Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-07-27

Summary

ServerShelf is a local-first desktop application. We do not run servers that store your data. Your inventory, scans, AI prompts and provider credentials live in a SQLite database on your own machine.

What we collect

License purchase: when you buy a license, our payment processor Polar.sh (Merchant of Record; older orders went through Lemon Squeezy — see Imprint) collects your email and billing details to process the order and issue invoices. We receive your email and license key only.

Telemetry: none, by default. Crash reports are opt-in and only sent if you provide your own Sentry DSN in Settings.

AI features: prompts are sent directly from your device to the AI provider you configure (Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, Groq, Gemini, Ollama, …). We do not proxy or log them, except for the optional AI Pro add-on which routes through our infrastructure — see the AI Pro privacy notice in the app.

Cloud sync: when you enable cloud sync, your inventory snapshot is encrypted with your passphrase (AES-256-GCM + Argon2id) before being uploaded to your S3 bucket, WebDAV folder, or iCloud Drive. We never see the encrypted blob.

What the app sends to our own servers

Almost nothing, and never your inventory. These are the only requests the desktop app makes to servershelf.app:

• License revocation check: once a license is stored, the app asks at every start whether that license has been revoked. It sends a SHA-256 hash of the license email, nothing else. If the request fails (offline, server down) the app keeps working. License activation itself is verified offline with an ed25519 signature and needs no network.
• Update check: on first start the app asks once whether it may check for updates; if you say yes, it fetches a small version file at launch and once a day. Otherwise only when you click "Check for updates" in the About dialog. No identifier and not your version is sent, the comparison happens on your device, and nothing is installed automatically.
• Feedback form: only when you send it — subject, text and, if you enter one, your email.
• Mobile notifications: only if you pair the mobile companion app. Alerts from uptime checks and triage are then relayed through our push service to Apple (APNs) or Google (FCM) so they can reach your phone. The notification text contains the server name or check target (hostname, URL or IP) and a short status line. The relay keeps a device registration (up to 90 days after the last update) and does not store the notification content. Unpairing the phone removes the registration. If you do not pair a phone, nothing is relayed.

The mobile app initialises Firebase Cloud Messaging at launch so it can receive notifications; that SDK contacts Google with installation data even before you pair. Notifications to the phone travel over Apple's and Google's push services; their privacy terms apply to that hop.

Cookies on this website

This marketing site (servershelf.app) sets no cookies at all. To see how many people visit and which pages get read, we count a few anonymous events on our own server: the page, its language, an approximate country from Cloudflare, and — if you arrived through a campaign link — the campaign tag. We keep daily totals only, and neither your IP address nor your browser is stored. If your browser sends Do-Not-Track or Global Privacy Control, this counter records nothing at all.

Alongside that, our host Cloudflare provides Web Analytics, a cookieless measurement tool. It sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device and does not fingerprint you or follow you to other sites. It reports aggregate figures only: page views, referrers, an approximate country and the browser. Your IP address is used to derive that country and is not retained.

The checkout pages of our payment processor may set their own cookies. The ServerShelf app itself still sends us nothing.

Your rights (GDPR)

You may request export or deletion of any personal data we hold (your purchase email + license key) at any time by emailing privacy@servershelf.app.

Contact

See Imprint for legal contact details.