Connect your Plaud account

OpenPlaud signs into Plaud directly — the same way the official Plaud app does. No screen-scraping, no headless browser, no reverse-engineered mobile-app traffic. The flow you'll use depends on how you originally created your Plaud account.

Email-and-code (default path)

If you signed up to Plaud with an email address and password, you can sign in from OpenPlaud directly:

1. Enter the email address you use on plaud.ai.
2. Plaud emails you a 6-digit verification code.
3. Paste it into OpenPlaud.

The code is forwarded to Plaud's servers and never stored locally. After login, the returned access token is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it hits the database — see Encryption at rest for what that covers.

Plaud's account region (Global, EU, Asia Pacific) is detected automatically: if the global endpoint responds with status: -302 and a regional API host in data.domains.api, OpenPlaud follows the redirect and stores the per-account region alongside the token.

Signed up with Google or Apple?

If you originally tapped Continue with Google or Continue with Apple on Plaud, the email-and-code flow will appear to succeed but sync will return zero recordings. That's because the email/password identity and the Google/Apple identity are two different accounts on Plaud's side, even when they share an email address (#65).

Real "Sign in with Google / Apple" inside OpenPlaud is structurally blocked by Google's authorized-origins policy on Plaud's OAuth client. There are two workarounds.

Easy path: the connector extension

Install the OpenPlaud Connector browser extension (AGPL-3.0) — grab the latest release from GitHub and load it as an unpacked extension. With the extension installed, the connect screen surfaces a Sign in with Plaud button. You sign in to web.plaud.ai the way you normally do; the extension forwards the resulting access token to your OpenPlaud instance. No copy-pasting, no devtools.

Manual fallback: paste the token

If you can't or won't install the extension:

1. Open web.plaud.ai in a tab and sign in with Google or Apple as usual.
2. Open browser devtools (F12 / Cmd+Option+I) → Network tab. Refresh the page.
3. Click any request whose host starts with api.plaud.ai, api-euc1.plaud.ai, or api-apse1.plaud.ai.
4. Under Headers → Request Headers, find Authorization. Copy everything after Bearer — the long eyJ… JWT.
5. In OpenPlaud, switch to the Paste token tab, pick the region that matches the host you copied the token from (EU if it was api-euc1.plaud.ai, APAC for api-apse1.plaud.ai, otherwise Global), and paste.

The pasted token is encrypted at rest the same way as a code-flow token.

What about refresh tokens?

Plaud's API does not issue refresh tokens. The OTP login response contains only an access token, which is a long-lived JWT (roughly 300 days observed). When it expires, the dashboard surfaces a reconnect banner and you repeat whichever flow above you used originally. There is no background refresh to fail silently.

Switching accounts

You can disconnect or switch the connected Plaud account at any time from Settings → Plaud account. The encrypted bearer token is deleted; previously synced recordings stay where they are (you own that data on your own storage).