# What beafk does not do

> The honest list, so you can decide before you pay rather than after.

Every product's documentation tells you what it does. This is the other half.
Most of it is deliberate: the things beafk leaves alone are the things it cannot
then take away from you.

## It does not sell you a model

There is nothing here to buy tokens from — beafk runs the subscriptions you
already have with Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Moonshot. **One of them is enough
to start**, and if you have none of them yet, start there rather than here.
[Which agents beafk runs](https://beafk.app/docs/which-agents-beafk-runs.md).

## It does not host your server

You bring the machine and your provider bills you. There is no "start a machine"
button — and the other side of that is the one in
[what you keep](https://beafk.app/docs/what-is-beafk.md): nothing here can stop, resize or delete a
box you own, ours included. If you want somebody else to run the hardware, that
is a different product.

## It does not install on Windows

The machine is **Debian or Ubuntu** (anything with `apt` and `systemd`) or
**macOS**, on Apple silicon or Intel. What you *use* it from is any browser on
any device, Windows included.

> [!NOTE]
> A Mac is a machine, with a handful of differences named where they matter —
> see [what the install does](https://beafk.app/docs/what-the-install-does.md).

## It supports one way in, not every way in

The machine listens on loopback and nothing else, on purpose. Something has to
put an address in front of it that your phone can reach, and beafk sets up
exactly one of those for you: Tailscale, in one step of the install, with no
port opened to the internet.

Your own tunnel or reverse proxy works too, and the panel treats an address you
published that way like any other — but you are on your own for it. There is no
screen and no step in the install for it, and nothing here will tell you it is
wrong. Tailscale is the path this documentation describes.

## It does not have a public API

The machine's HTTP interface is private and unversioned — an implementation
detail of the panel that changes without notice between releases. Do not build
against it.

## It is not a secrets manager

[Variables](https://beafk.app/docs/variables.md) are the `.env` you already have, kept in one place
and delivered to every machine that needs it. There is no rotation, no
versioning and no per-secret audit.

## It is not a project management tool

[Tasks](https://beafk.app/docs/tasks.md) is a small list an agent writes for you and starts in
batches. There is no board, no sprint and no burndown — it is deliberately the
smallest thing that keeps an agent busy while you are away.

## It cannot recover an account with no way in

If you lose your identity provider *and* your authenticator, that is a
conversation rather than a button. See [two-factor](https://beafk.app/docs/two-factor.md).

---

That is the list. The short answers to everything else are
[questions people ask](https://beafk.app/docs/questions-people-ask.md), and the first machine is
free for seven days with no card:
[connect one](https://beafk.app/login?return_to=/machines/connect).

---

beafk documentation · Start here · https://beafk.app/docs/what-beafk-does-not-do

In this section:
- What beafk is — https://beafk.app/docs/what-is-beafk.md
- What it costs — https://beafk.app/docs/what-it-costs.md
- What beafk does not do — https://beafk.app/docs/what-beafk-does-not-do.md (this page)
- Questions people ask — https://beafk.app/docs/questions-people-ask.md
- Moving from Cursor — https://beafk.app/docs/moving-from-cursor.md
- What you need before you start — https://beafk.app/docs/what-you-need.md

Every page, one line each: https://beafk.app/docs/llms.txt
All of it in one file: https://beafk.app/docs/llms-full.txt