Everything in vfrey today works without an account: projects, scenes, rendering, the dashboard, the quality checks, the background worker, and publishing with your own keys. You never need to sign in for them. An account is for paid features: Topics, Creators, Mail, and the MCP server. They need a plan and prepaid credits. See Plans and credits.
Accounts are not live yet. The hosted vfrey service that paid features run on is not deployed, so login cannot sign you in today.

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The commands

All three take --api URL. The default is VFREY_API_URL.

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Until accounts are live

No server address is built in yet. So login and whoami stop at once, without any network call:
logout prints Not signed in (vfrey accounts are not live yet). and exits 0. npx vfrey doctor shows not signed in (free features work without it), and that is not a failure.

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When you can sign in

Once an address is set, login uses a device flow. You open the link, confirm the code, and the command saves a token. The token is stored in the macOS Keychain, or elsewhere in credentials.json in the vfrey home folder, readable only by you. VFREY_CREDENTIALS_STORE=file skips the Keychain. vfrey sends the token only over https, or to your own machine.

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What whoami shows

The example values are made up. Credits are the prepaid balance, and the number in brackets is how many expire soon. Each usage line is one meter: what you used, your plan’s limit, and when it resets. A limit that is not set reads unlimited. See Plans and credits. To sign in without login, for example in CI, set VFREY_TOKEN. It overrides a saved token.