Handing a Browser Profile to Someone Who Has Never Paid

Selling a warmed-up environment used to mean going first

An aged account has value precisely because it has history - a browsing pattern, saved logins, a network exit that has looked the same for months. That is exactly what makes it hard to sell safely. Handing it over as an exported file works, but it works by giving the buyer the whole thing before a single dollar changes hands: cookies, passkeys, fingerprint and all, sitting on their disk, with nothing left on your side to take back if the payment never arrives.

Ownership transfer exists to avoid that. Instead of a file, you generate a link. The recipient accepts it, and the environment moves - not a copy, the actual environment, cookies and all - out of your account and into theirs. There's no intermediate state where both of you have a working copy and no revoke afterward: once it's accepted, it's gone from your side, full stop.

That made transfer strictly better than exporting a file, with one catch: the recipient had to already be on a paid plan with room to spare in their profile quota. A free account could not accept a transfer at all. If you were selling to someone who hadn't signed up for anything yet, transfer wasn't an option - you were back to exporting a file and hoping.

The prerequisite that just changed

A recipient with no paid plan can now accept an ownership transfer. Accepting one opens a one-time handover window that lasts 30 days.

The window is deliberately narrow. It carries exactly what a transfer needs to complete and nothing else: one cloud-synced environment - the one that was just transferred - and one managed proxy, if the environment came with one attached. It is granted once per account, ever, and it does not renew. If the recipient's account has already used its window, a second transfer to that same account falls back to needing a paid plan, the same as it always has.

Inside the window, the environment behaves like any other cloud-synced environment the recipient owns, with one restriction: they cannot share it or transfer it onward. The window exists to get one handover across the line, not to turn a free account into a redistribution point for environments it never paid quota for.

What the window deliberately leaves out

Two things a paid plan gets you are not part of the window, on purpose. There's no Live View - no watching the session render remotely from another device. And there's no access to the captured-device fingerprint library, the pool of real-hardware profiles paid plans can draw new environments from. Neither of those is what a transfer recipient needs in order to receive and keep using the one environment that was just handed to them, so neither is included.

If that sounds strict, it's meant to. The window is scoped to the transfer, not a trial of everything a subscription includes.

What happens on day 31

When the window closes, three things happen at once. The managed proxy that came with the environment returns to us - it stops being reserved for that account. Cloud sync stops, so the environment is no longer being backed up or kept in sync with our servers. And the environment itself does not go anywhere: it stays right where it is, on the recipient's computer, fully intact and usable - it just becomes a local-only environment from that point on, the same as any environment a free account can keep using without cloud sync.

The one thing we don't do immediately is delete the cloud copy. We keep it for a further 30-day grace period after the window closes. That exists for one specific case: the recipient decides, a few weeks later, that they actually do want to upgrade. If they do, upgrading inside that grace period restores the environment's cloud copy in full - the cookies, the sync history, everything - rather than making them start over with whatever state happened to be on their machine at that exact moment. Miss the grace period too, and the cloud copy is gone; the local copy on their computer is unaffected either way.

Paying recipients: nothing changes

If the recipient is already on a paid plan, none of this applies to them - they still need spare room in their profile quota, and in their proxy quota if the environment carries a managed proxy, exactly as before. The handover window is a substitute for those quota checks, not an addition to them. It only exists for the one case those checks used to block outright: an account with no plan at all.

Further reading

The sharing & transfer overview has the full comparison between exporting a file, sharing a link, and transferring ownership. The sharing docs cover the exact mechanics of a transfer, including what happens when the environment runs on your own proxy instead of a managed one.