Shared account vs your own account: what you actually get

The cheap option is not a cheaper subscription. It is a different product with a different failure mode.

A shared account — sometimes sold as "carpool" or "family" — is one vendor account divided between several people. It is usually a quarter of the price and it is not the same product. Understanding why matters more than the discount.

How sharing is implemented

There are two designs, and both fail differently.

• One login, many people. Everyone gets the same email and password. The selling point is simplicity; the problem is that every message, project and uploaded file is visible to anyone who logs in. Conversation history is not per-user — it belongs to the account.
• A proxy with quotas. A gateway sits in front of the account and gives each buyer a key with a token budget. Your conversations are isolated, but there is a middleman reading the traffic, and the quota rarely matches what was advertised.

The three failure modes

Detection. Vendors look for concurrent sessions from different networks, impossible travel between requests, and browsers that do not match the account's history. A shared account is the most detectable pattern there is, and when it is caught, everyone on it loses access at once.

Data. With a shared login, the other people on the account can read your prompts. If you paste code, logs, keys or client data into that account, you have disclosed it to strangers. This is the part buyers underestimate most.

Continuity. The operator can vanish. Prepaying six months to a month-old shop is how people lose money — not through a ban, but through the shop simply stopping.

What a personal account actually includes

When sharing is defensible

There is one honest case: you want to evaluate whether a plan is worth it for a few days, with no sensitive input, and you accept losing it. Test the product, then buy properly. Using a shared account for work you are paid for is a false economy — the first leak or ban costs more than the year of subscription you saved.

The rule we use

If the account will contain anything you would not paste into a public chat, it cannot be shared. That single question resolves most of the decision.

All plans on this site are activated on your own account — see the current price list.

Back to plans →