Connect your home to Charyl Cloud

Pairing connects your home to Charyl Cloud — the service behind automatic backups, push notifications, product research, and cloud-routed chat. It takes about a minute, and you never see or copy a key.

How it works

1. Start from the wizard, or from Settings

   During first-run setup, choose Charyl Cloud at the “how should Charyl run” step. Already set up? Pair later from Settings → Cloud.

2. Sign in

   The same browser tab takes you to sign in — no popup, no separate app. Sign in, or create an account.

3. You're returned, already connected

   The tab redirects back to your home automatically. The connection — a credential scoped to this one home — is minted directly into your home’s own database; you never see it, copy it, or type it anywhere. Every Cloud-gated feature shows its correct state right away — there’s no waiting several minutes for it to catch up.

Behind the scenes, your home’s identity is bound to this connection at pairing time, so a mismatch fails loudly with a clear re-pair option rather than leaving you on a home that looks connected but isn’t.

What pairing enables

• Automatic, encrypted backups — see Backups and the recovery passphrase.
• Push notifications to your paired phone.
• Product research, so Charyl can look up your appliances rather than working only from what you tell her.
• Cloud-routed chat, if you’re not supplying your own AI key.

Everything else — your inventory, the web app, sensors, devices — works whether or not you ever pair.

Pairing and self-hosting together

Pairing to Charyl Cloud doesn’t force chat through the cloud if you’d rather keep it local or on your own key. The order of preference is automatic: a capable local model wins first, then your own key, and only then Charyl Cloud — so a self-hosted home with real hardware can pair for backups and research while chat still never leaves the house. You can also pin chat to local, your own key, or Cloud explicitly in Settings, overriding that order.

For example, a self-hoster running a capable local model might pair purely for backups and the phone-notification path, and never see Charyl Cloud touch a single conversation. Pairing is about which conveniences you want turned on, not an all-or-nothing switch.

Usage and tiers

Charyl Cloud’s plans, once published, are meant to differ by how much you use her, not by what she can do — nothing about her capabilities is held back by tier. You get a one-time heads-up when a home is running low for the period. If an answer does stop short, the message you’ll see today is generic — see Charyl isn’t answering.

Each home is its own account

Every home carries its own subscription, backups, recovery passphrase, and paired phones — a home is the unit, not an account. Pausing or canceling one home’s subscription never touches another. Other people in your household get their own logins to your home directly — see Can other people in my household use Charyl? — Charyl Cloud only ever knows about the one account that paired.

Subscription status today

We’re in early access: pricing hasn’t been announced, and nothing is charged yet. Early homes are comped automatically while that’s true — nobody’s card is on file, and that won’t change without clear notice before it does. Canceling from Settings → Cloud takes effect at the end of the current calendar month — everything keeps working until then, and you can undo a cancellation any time before that date. Your home and its data are never removed when a subscription lapses; only the Cloud-gated features pause.

If a subscription lapses

Chat that routes through Charyl Cloud goes quiet. The rest of your home keeps running exactly as before — sensors, devices, the web app, your records. Nothing is bricked.