privacy & network use
Local-first, verifiably.
By default nothing you say, show or type leaves your computer. Don’t take the page’s word for it: put a firewall in front of the app, or pull the network cable — dictation and Crop & Speak keep working. Here is every network touch, exhaustively.
| What | Goes online? | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Speech-to-text (transcription) | On-device by default | Runs entirely on your computer — audio is never uploaded. One exception, off until you set it up: Pro can send audio to a cloud speech provider you configure, with your own account key. |
| Crop & Speak screenshots | No | Saved to a local folder you choose (or a temp folder, auto-cleaned) and pasted locally. The image never leaves your device. |
| History | No | Kept in memory while the app runs and gone when you quit — never uploaded. Pro can optionally keep history on disk, stored only on your machine. |
| Speech model files | Download only | Fetched once from Hugging Face (size depends on the model you pick), then cached and used offline. Only the model comes down — no audio goes up. |
| Local AI polish model | Download only | A small instruct model downloads once on first use; text enhancement then runs offline. |
| Update check | Version file only | A small, digitally-signed version file is fetched from dl-voice.croppick.com — no account, no analytics, none of your content. Updates are verified before they install. You can turn checks off or block updates entirely. The download host counts downloads and update checks per version in aggregate — no IP addresses or identifiers are stored. |
| Pro licence activation | One-time (Pro) | Entering a Pro key makes one activation call: the key plus an anonymous device code (a one-way hash) — never your name, audio, text or screenshots. After that Pro works fully offline; machines without internet can use a licence file from /activate instead. |
| AI enhancement via Ollama | Your own server | Text goes only to the Ollama address you configure — http://localhost:11434 (your own machine) by default. Nothing is sent to us or any third party. |
| AI enhancement via OpenAI / Claude | Yes — uploads that text | Only if you deliberately choose an online provider and press Polish / Prompt. Your dictated text (never audio, never screenshots) goes to that provider over a secure connection, using your own account key. Off until you enable it; the built-in local model or your own Ollama server work fully offline instead. |
| Output actions (Pro) | Only where you point them | Off until you create one. Actions hand a finished dictation to destinations you set up: appending to a file or running a local command stays on your machine; a webhook posts your dictated text — plus the captured image only if your template asks for it — to the exact URL you configured, and nowhere else. Webhook tokens are sealed in the same encrypted vault as account keys. |
| Agent bridge (Pro) | Local answers only | Off until you turn it on. The bridge is a local MCP server: any MCP-capable AI app you connect — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code or another agent — can read your latest Crop & Speak capture and your dictation history, ask you for a snip (the normal overlay opens; redact before confirming, Esc declines) and ask you a short question you answer by voice. Two further abilities are off separately: receiving the captures you take, and taking an aimed capture itself — each shot is announced with a flash and a notification and marked in History. It answers only on your own computer and never connects out; every request needs a local access token, and each ability has its own switch. What a connected app reads becomes part of your conversation with that app’s AI — usually in the cloud. |
| Tracking / analytics | None | The app reports nothing about you or your usage — nothing gets sent home, ever. This website is equally boring: no cookies, no trackers. |
Account keys for optional online providers are stored encrypted on your own machine — sealed in a local vault protected by your operating system’s keychain; a key is sent only to the provider you chose. Logs stay local (last 10 sessions) and record the length of dictated text, not its content.
the free-forever promise
What can never move behind a paywall
Pro exists to fund the app, and it is additive only. If a feature is on this list — or is simply free today — it stays free. No rug-pulls.
- Unlimited on-device dictation — no word caps, no time caps
- The full on-device model catalog, including the best ones — quality is never a paywall
- Core Crop & Speak: capture, annotate, narrate, smart delivery
- Editable voice modes and basic AI polish
- The history panel
- Offline, private operation — privacy is the floor, never the upsell
- Every feature that is free today
updates
Signed, verified, optional
The app checks a small, digitally signed version file (Ed25519) — at most hourly on launch, about daily while it runs. The signature is verified before anything is trusted, every download is checksum-verified, and if anything doesn’t match, the update is simply rejected. No account, no analytics, none of your content.
Prefer silence? Settings → Updates can turn automatic checks off — or block updates entirely.
the formal bits
Privacy policy, officially
This website sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and has no accounts — it collects nothing about you. It is served by Cloudflare, whose infrastructure processes technical request data (such as IP addresses) transiently to deliver the pages, under Cloudflare’s own policies.
The app collects and transmits no personal data unless you choose a feature that needs it — the table above is the complete list of its network activity. The opt-in features send your content only where you point them, and Pro activation sends your licence key and device code, which we keep with your licence record (below). There is no account system, and unless you activate Pro we have no way to identify you as a user.
The activation page (/activate) sends only what you type into it — your purchase email or an offline request code — to our licence service, solely to answer that request. Its forms are gated by Cloudflare Turnstile, Cloudflare’s privacy-preserving bot check, which processes technical request signals under Cloudflare’s own policies; it is loaded only on that page.
If you email us, we keep the correspondence to help you — that’s it. If you buy Pro, the payment is handled by Polar, our merchant-of-record payment provider; we receive the order details needed to deliver your license (like your email address), never your card number.
Data controller: MB Croppick (company code 308104331), Krivių g. 5, LT-01204 Vilnius, Lithuania. Contact for any privacy question or request: the email in the footer.
What we hold, and why. Three things, and only three. (a) Licence records when you buy Pro: your purchase email, the licence key, an anonymous device code per activated machine (a one-way hash) and the activation timestamps — kept because the licence can’t work without them (performance of the licence contract, GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)). (b) Emails you send us — kept so we can answer you (our legitimate interest, Art. 6(1)(f)). (c) The technical request data Cloudflare’s network sees for a moment when it serves a page, a download or the licence service — used only for security and abuse prevention (legitimate interest, Art. 6(1)(f)).
How long. Licence records for as long as the licence is valid and, after a refund or revocation, up to 12 months more — just long enough to stop the refunded key being reused. Correspondence up to 2 years after the last message. The download host keeps only per-version totals of downloads and update checks — no IP addresses, no identifiers, nothing that could be traced back to you.
Who processes data on our behalf.
- Polar — the checkout, your payment data and licence-key delivery (merchant of record; its own privacy policy covers the payment itself).
- Cloudflare — hosts this site, the licence service and the download files; runs the Turnstile bot check on /activate; routes our email.
- Resend — sends our transactional emails (licence keys, resends).
- Google — the mailbox where your emails to us land.
- Hugging Face — the app downloads speech models straight from it, under Hugging Face’s own policies; nothing of yours passes through us on the way.
Your rights. You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, have it corrected or erased, restrict or object to its use, or have it handed over in a portable format. Email the address in the footer; you’ll have an answer within one month. One practical limit: an active licence needs its record to keep working, so licence records can be erased once the licence is refunded or revoked — and Polar keeps its own copy of the payment record, which you’d ask Polar about.
Complaints. If you think we’ve handled your data wrongly, you can complain to the Lithuanian State Data Protection Inspectorate (Valstybinė duomenų apsaugos inspekcija, VDAI) — L. Sapiegos g. 17, LT-10312 Vilnius, vdai.lrv.lt. We’d rather you told us first, but you don’t have to.
Security issues. Found a way the app or our services could be misused? Report it privately to security@croppick.com — how we handle reports, and how fixes reach you, is on the security page.