Nodeless

Normally an account serves only while your node is connected. Nodeless lets a linked account serve with no machine of yours in the path at all: Aile dials the provider directly. It keeps earning while your box is off.

Terminalbash

1aile nodeless 1 on
2aile nodeless 1 off

Or at link time:

Terminalbash

1aile connect groq --nodeless

Re-linking an account keeps its setting unless the link names one. A nodeless account's models are not tested at link: run aile test <n> (or Test on the dashboard) so they list.

What you give up

It removes your kill switch

With nodeless on, turning your node off no longer stops the account. Only aile nodeless <n> off does: revocation goes through Aile alone. If you want the ability to stop serving by closing a laptop lid, do not turn this on.

Subscriptions

The CLI turns nodeless on for API-key accounts only. The relay accepts it for any linked account, and the web dashboard (Dashboard → Sharing → Providers, Route set to Direct) turns it on for a subscription too; an OAuth or device-code account linked in the browser starts with it on. aile nodeless <n> off works for either.

A consumer subscription relayed through your node presents the traffic from your address, which is what the provider expects of a subscriber. Served with no node, it is a real person's subscription served from Aile's egress. The relay never sends it from its own address (it goes through a proxy pool, or is not served at all), but the account is still in use from a machine that is not yours, and whether the provider tolerates that is the provider's call. The CLI declines on your behalf; the dashboard lets you decide.

The non-chat endpoints

Embeddings, images, speech, transcription and translation, video, music, rerank, moderation, OCR, web search, scrape and decisions have no node path. They are served only from an API-key account with nodeless on, and a model sells there only when:

it has a price. A per-unit model (an image, a second of video, a track, a page …) sells at its published list × your margin from the start, never without a list and never at a margin of 0; see Your rates. Embeddings on OpenAI, Cohere and OpenRouter are token-priced and serve at your usual margin from the start. Decisions serve from the start too, at the deployment's own margin rather than yours.
it is not turned off, for the account or across your price sheet.
you have a payout wallet.

Each request uses one account, with no failover to another sharer. These sales appear on your dashboard alongside chat, and the extra 5% below applies to them too.

What changes about privacy

Nothing changes from your machine's point of view: it was already blind on the subscription and API-key paths, because the credential is injected at the relay and never read locally.

What changes is that there is no node in the path to be blind. Aile dials the provider, terminates TLS, and reads both directions to meter the call. Responses say so (nodeless-oauth in place of nodeless for anything that is not an API key):

HTTPhttp

1x-aile-capacity: nodeless
2x-aile-blind: false

x-aile-node is omitted on a nodeless serve, so no machine is claimed that was not in the path.

The full picture, for all three kinds: What Aile can see.

It costs you an extra 5%

Your rates are unchanged: the caller pays the same list × margin. What changes is the platform fee on the settlement: a nodeless serve settles at 15% rather than 10%.

The extra 5% recovers a cost: on a node serve your machine carries the request, and on a nodeless serve Aile's own egress and proxy pool carry it instead. That is a real cost the sharer is no longer paying.

It is a per-provider setting an operator can lower or zero, resolved as per-provider → global → deployment default (5%), and any value at or above half is refused as a typo rather than applied.

Weigh it against what it earns

An account that would otherwise serve nothing while your machine is off earns 85% of list instead of 0%. An account on a box that is always on keeps 90% by staying node-only.

When to use it

An API key you would otherwise not share, because you do not want to keep a machine on for it.
A provider whose value is the key rather than your bandwidth.
A second key you want serving continuously while your main node reboots.

When not to

Anything where you want a local switch to stop serving.
A subscription whose provider account you are not willing to risk. The CLI will not turn it on for one; the web dashboard will.
If you want the x-aile-blind: true property for the caller's sake. Nodeless cannot offer it, and says so.