How TackNote handles your information — the honest, plain-English version.
TackNote is operated by Keepers Code, LLC, doing business as TackNote ("we," "us," or "our"). It's private by design: your notes, checklists, and voice memos live on your Mac, encrypted. There's no account. Downloading the app does now ask for an email address, so we can reach you about the copy you have — being added to a mailing list is a separate box you have to tick yourself. The app never shows ads or builds a profile of you. We genuinely can't see what you write. The only thing the app sends just to count something is an anonymous ping on first launch whose entire contents is the version number, so we can count installs. Every other request does a job, and all of them are listed under "Every request the Mac app makes": checking for updates, checking your license once you buy one, asking once whether you have already written a review, sending a crash report or feedback when you press Send, and iCloud sync if you turn it on (which runs through your own iCloud, not our servers). Our website loads no advertising scripts, and its analytics set no cookies for visitors in Europe and the UK. The details are in "Every request the Mac app makes", "The one thing the app counts" and "The website" sections below.
Your notes, checklists, voice memos, transcripts, and their metadata are stored locally on your Mac and encrypted at rest using AES-GCM, with the key held securely in the macOS Keychain. They are never sent to us.
When you record a voice memo, transcription is done with Apple's speech recognition. On Macs and languages that support on-device speech recognition, it runs on your Mac and the audio stays there. Where on-device recognition is not available, Apple's speech service transcribes the recording, so the audio is sent to Apple for that, under Apple's privacy terms. It is never sent to us.
When you activate a license, four things are sent to our own licensing server: your license key, a device name (your Mac's name, so you can tell your Macs apart when you manage activations), a device identifier, and which edition of the app you are running (our download or Setapp).
The device identifier is a number macOS assigns to your Mac. We use it for one thing: tying an activation to a particular Mac, so a license bought for three computers is used on three computers. It is not tied to you, it tells us nothing about what you do, and it is never combined with anything else.
Each time the app launches, and about once a week while it stays open, it re-checks your license, sending your license key, the install identifier, the device identifier and the edition, so a license that has been refunded or reported stolen stops working, and so you are not stuck if you move to a new Mac. The server answers with a signed confirmation that your Mac keeps locally, which is what lets the app work normally when you are offline.
A license keeps working offline for 60 days after its last successful check, and every successful check starts a new 60 days. In the last 7 days the app shows a notice asking you to connect once. If it goes 60 days without a successful check, for example because your Mac has been offline or our server could not be reached, your notes stay on your Mac, stay readable and can still be exported, but they become read-only until the next successful check. Connecting to the internet runs that check, and editing comes back as soon as it succeeds. We need this limit because a copy that never reaches us could otherwise never learn that its license was refunded or moved to another computer. The app counts those days by the latest date it has seen, so setting your computer's clock back does not change them.
That is the whole of it. No note content, no file names, no browsing, no usage analytics, ever.
We never receive or store your payment card details. Purchases are handled by Stripe, which also calculates and collects any applicable sales tax or VAT.
If you turn on syncing web-page notes across your Macs, those notes sync through your own iCloud account (Apple). Each note is stored in CloudKit's encrypted fields, which are encrypted on your Mac before they are uploaded. Under Apple's standard data protection, Apple holds the keys to those fields. If you turn on Apple's Advanced Data Protection, the keys are available only to your own devices, so the sync is end-to-end encrypted and Apple cannot read it. Stored alongside each note without that encryption are a few labels CloudKit needs: when the note last changed, its record ID, and for each attached file, which note it belongs to and whether it is a picture, recording or video. The attached files themselves are sealed by the app with their own keys before upload, and those keys travel inside the encrypted note. We operate no servers for this and never see the contents. It's governed by Apple's iCloud privacy terms.
Notes pinned to a specific app window or file stay on the Mac they belong to.
TackNote periodically checks tacknote.app for a newer version. This is an ordinary web request — like any web server, it may log the app version and IP address in standard server logs. There are no personal identifiers and no tracking.
