Known waters

Privacy

Last updated 2026-07-17

The short version: Runbay runs on your Mac, keeps your data on your Mac, and phones home for exactly two things — checking your license and checking for updates. No app telemetry, no account, and only cookieless, anonymous analytics on the website. The long version is below, in plain language.

1. The app collects no telemetry or analytics

Runbay has no telemetry and no analytics. Your containers, logs, stats, and the on-disk cache all live on your Mac and never leave it. There is no usage metering, no crash-reporting service, no product analytics, and no hosted agent compute on our side. The built-in MCP server listens on a local Unix socket or localhost TCP only.

If we ever add on-device diagnostics, it will be Apple's MetricKit (aggregated, on-device) and it will be opt-in — off unless you turn it on. We are not doing that today.

2. License validation (Polar)

If you activate a commercial license, the app validates it directly against Polar's public customer-portal API, using only a public organization identifier. That request carries no personal information and no account — it exists solely to check, activate, or deactivate a license key. There is no Runbay license server, no account database on our side, and nothing about your usage is reported anywhere. Free personal use makes no license call at all. Payments and invoicing are handled by Polar as Merchant of Record — see the licensing terms.

3. Update checks (Sparkle)

The app uses Sparkle to check for updates by fetching a static appcast (https://runbay.app/appcast.xml) from our website. Like any web request, that fetch carries your IP address and the current app version so Sparkle can tell whether a newer build exists. It carries no identifiers, no license data, and nothing about your containers. Automatic update installation is not enabled yet; when it is, updates will be cryptographically signed. You can turn update checks off in Settings ▸ General.

4. This website

runbay.app uses Cloudflare Web Analytics — a cookieless, privacy-first measurement of aggregate traffic and page performance (Core Web Vitals, like how fast pages load). It sets no cookies, stores no personal data, and does not track you across sites, so it needs no consent banner. We use it to see roughly how many people visit and how the pages perform — nothing that identifies you.

The "Download" buttons route through a /download page so we can count, in aggregate, how often a download is started — again with no cookies and no personal data. Standard web-server request logs (IP, timestamp, requested URL) may exist at the hosting layer for security and reliability, as with any website; we do not build profiles from them. This is the only analytics anywhere in Runbay — the macOS app still sends no telemetry of any kind (section 1).

5. Nothing is sold or shared

We do not sell, rent, or share your data with anyone. There is no third party receiving your data from the app, because the app sends no personal data anywhere in the first place.

Questions about any of this? Email [email protected]. If a claim here is ever wrong or out of date, that's a bug we want to fix.