One account, every tool
Most people’s work is spread across tools that were never meant to meet. The notes are in one app, the video is in another, the AI chat is in a third, and the photos are wherever the phone put them. Each one wants its own login. Each one bills separately. Moving anything between them means exporting a file and hoping the other side understands it.
Tincograph is built the other way round. There is one account, and the tools sit on top of it: an AI workspace, the Nova terminal browser, a video editor, a gallery and a camera link. That is a design decision with real consequences, good and bad, so it is worth setting out what it actually means.
What one account buys you
The obvious part is that you sign in once. The less obvious part is what has to exist behind that for it to be true.
A single entitlements authority. Every app asks the same service what your account is allowed to do, and gets the same answer. Your plan, the features it includes and your credit balance all resolve in one place. When the video editor and the AI workspace disagree about whether you can use a feature, that is a bug with one cause, not five. Credits are an append-only ledger, so spending is something you can read back rather than a number that quietly changes. Spending is idempotent: a retried request after a dropped connection does not charge you twice.
A sync layer where the document is the source of truth. Your bookmarks, settings, chats and projects are stored as documents against your account, not as files inside one device’s app. Sync is conflict-aware with explicit versions, so two devices editing at once reconcile instead of one silently overwriting the other. The video editor’s edit decision list is designed as one more document of the same kind — the list of cuts is the truth, the rendered file is an output of it — which is what will let an edit started on a phone be picked up on a Mac. That part is not shipped yet; the mechanism under it is. The practical effect, where it is live today, is that the thing you were working on is on the other device when you get there, without you exporting anything.
Device pairing you can revoke in one place. Pairing your Mac or your phone registers a device against your account. The account page lists them and lets you revoke any of them. One list, one place, whether it is a browser session, the desktop app or the phone.
None of that is exciting on its own. It is the plumbing that has to be right before “one account” means anything more than a shared sign-in button.
The trade-off we are not going to pretend away
One account is also one point of failure. If sign-in is down, that is not one app being down. If someone gets into your account, they are not in one tool. Concentrating things concentrates the risk, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
So the design has to answer for that, and it does so in two ways.
First, security is treated as account-level work rather than per-app work. Two-factor authentication with recovery codes, magic links as an alternative to passwords, a device list you can revoke from, a data export you can take with you, and account deletion with a grace period in case you change your mind. Because there is one account, doing any of this once covers everything.
Second, and more importantly: the local-only features keep working without us. The video editor cuts on your device. The gallery shows what is on your disk. Nova is a browser and a terminal on your own machine. Those do not stop because the network is down, because your subscription lapsed, or because we had a bad day. Signing in adds sync, credits and the shared account. It is not a licence check standing between you and your own files. On the subscription side, entitlements are issued with a signed offline grace token valid for 72 hours, so a paid feature does not fail on a train because your laptop could not phone home.
The honest summary: we accept the single-point-of-failure cost for the things that genuinely need an account, and we try hard to keep everything else out of that dependency.
Where this stands today
Two of the five tools are real and shipping. The AI workspace has projects, artifacts, bring-your-own OpenAI-compatible providers and a credit balance you can see before you spend it. Nova, the terminal browser, pairs with your account and syncs bookmarks, settings and tabs.
The video editor, the gallery and the camera link are being built. The accounts and entitlements layer underneath them is already live, which is the part that is slow and tedious to retrofit — building it first is the reason the remaining apps can be smaller pieces of work rather than five separate products with five separate account systems.
We would rather say what exists than describe a finished suite that does not. The changelog lists what has actually shipped, with dates.