This is the complete list of network requests TackNote for Mac makes, and when. Like any web request, each one also carries your IP address and a standard header naming the app and its build number.
Links you click in the app, such as the user guide, the review page or buying a license, open in your web browser like any other link.
Everything above describes the Mac app. The Windows app follows the same rules, with Windows doing the jobs Apple does on a Mac:
%APPDATA%\TackNote) and encrypted at rest with Windows' own data protection (DPAPI), so only your Windows account on that PC can open them. They are never sent to us.On your iPhone, notes are sealed with AES-256 and the key is kept in the iPhone's Keychain. If you use iCloud Backup, iOS includes TackNote's sealed notes in it. The key goes into that backup only in a form tied to your iPhone's hardware, so Apple cannot read it, and those notes open again only when the backup is restored to the same iPhone. To move your notes to a new iPhone, use Quick Start or an encrypted backup on your Mac or PC, or turn on sync with TackNote for Mac. If notes cannot be opened after a restore, TackNote keeps them unchanged and tells you. The app contacts Apple's push service only while sync is on.
The phone apps can use your device's location for two features. Neither is on until you use it, and the app explains what it needs and asks your permission first.
TackNote Lite, our Chrome extension, is simpler than the apps, and it sends even less:
The very first time you launch TackNote, it sends a single anonymous "a trial started" ping to our server. The entire contents of that message is the app version number. No hardware identifier, no email, no tracking id, nothing that could distinguish your install from anyone else's. It exists so we can tell how many downloads become actual installs, and it is fired once ever, never again.
That is the only request TackNote makes just to count something. Every other request does a job for you, and each one is listed under "Every request the Mac app makes" above.
If you buy a license, the key is re-checked each time the app launches and about once a week while it stays open (more often near the end of the 60-day offline period). That request includes a per-computer install identifier, because it is how the 3-computer limit is enforced. It is licensing, not analytics, and it only happens once you have purchased.
TackNote asks for a few macOS permissions, each tied to a specific feature:
These power the stated features only. Nothing is transmitted to us.
Since 21 August 2026, downloading TackNote from this site requires an email address. A first name is optional. We ask because a direct download is otherwise completely anonymous, and if something is wrong with the build you downloaded — a bad release, a signing problem, a security fix — we have no way to tell you.
We use that address to give you the download link and to contact you about the copy you downloaded or any support you ask for. That is not a marketing list. Being emailed tips and updates is a separate, clearly-labelled checkbox that is switched off unless you switch it on, and your download works exactly the same either way. If you do tick it, you can unsubscribe from any email we send, and unsubscribing never affects your download or your license.
Before we accept an address we check that it can actually receive mail, by looking up the domain's public mail records (a DNS lookup through Cloudflare). We do this to keep typos and junk out of the list. We do not send a message to verify it, and we do not pass the address to anyone for scoring or enrichment.
Alongside the address we record that you accepted the License Agreement and this policy, which version you accepted, and when. We keep that for the same reason anyone keeps a signed document: so that if it is ever disputed, there is a record of what was actually agreed rather than an assumption. It is three short values — a date, a version, and your address — and it is never used for marketing or analytics.
If you reached us through one of our affiliates' links, we also note which affiliate referred you and when you followed their link, alongside your email address. That way they are still credited if you buy later from inside the app, where your browser can't tell us who sent you. We keep that note for 60 days, the length of the affiliate window, and use it only to work out their commission. The affiliate never sees your email address. Following one of those links also adds one to a daily count for that affiliate's code, so we can see that their link is working. That count is a number and nothing else: no address, no identifier, nothing that points back to you.
We keep these addresses until you ask us to remove yours, which you can do at any time by emailing support@tacknote.app — no account needed and no reason required. If you also bought a license, note that we have to keep the billing record Stripe holds for tax purposes even after removing you from everything else.
