Privacy
Your data
Stays on your Mac. Readdown reads your Markdown files in place. It never copies, syncs, or uploads them. Your recent documents, window positions, and preferences live in your Mac's local settings. There are no accounts.
What we collect, anonymously
- Update checks. Once a day, while Readdown is open, the app asks our server whether a new version exists (older versions ask heya.studio, which forwards to readdown.app). At most once a week, the request also includes the app version, your macOS version, Mac model, CPU type, RAM, and language. No identifier, no account. We use it to guide product decisions: which macOS versions and Macs to support, performance targets, language priorities, and where to focus future work.
- Feature usage, only if you opt in. If you click Count Me In when Readdown asks, or turn on Share Anonymous Usage Data in the Help menu, the app sends one small summary a day: how many times features like Copy, Find, or Show in Finder were used, plus the app version and macOS version. A complete report looks like
{"version": "1.16", "os": "26.1", "counts": {"copy_file": 3, "find": 1}}. It carries no identifier of any kind, so two reports from the same Mac cannot be linked to each other. If you decline, nothing is counted, not even locally. You can verify all of this in the source code. - Site analytics. Page views on readdown.app go through Cloudflare. No cookies, no cross-site tracking. When you click a download, support, or sponsor button, copy the Homebrew command, or open the support page or panel, the site records which button, the referring site, the page, and your country code, and nothing that identifies you. To credit a later download to the site you came from, your browser keeps that referring site in session storage until you close the tab; it never leaves your browser except with a click you make. The download counter on the homepage reads the public GitHub release count.
Supporting Readdown
Payments on the support page are handled by Stripe, which processes your payment details and email to send your receipt. Readdown keeps only totals: how many payments, the amounts, and which page the link came from. Your name appears on the thanks wall only if you choose that at checkout, and you can have it changed or removed anytime by emailing hello@readdown.app.
The Buy me a coffee link in the app goes to PayPal, which handles that payment under its own privacy statement.
What we never see
- The contents of any file you open.
- File names, paths, or which files you've opened. Usage counts are feature totals only, never tied to documents.
- Account info. There are no accounts.
- Device identifiers, advertising IDs, or fingerprints.
- Crash reports. Crashes stay in macOS's local reporter.
Opting out
Usage stats are off unless you said yes, and one click turns them off again: Help › Share Anonymous Usage Data. Switching it off also discards anything counted but not yet sent.
Readdown asks once, on its second launch, whether to check for updates automatically. Untick Include anonymous system profile to keep getting updates without sending the profile, or choose Don't Check to stop update checks altogether. To change your answer later, run defaults write com.heya.readdown SUSendProfileInfo -bool false in Terminal to stop the profile, or defaults write com.heya.readdown SUEnableAutomaticChecks -bool false to stop checks. Without checks you won't hear about new versions; grab them from readdown.app when you want.
Source code
Readdown is source-available on GitHub. Updates are handled by Sparkle, the standard open-source update framework for Mac apps.
Who's responsible
Readdown is made by Natalia Arsand, trading as Eixo Design, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (KVK 42036962). Eixo Design is responsible for the data described here.
Who helps
- Cloudflare hosts readdown.app, counts the anonymous events above, and forwards email sent to hello@readdown.app.
- Stripe processes support payments.
- GitHub hosts the downloads and the source code.
- Google stores email, since hello@readdown.app lands in a Gmail inbox.
Why, and for how long
- Update checks and site counts run on our legitimate interest in keeping Readdown working and knowing which pages help people. They hold nothing that identifies you, and Cloudflare keeps the counts for about three months.
- Feature usage runs only on your consent, which you can withdraw anytime in the Help menu.
- Payments are needed to process your support, and payment records are kept for seven years because Dutch tax law requires it.
- Your name on the thanks wall appears only with your consent, until you ask us to remove it.
- Emails you send are kept as long as needed to answer and follow up.
Your rights
You can ask to see, correct, or delete what we hold about you, or object to how we use it, by emailing hello@readdown.app. If you think we got something wrong, you can complain to the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
Questions
Open an issue on GitHub or email hello@readdown.app.