HQ Cloud: What It Is and Whether You Need It

Cloud is what you add the day teammates enter the picture

Here is the most important thing to know, stated up front: HQ works fully on its own, offline, with no account and no cloud. Everything core to HQ, your projects, your knowledge base (the organized notes and context HQ builds up about your work), your skills (the reusable instructions behind HQ's commands), your daily workflow, lives in a folder on your computer and runs there.

HQ Cloud is what you add when you want more than a solo setup: syncing between machines, sharing with teammates, safely storing passwords and API keys, and turning your meetings into searchable notes. If you never sign in, nothing breaks. If the answer to "do I work with other people in HQ?" is no, you may not need this article yet.

The pieces of HQ Cloud, in plain English#

Each cloud feature is optional and does one job:

Login and identity. Signing in tells HQ Cloud who you are. You run /hq-login once (it opens your browser to sign in), /hq-whoami any time you want to check who you're signed in as, and /hq-logout to sign out. One login powers everything else on this list.

The vault. Every cloud-backed company (a company in HQ is an isolated workspace for one business or team) gets its own encrypted online storage space, called the vault. It is the "cloud copy" of that company's files. You can browse it without downloading everything using /hq-files.

Sync. Sync keeps the files on your laptop and the files in the vault matched, in both directions, for every cloud-backed company (one whose files are connected to a vault). It runs automatically in the HQ app, or on demand with /hq-sync. This is how your teammate's new notes appear on your machine, and how your work appears on theirs. Full details in the sync guide.

Share links. /hq-share lets you share a file or folder from the vault, either as a single-use encrypted link (it expires after 15 minutes) or as a durable grant to a specific person or group. See Sharing your work.

Direct messages. /dm sends a message straight to a teammate's HQ app, where it shows up under Direct messages, optionally with a ready-to-use prompt their own HQ can act on, or a scheduled delivery time. You can even DM yourself as a reminder.

Secrets. An encrypted store for API keys and passwords, so HQ can use your tools without you ever pasting a credential into a chat. Covered fully in the secrets guide.

Deploy. /deploy publishes something HQ made for you, a report, a webpage, a dashboard, to a link you can send to anyone. See Sharing your work.

Meeting intelligence. A meeting bot that joins your calls, transcribes them, and extracts action items and decisions. See Meeting notes and signals.

Do I need cloud? A quick decision guide#

If you're an Operator (everyday user, not living in a terminal):

You need cloud if your team already uses HQ together, sign in so you receive the shared knowledge, messages, and files. If you're using HQ alone on one computer, you can skip cloud entirely and add it later. Nothing you do now gets lost.

If you're a Builder (technical user):

Cloud earns its keep the moment you (a) work from two machines, (b) need secrets injected into commands without keeping them in plain-text .env files, or (c) want to hand teammates a working setup instead of a README. Solo on one machine with your own secret management? Optional.

If you're a Champion (rolling HQ out to a team):

You need cloud, it is the mechanism that makes HQ a team system rather than a personal one. Shared companies, invites, roles, synced knowledge, and meeting intelligence all ride on it. Start with the team rollout guide.

What goes to the cloud, and what stays on your machine#

Being honest about this matters, so here is the actual split:

Goes to the cloud (only after you sign in and opt in):

• Files inside cloud-backed companies. When a company is designated cloud-backed, the files under its folder sync to that company's encrypted vault so teammates can receive them. Companies you never cloud-back never sync.
• Anything you explicitly share or deploy with /hq-share or /deploy.
• Secrets you store, which live encrypted in the cloud vault (and never appear in chat). Secret names and metadata are visible to you in listings; values stay encrypted and are only injected into commands you run.
• Direct messages, which are stored server-side for delivery, so don't put secrets in a DM.
• Meeting recordings and transcripts, if you invite the meeting bot to calls, processing happens on HQ cloud.

Private to you (not shared with your team):

• Your sessions, the raw conversations you have with HQ stay on your machine and aren't uploaded.
• Your workspace and handoffs, drafts, session state, and handoff threads sync to your own private personal scope, so they follow you to your other machines, but your team doesn't see them.
• Your personal overlay, the personal/ folder (your private settings and notes) also syncs to that personal scope, which is auto-provisioned when you sign in and on by default.
• Everything, if you never sign in. Solo, offline HQ sends nothing anywhere.

Each company's vault is isolated from every other company's. HQ treats keeping companies separate as a hard rule, so one team's knowledge never leaks into another's.

Common questions#

If you get stuck#

The most common cloud issue is simply not being signed in, run /hq-whoami to check, and /hq-login to fix. For sync problems, go to the sync guide; for anything else, the "I'm stuck" guide or /hq-bug to report it to the team.