To be straight with you about what this does and doesn't achieve: it is not a copy-protection measure, and we don't pretend it is. Anyone determined to get the application without giving us an address can still do so. It exists so that the people using TackNote are people we can reach.
tacknote.app is hosted on Cloudflare. Email addresses you give us — to download the app, to join a list, or to ask for support — are covered in "Downloading the app" just above.
This site loads no advertising scripts. Since 9 August 2026 it does use Google Analytics, so we can see which pages people actually land on and where they came from. Our traffic statistics come from Cloudflare's own server logs (page views, countries, in aggregate), which requires no script in your browser, sets no cookies, and is never sold. The only things stored by default are an occasional bit of first-party local storage (for example, remembering an affiliate referral link) and the essential security cookies Cloudflare sets to keep the site safe.
There is no cookie consent banner, and that is deliberate rather than an omission: for visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland we tell Google Analytics up front to store nothing on the device, so those visits are counted without a cookie and without an identifier, and there is nothing to ask permission for. Elsewhere, Google Analytics sets its usual cookie.
What changed, and when. Until 4 August 2026 this website carried Google's advertising tag for conversion measurement, gated behind an opt-in banner. We have stopped advertising through Google Ads and removed that tag, its banner, and the ad-network permissions from our content security policy. On 9 August 2026 we added Google Analytics, which is measurement rather than advertising: it tells us which pages are read and what sent people here, it is not connected to any ad account, and it never sees anything you write in the app.
Our fonts are served from this domain, not from Google Fonts. Loading them from Google would have meant Google's servers seeing your IP address on every page view, so as of 4 August 2026 we host the files ourselves.
To be complete about what else your browser fetches from anyone but us, because it is a short list: pages with a form (downloading the app, student verification, affiliate signup, writing a review) load Cloudflare Turnstile, which is the anti-spam check that replaces a CAPTCHA. It's there to do a job on the page rather than to measure you. Nothing else on this site reaches a third party.
One embedded video. The As seen on page shows a creator's review of TackNote from YouTube. Nothing is loaded from YouTube or Google until you press play. When you do, the player comes from YouTube's privacy-enhanced domain (youtube-nocookie.com), and YouTube's own privacy policy applies to what it then collects. Pressing play also remembers, in this browser's local storage, that you watched that creator's review, exactly like following their referral link: if you then download or buy TackNote, they earn their commission. Nothing about you is sent to us for this; we count plays only as a daily total.
Two things you can send us are read by a machine before they reach us, and you should know which two. Both use Claude, made by Anthropic.
Reviews. When you write a review, it goes to Claude to check it is genuine feedback rather than spam. What we send is the review text, your star rating, the display name you put on the review, and whether you are a verified buyer. All four of those are what appears publicly on the review anyway. Clear cases post straight away, anything unclear waits for one of us to read it by hand, and if a review is turned down you are told rather than left wondering.
In-app feedback and bug reports. When you send feedback from inside TackNote, your message goes to Claude along with your TackNote version and your macOS or Windows version, so it can be sorted into a bug, an idea, a question or praise and land in the right place. That is sorting, not answering. A person still reads every one.
What is not sent. Your notes are never sent, to Claude or to anyone else. Neither is your email address or your license key. Only what is listed above goes, and none of it is used to train anyone's model. If the check is unavailable for any reason, your review simply waits for a person instead of being refused.
Nothing else in TackNote uses AI. The app itself does no such processing, on your Mac or off it.
We rely on a small number of trusted services:
We don't sell your data. Ever.
TackNote is not directed at children under 13.
If we change how any of this works, we'll update this page and the "last updated" date at the top.
Questions about privacy? We'd love to hear from you at support@tacknote.app.
This page is provided for transparency and is not legal advice.
Every note is sealed with AES-256 encryption the moment you write it — the key lives in your Mac’s Keychain, never on a server. Switch on iCloud sync and your notes are encrypted on your Mac before they travel through your own iCloud. Apple holds the keys to that sync unless you turn on Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, which makes it end-to-end encrypted and readable only on your devices. No accounts, no trackers, no servers we control. Not even we can read your notes.