Privacy policy
Last updated: September 10, 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 does reach us is listed below, call by call, and so is what this website keeps.
Who is responsible
DeftNib is made by Open Cloud LLC, a Delaware company. For anything about your data, write to support@deftnib.com. That address is read by the person who wrote the app.
What the app sends
The app talks to our servers for four things, 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 once per session, when the app starts or as soon as it gets online. That last one sends a hashed machine id and one number; never what you dictated, never when. Apart from that, your Mac downloads Apple's speech models from Apple when you add a language, and the installer when you accept an update. 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. If that list ever grows, this page changes first and says so.
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. It travels when you activate, when the app renews that Mac's permission each month, and when you look up your Macs.
- 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 update check sends the version of the app you run and the version of Sparkle, the open source updater it uses. Nothing else.
The free plan needs no account and no email: the weekly word counter is a file on your Mac. Once per session, on the free plan, when the app starts or as soon as it gets online, 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. On the free plan that id is the same for your Mac every week, which is what lets the counter survive a reinstall. It cannot be turned back into your Mac's id, and it is never linked to an email. Pro users never make this call.
What the app reads on your Mac
Through Accessibility the app reads four things:
- Which app is active, to know where the text goes and to apply that app's profile.
- Up to 3 characters before the cursor when it inserts, to get spacing and capitalization right.
- For 45 seconds after a dictation, the exact span it just wrote, to notice if you corrected a word. You can switch this off in Settings.
- What you have selected, once, only when you use Add selection to dictionary.
In apps that cannot hand over a range, the second and third reads fall back to the field you are typing in, never a document over 20,000 characters, keep the piece they need and throw the rest away. Nothing read this way is stored or logged. The app never reads other windows or other documents, and never takes screenshots. To notice your dictation key in any app it sees key events, and it discards every one that is not that key: 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.
The app also keeps a diagnostic log in your Library folder, with timings and the decisions the pipeline made. It never contains what you dictated: where a sentence would go, it writes a word count and a short fingerprint instead. The text goes into the log only if you switch on a verbose mode by hand for a support session, and then it is your call whether to send it.
What this website stores
- Analytics, without cookies. This site uses three analytics services, none of which sets a cookie or identifies you: PostHog, for which button you clicked and from which section; Vercel Web Analytics, for page views and referrers; and Google Analytics 4, which never runs in your browser at all. No Google script loads on this site. Our own server tells Google which page you opened, which site you came from, your browser and your rough location, tagged with a random id that lives in this tab and is gone when you close it. There is no consent banner because there is nothing stored on your device to consent to, and blocking any of them breaks nothing. Worth saying plainly: because the Google side leaves from our server and not from your browser, an ad blocker does not see it. It still carries no cookie and no id that outlives this tab.
- Funnel events. We store rows recording which button was clicked, from which section, with which price on screen, along with the campaign or site that brought the visit. No name, no email, nothing that identifies you.
- If you leave your email. When you join the waiting list or the team list we keep your email, where you came from, which browser you used and the price you saw, for one purpose: one email the day it opens. We keep it until that email goes out; after that it is deleted, or we ask you before keeping it for anything else. To leave the list before then, write to support@deftnib.com.
- 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. For a team pack we also store the name of your organization. Payment is processed by LemonSqueezy as merchant of record: your card details never pass through here.
- Your IP address. Our hosting sees it, like any website. We keep a hashed version for up to a day to stop abuse, and nothing else.
Who else touches the data
Nobody sees your dictations, because they never exist outside your Mac. For the little the website and the license server do hold, these are the companies that run the infrastructure, and what each one sees:
- Vercel hosts the site and the license server, and keeps the usual server logs, including IP addresses.
- Neon hosts the database: purchases, licenses, the Macs on them, the waiting list, funnel events and the free plan counters.
- Cloudflare stores the app installers you download.
- LemonSqueezy takes the payment as merchant of record and sends us your email, your order number and, for teams, your organization's name.
- Resend delivers the emails with your license key.
- PostHog, Google and Vercel receive the cookieless analytics described above.
- Apple notarizes the app and serves the speech models your Mac downloads. Apple's own privacy policy covers what Apple does.
All of them are in the United States. If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, this means your data travels there, under the standard contractual clauses these providers offer.
How long we keep things
| What | For how long |
|---|---|
| Your purchase and license | For as long as the license exists, and afterwards for as long as tax and accounting rules require the purchase record. |
| The Macs on your license | While they are activated. A freed Mac stays in the list, marked as freed, so it can be reactivated. |
| Your email on the waiting list | Until the email it was for goes out. |
| Funnel events | Indefinitely; they identify nobody. |
| The free plan counter | Old weeks are deleted automatically after eight weeks. |
| Hashed IP addresses | Up to one day. |
Your data, your call
Write to support@deftnib.com to see what we hold about you, correct it, take a copy of it, or delete it. If you hold an active license, deleting the purchase record also deactivates it, so we tell you before doing it. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.
DeftNib is for adults and for professional use. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and if the change is about what the app sends or what we keep, the release notes of the next update say so too.