FAQ
Product questions, answered plainly. If you are trying to work out what Basin is for rather than how it behaves, start here instead.
Connecting
Do I need an account before I connect?
No. Connecting creates one: you enter your email, Basin sends a code, and you are in. The code expires in 10 minutes.
Which AI tools does Basin work with?
Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Cursor have their own setup pages. Beyond those, any client that supports a remote MCP server over Streamable HTTP with OAuth will work. There is no API key to paste.
Is there anything to install?
No. Basin is a remote server, so you add it as a connector in the tool you already use and sign in there.
What Basin can see
What am I granting when I connect?
Read access to the spaces you own and the ones shared with you, and write access to files in those spaces, stamped with your email.
Does connecting share anything with anyone?
No. Connecting shares nothing with anyone else. Sharing is always a separate step, and it is scoped to a space or a path inside one.
Is anything in my library used to train a model?
No. We never let anyone else train on your files. The full privacy terms are on one page with the rest of the legal text.
Limits
What are the limits?
A file is capped at 256KB, a library at 2,000 files and 50 spaces, and a file's frontmatter at 8KB on top of its body. Every rejection names the cap and the current number, so an assistant can work out what to do without you.
Why cap a file at all?
So a runaway agent cannot turn a library into a landfill. Smaller files are also easier to read back selectively, which is most of what makes a library cheap to use.
When it looks broken
My assistant does not seem to use Basin.
Usually the standing instruction is missing. Add one line wherever your assistant keeps standing instructions: Check Basin at the start of every conversation. Without it, it answers from whatever is already in front of it.
I see fewer than 14 tools.
The client is holding an old tool list. Remove Basin and add it again — clients cache the tool list when they connect and do not refresh it on their own. Seeing more than that is not a fault: a client that connected earlier keeps the tools it cached, and they all still work.
Claude Code says Basin is using a lot of tokens.
Basin's share can look much higher than it is. It is a result of how Claude Code counts, not of what Basin costs, and the Claude setup page explains why and where the real number is.