The question we get first is why an automation service needs a Cortex Cloud login at all, and whether handing one over is safe. That answer is below, along with the practical setup we recommend to anyone who would rather not use their personal account.
What we store, what we can see, and how to limit what you expose in the first place.
Cortex Cloud has no public API and no way to authorise a third party app, so there is no token to issue and no permission screen to approve. The only way to send a friend request and share a preset is to drive the website the way a person would, signed in as the account that owns the preset. If Neural DSP ever ships an official API or OAuth, that becomes the way we connect and the password stops being needed.
Yes, and this is the setup we recommend. Create a second Cortex Cloud account on a store address such as presets@yourstore.com, upload the presets and captures you sell to that account, and give Preset Bridge only that login. Use a password you do not use anywhere else.
Your personal account, your own preset library and any purchase history stay entirely outside the system. If you ever want to stop, changing one password on an account that does nothing but fulfil orders costs you nothing. It also keeps your store's friend list separate from your own, which gets easier to manage as order volume grows.
It is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it is written to the database. The encryption key lives in Google Secret Manager, not in the database and not in the source code, so a copy of the database on its own is not enough to read anything. Only the worker process that runs a delivery decrypts it, and only for the length of that delivery.
The password is never written to a log, never returned by the API, and never shown back to you in the dashboard. Settings shows whether credentials are present, not what they are.
Delete them from Settings at any time and the stored copy is gone. Future deliveries stop until you add a login again. Your delivery history, item mappings and API tokens are left alone, so nothing is lost by disconnecting for a while.
Sign in fails and deliveries queue instead of completing. Update the credentials in Settings and the queued work retries on its own. Nothing is silently dropped.
We should be straight about this. Preset Bridge is unofficial. Neural DSP does not publish an API, has not endorsed this service, and could change the site or its rules at any point. We pace requests so an account behaves like an active seller rather than a script, and reading data costs nothing partly so integrations have no reason to poll aggressively. That is a real risk we manage, not a risk we can promise away, which is the honest reason we suggest a dedicated store account rather than your personal one.
Credentials are readable only by the delivery worker, which needs the decryption key to do its job. Support access to your account covers delivery logs and billing, the same records you see in the dashboard. Store webhooks are signed with HMAC-SHA256 against a secret belonging to a single integration, and API tokens are shown once then stored as a hash, so a token cannot be recovered from our side either.
Credits are bought up front and spent when a paid action succeeds. There is no subscription.
Every new account starts with 30 credits, which is 3 full deliveries. No card is required to get them. That is enough to connect your store and put a real order all the way through, including the friend request and the share, before you decide whether to buy anything.
10 credits, which is the cost of the share. That is the only action we charge for. Sending the friend request, signing in, profile checks and preset lists are all free, so an integration that polls for status never burns credits for looking, and a customer who never accepts never costs you anything.
Credits are deducted for successful paid actions and refunded for failed ones. A customer who has not yet accepted the friend request is not a failure, it is a delivery that stays queued and retries, and you are not charged twice when it finally goes through.
No. They stay on the account until they are spent, and any active API token on the account can spend them. A quiet month costs nothing.
Checkout runs through Stripe and we never see your card details. Credits are added once Stripe confirms the payment on its webhook, which is usually within a few seconds of checkout completing.
No. Deliveries run on our infrastructure on a schedule, including the retries that wait for a customer to accept a friend request. Your store posts the order and the rest happens without you.
The delivery stays queued and keeps retrying rather than failing outright, and the log shows exactly which stage it is sitting at. You can see at a glance which orders are waiting on the customer rather than on you.
Their Cortex Cloud username, collected at checkout as an order field. Your store sends it with the order, item mappings translate the product into a preset or capture, and the delivery runs from there.
No. Shopify can send paid-order webhooks directly, WooCommerce has a two-way plugin, and another platform can use the signed JSON contract through an adapter. Preset Bridge can send signed delivery results back to the store when it has a callback receiver.