Individuals & Organizations

In the hosted public cloud, you work in one of two contexts:

Individual (Personal) — Your solo workspace. You are not required to create an organization. Conversations, files, provider settings, routing policy, API keys, and your personal subscription belong to you.
Organization — A shared workspace you create or join with others. Organizations share policies, billing, and administration while keeping day-to-day chat private to each member.

Organizations using a private cloud or on-premises installation receive a dedicated organization deployment instead. See Deployment options.

Active context

You can use Individual context and belong to one or more organizations, but only one context is active at a time. The active context controls what you see and what you can do right now:

Conversations, files, and shared links in the sidebar
Plan, usage budget, and billing status
Provider configuration, routing policy, and tool policies
API keys and Platform API access

Use the organization switcher in the main navigation to change context:


Personal          ← Individual context
────────────────
Acme Corp         ← organizations you belong to
Other Org

After switching, settings and usage pages reflect the newly active context.

Individual vs Organization

	Individual (Personal)	Organization
Members	Just you	You and invited colleagues
Billing	Your personal subscription	Separate organization subscription, billed per seat
Conversations	Private to you	Private to each member by default
Settings	You manage everything	Owners and admins manage organization-wide settings

Your Individual subscription and any organization subscriptions are independent. A subscription on Individual does not apply when you switch to an organization that has no plan, and the reverse is also true.

Who should use organizations

Organizations suit:

Small groups or departments that want one place for AI policies and provider configuration
Groups that need per-member usage budgets on Gateway plans
Companies where one person manages billing and others use the product

If you only use Steinkauz for yourself, Individual (Personal) context is all you need.

Next steps

Create & manage an organization — set up an organization and invite members
Members, roles & invites — understand owner, admin, and member permissions
Organization billing & seats — subscribe and manage billable seats
Plans overview — choose Gateway or BYOK for individuals and organizations