Privacy Policy

1Who we are

Notchi is a free, open-source macOS utility made by Lofi Lab, a solo indie developer. The full source code is public at github.com/cyrus-cai/notchi — so you don't have to take this page on faith; you can read exactly what the app does with your data. Notchi is distributed by direct download and through GitHub, not the Mac App Store.

2What Notchi does not collect

There is no account, no sign-up, no email collection, no user ID, no device ID, and no fingerprinting of any kind. Lofi Lab has no way to identify you, because Notchi never sends anything to Lofi Lab. Specifically, Notchi contains:

• No analytics or telemetry
• No crash reporting service
• No advertising SDKs
• No third-party tracking libraries

None. The app does not phone home to Lofi Lab for any reason.

3Clipboard access

Notchi reads your system clipboard — that's the core feature. It lets you act on copied text with the AI assistant and populates the "Recent" list. Many apps don't mention this; we'd rather be upfront. Here is exactly what happens:

• Clipboard text is read on the fly while the panel is open; Notchi does not keep a copy of it after you close the panel.
• Clipboard contents are never written to disk and are never stored in your Recent history.
• Clipboard text is sent to an AI provider only when you act on it — when your typed request refers to it (e.g. "summarize this") or you tap a clipboard action chip — and only up to 1,500 characters at a time.
• If you close the panel without triggering an AI action, your clipboard text goes nowhere.

4AI features — bring your own key

Notchi's AI assistant runs on a bring-your-own-key (BYOK) model. You supply an API key from a provider of your choice, and Notchi sends your prompts directly from your Mac to that provider over HTTPS. There is no Lofi Lab relay server. Lofi Lab never receives, sees, or stores your prompts or the AI's responses.

You pick one provider; only that provider receives your requests. Supported providers: OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Zhipu AI (GLM), Alibaba Qwen, Moonshot (Kimi), MiniMax, and Xiaomi MiMo. Each provider handles your data under its own privacy policy — review the policy of whichever one you use. Notchi does not use your prompts or responses to train any model; it has no ability to, since it never sees them.

If you use OpenRouter's one-click connect, your default browser opens to openrouter.ai to sign in or create an account; the key it returns is scoped to your own OpenRouter account and is then saved locally like any other key.

If the AI model runs a web search while answering, a model-generated search query (not your raw text) is sent to the search backend — the provider's built-in search, Zhipu's web-search API when GLM is selected, or Exa if you've entered an Exa key. Same principle: it uses your key, goes direct to that service, and no Lofi Lab server is involved.

5Your API keys

Your API keys are stored locally on your Mac, in the app's standard preferences (macOS UserDefaults) under your user account. To be fully honest: they are stored in plaintext, not in the Keychain. They never leave your Mac except as the authentication header sent to the specific AI or search provider the key belongs to — never to Lofi Lab or anyone else.

If you prefer, keys can also be supplied through environment variables (for example OPENAI_API_KEY, DEEPSEEK_API_KEY, EXA_API_KEY), which take precedence over a stored key.

6What is stored locally on your Mac

Everything Notchi stores stays on your Mac and is never uploaded anywhere:

• Recent history — up to 50 conversations. Each one keeps the full thread of that conversation (every question you typed and every AI reply), a title, a timestamp, and — if the item came from saving a Note or Reminder — a link back to it. The raw clipboard text is not stored here; only what you typed and the responses.
• Your API keys and model choices — including the Exa search key, if you entered one (see section 5).
• App preferences — panel placement, dock-icon visibility, your two preferred translation languages, which clipboard action chips are enabled, onboarding state, and the last "What's New" version you saw.
• A diagnostics file at ~/Library/Application Support/Notchi/diagnostics.json — a small rolling log of at most 50 recent failures. Each entry holds only a timestamp, the provider name, an HTTP status code, and an error-category label. No prompt text, no clipboard content, no API keys. It stays on your Mac.

7Permissions

macOS will ask for these the first time, and only if you use the matching optional feature:

• Automation / Apple Events — only if you save a typed line to Apple Notes.
• Reminders access — only if you file a typed line as a reminder in Apple Reminders.

Those writes go to your local Apple apps on your Mac; Notchi does not transmit them anywhere. Notchi does not request Accessibility, Screen Recording, Microphone, Camera, or Location access.

8Update checks

To see if a new version is out, Notchi requests the public GitHub releases API (api.github.com/repos/cyrus-cai/notchi/releases/latest). No personal identifiers are sent. If you choose to update, the new version is downloaded from GitHub. (A NOTCH_GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable, used only by developers building against a private repo, would add an authorization header — this is not part of normal use.)

9Open source is the guarantee

Every claim on this page can be checked against the code. Notchi is open source, so anyone can read exactly how it accesses and handles data at github.com/cyrus-cai/notchi. That's a stronger promise than any sentence we could write here.

10Children

Notchi is not directed to children under 13, and it knowingly collects no personal data from anyone — children included, since it collects none.

11Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the "Last updated" date at the top of the page will change with it. The latest version of the source is always in the open-source repository, so you can see exactly what changed and when.

12Contact

Questions about your privacy? Open an issue on GitHub: github.com/cyrus-cai/notchi/issues.