Privacy
Last updated: August 31, 2026.
The short version
DeftNib does not receive your voice, your text or your dictations. There is no server of ours processing them, no account storing them and no copy of them anywhere on our side. All of it lives on your Mac and stays there.
What network calls the app makes
The app makes exactly four network calls, and none of them carries your voice: activating your license (once per Mac), renewing that Mac's permission (once a month, in the background), checking for updates, and, on the free plan, syncing the week's word counter when the app starts. That last one sends a hashed machine id and one number; never what you dictated, never when. Your audio and your text are never transmitted: there is no code in the app that knows how to. You can dictate all day with Wi-Fi off.
We would rather enumerate than deny. Saying "no server check" would be a lie, because there is one: it is the one that counts how many Macs your license is activated on. This is exactly which one and when.
What travels in those calls
- Your license key, which carries inside it the email you bought with. It is the same one we sent you.
- An opaque identifier for your Mac. The hardware identifier never travels raw: what is sent is an HMAC salted with your license id, which cannot be reversed. Because the salt is your license, the same Mac under two different licenses produces two different identifiers, so customers cannot be correlated either.
- Your Mac's model, for example MacBookPro18,3, so you can recognize it in the list when you want to free up a slot. Never the name you gave it, which is personal data and is not needed for anything.
The free plan needs no account and no email: the weekly word counter is a file on your Mac. When the app starts, on the free plan, it sends a hashed id of your Mac and the number of words used this week, and gets back the higher of that and the number the server remembers, so reinstalling does not reset the counter. Pro users never make this call.
What the app reads on your Mac
Through Accessibility the app reads three things and nothing more: which app is active, up to 3 characters before the cursor when it inserts, and for 45 seconds after a dictation the exact span it just wrote, to notice if you corrected a word (you can switch that off in Settings). None of it is stored or leaves your Mac. It never logs your keystrokes.
What the app stores on your Mac
Your dictations (only if you turn history on; it is off by default), your personal dictionary, your snippets, a weekly counter (the week and a word count), and your license. All of it in your user folder, in files you can delete whenever you want. None of it is uploaded.
What this site stores
- Cookieless analytics. We use PostHog in cookieless mode, so there is no consent banner to accept because there is nothing to consent to: the visit's identity lives in memory only and is gone when you close the tab.
- Funnel events. We store rows recording which button was clicked, from which section, and with which price on screen, along with the campaign that brought the visit. No name, no email, nothing that identifies you.
- Purchases. When you buy, we store your email, your order number and your license key, because that is what it takes to issue it, resend it if you lose it, and support you. Payment is processed by LemonSqueezy as merchant of record: your card details never pass through here.
Deleting your data
Write to support@deftnib.com and we delete what we have. If you hold an active license, deleting the purchase record also deactivates it, so we tell you before doing it.