Privacy
There is no server. Spine runs on your Mac, and everything it does stays there.
What Spine sees
To fold your desktop, Spine has to look at it. macOS asks you for the Screen Recording permission the first time you run it, and that's what the permission is for.
Each frame goes straight from the screen to the graphics card, gets folded, and is gone. Nothing is written to disk. Nothing is kept in memory once it's drawn. Nothing is sent anywhere — there is nowhere to send it to, because there is no backend behind this app. When the effect isn't running, the capture isn't running either.
What Spine sends
Two requests, both dull, and that is the whole list:
- Your licence. When you paste your key, and once every three days after that, the app asks Polar — the shop that sold it to you — whether the key is still good. It sends the key, an activation ID and the name of the Mac, so that the three-machine limit can work. If there's no internet, the app just keeps working.
- The version number. On launch it fetches one small text file from this website to see if there's a newer build. It's the same request as loading a web page, with nothing attached to it.
No account. No sign-in. No analytics, no crash reporting, no "anonymous usage statistics", no unique ID. Nobody, me included, can tell that you're running Spine.
This website
No cookies and no trackers — not a single third-party script on any page. The hosting company keeps ordinary access logs for a short while, the same as every website on earth.
Buying
Checkout is handled by Polar, who are the legal seller. They get your email address and your payment details so they can send the receipt and the licence key; I only ever see the email address on the order. Card details never touch anything of mine.
Asking about your data
Since the only thing held about you is that email address, write to hi@tryspine.app and it can be sent to you or deleted the same day.