Privacy Policy

Last updated: April 16, 2026

The short version

Your files, projects, and activity stay on your Mac. Mistline has no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, and no usage tracking. The only network requests Mistline makes are for license validation and update checks — both described in detail below.

What Mistline accesses

Mistline reads your local file system to display your project's file tree, previews, and activity. This data is processed entirely on your machine and is never transmitted anywhere.

Specifically, Mistline accesses:

• File and folder names, paths, sizes, and modification times within the project directory you open
• File contents for preview rendering (Markdown, HTML, JSON, CSV, images, PDFs, video, audio, spreadsheets, zip archives, and text files)
• File contents for in-app search
• Git history for the changelog view
• .gitignore, .claudeignore, .cursorignore, and .aiderignore files for AI scope analysis

What Mistline stores

Mistline stores the following data locally on your Mac:

• App settings: preferences, shortcuts, panel widths (~/.mistline/settings.json)
• Recent projects: folder paths you've opened (~/.mistline/mistline.db)
• Annotations: notes you add to files (.mistline/annotations.json inside each project)
• Dismissed ghost files: files you've chosen to stop flagging (.mistline/ghost-dismissed.json)
• Trial / license: trial start time, license key, and activation ID (~/.mistline/license.json)

All of this data is stored in plain text or SQLite on your local file system. None of it is transmitted anywhere outside the limited, purpose-specific network requests described below.

Network requests Mistline makes

Mistline makes network requests in only three situations, all of them initiated by the app itself and all of them described below. None involve your file contents, your project data, or any usage information.

• License activation. When you enter a license key in Settings, Mistline sends the key, a Polar organization identifier, and your machine's hostname (used as a human-readable label so you can manage activated devices from Polar's portal) to api.polar.sh. This returns an activation ID that is stored locally.
• License validation. Once activated, Mistline periodically re-checks your license with api.polar.sh (typically once per app launch, at most once per minute thereafter) to pick up license revocations. If Polar is unreachable, Mistline trusts the locally cached license and keeps working — you're never locked out by a network blip.
• Update checks. On launch, Mistline fetches a small JSON manifest from the public github.com/trekertrev/mistline-releases repository to see whether a newer version is available. This is an anonymous GET request with no identifying information beyond standard HTTP headers. You can disable this in Settings.

What Mistline does NOT do

• No analytics or usage tracking
• No crash reporting
• No user accounts or authentication inside the app
• No cloud storage or sync of your files or project data
• No reading, transmission, or sharing of your file contents, anywhere, ever
• No third-party services, SDKs, or integrations beyond the two listed above (Polar for licensing, GitHub for updates)

Third-party services

Your purchase is processed through Polar.sh, which handles payment processing, license delivery, and the activation/validation API described above. Polar has its own privacy policy.

Update manifests are hosted on GitHub. GitHub logs anonymous web-server-style access information when files are fetched; see GitHub's privacy statement.

Updates to this policy

If Mistline ever adds features that expand what's described here (for example, optional telemetry or analytics), this page will be updated and the change will be called out in the release notes before any such feature ships.

Contact

Questions? Email hello@mistline.app.