What stays on your Mac, and what does not.

The short version

The screenshot never leaves your Mac. Not on any setting, not on any plan.
Your voice is transcribed on your Mac, by a model you downloaded. The audio is never uploaded.
We never hold anything you dictated. Our servers know that you bought a licence and how many words you have used. They have never seen one of them.

What happens on your Mac

Your voice

Recorded while you hold the dictation open, turned into text on your Mac — by a Whisper model you downloaded, or by Apple’s speech model that ships inside macOS — and then gone. The recording lives in memory as audio samples, it is never written to disk, and there is nowhere in the app that could keep it.

Your screen

Before transcribing, YapScribe takes one screenshot of the display you are working on and reads the text in it with macOS's own text recognition, on your Mac. The screenshot and the words read from it are held in memory for one dictation and then released — never written to disk.

The image itself is never sent anywhere, whatever else you have turned on. A short list of words read off it — names and jargon, so they come out spelled right — travels with your text when you have cloud polishing on, and that is set out below and in the Trust ledger.

Your wordlist and the words YapScribe learns

YapScribe notices names it keeps seeing — on your screen, and in the corrections you make to its output — and remembers them so it stops getting them wrong. What it is allowed to remember is limited in code, not by policy:

single terms, or a misheard/intended pair — never a sentence;
at most 64 characters and three words on either side;
never more than one line, which is the shape a screenful of text arrives in;
never anything from a password field or while secure input is on.

That ceiling is what makes "we do not store what is on your screen" a fact about the code rather than a promise on a website: a sentence cannot fit through it. Clear all learned data in Settings deletes the lot, and leaves the words you typed in yourself alone.

Your history

Every finished dictation is saved on your Mac: the text that was delivered, and what the speech model actually heard before polishing. No audio, no screenshot, no text read off your screen — those fields do not exist in the record, which is deliberate, because a field that exists is a field something later could start filling in.

Clear History in Settings deletes all of it. Nothing in the history is ever uploaded.

Recovery drafts

While you are speaking, YapScribe writes what it has heard so far to a small file beside the history, so that a crash cannot take your words away. It holds text and nothing else, it is deleted the moment your words land where they were going, and clearing your history takes it with them.

What you set for each app

Settings › Apps lists the apps you have dictated into and lets you set three things for each: which category it is, whether polishing runs there at all, and any instruction you want to write for it. That list is a file on your Mac — apps.json, beside your history — and it holds the app's identifier, the name you see, and those three settings. Forgetclears one app's entry and Forget all clears the lot.

An instruction you wrote for an app is part of the correction request for every dictation into it, so it travels exactly as your text does: nowhere at all on the local set-ups, and to the destination you chose on the others. That is set out in the table below.

Your name

Setup asks what to call you. It is optional, it stays in this Mac's own preferences, and it is used for nothing but the sentences on screen. The parts of the app that build network requests cannot see it.

Password fields

A dictation that begins in a password field — or while any app is holding secure input Mac-wide — is not recorded at all. Nothing is transcribed, nothing is polished, and nothing is sent anywhere.

That check has a deadline, and the deadline is 300 milliseconds: macOS is asked what you are typing into, and an answer slower than that does not hold the dictation up. In that case the recording starts and the refusal lands a moment later, at the check that runs before anything is polished — so your words were recorded and transcribed on your Mac, and then discarded. Nothing was polished, nothing was sent, nothing was typed, and nothing was left on disk.

A field that turns secure while you are already speaking is refused before anything leaves your Mac: nothing is polished, nothing is typed, nothing is put on your clipboard, and nothing is left in your history or on disk. The recovery draft above is the reason for that last word — it is written while you speak, and it is deleted when the refusal lands.

What leaves your Mac, and who receives it

That depends on one setting — where polishing happens — and the app states which of these is true, in one sentence, in Settings, before it sends anything.

Polishing off, or polishing on a model running on your Mac: Nothing leaves this computer: not your audio, not your screenshot, not the words read off your screen, and not your text.
Apple Intelligence's own model, on your Mac (macOS 26 and later): Nothing leaves this computer: not your audio, not your screenshot, not the words read off your screen, not the words you have saved, not what you typed on the Apps tab, and not your text. YapScribe makes no network request for a dictation at all — the model is already here, there is nothing to download and nothing to pay for.
Your own API key: The transcribed text of each dictation goes to the provider you chose, with your saved and learned words, any instructions you wrote for that app on the Apps tab, and a short list of words read off your screen. Their terms and privacy policy cover it. Our servers never see it, and never see your key — it stays in your Mac's Keychain.
Your own endpoint, somewhere other than this Mac: The same, sent to your own server and nowhere else — not to us, not to any model company.
YapScribe Cloud credits: The same content — your text, your saved and learned words, anything you wrote for that app on the Apps tab, and the words read off your screen — passes through our server to a model provider, is polished, and comes back.Nothing is stored on the way: not the text, not the terms, not the result. Our proxy streams it through and discards it.

Your screenshot and your audio are not sent on any of these paths. The Trust ledger is the same thing as a table, row by row.

What our servers hold

An account exists so that a licence can know which Macs it covers and so that a payment can be attached to somebody. It holds:

Your email address: Fetched from Clerk, our sign-in provider, the first time we see your account. It is how we send you your licence details and reach you about your account.
Your licence: Which plan, how many Macs it covers, and the date its year of updates ends.
A record of each activated Mac: A salted SHA-256 hash of the machine's identifier, computed on your Mac before anything is sent — the raw identifier never leaves it. Alongside it we keep what the device list shows you: the Mac's name as you set it in System Settings, its model, its macOS version and the YapScribe version it is running. Starting a trial records the same kind of hash. That record is kept rather than acted on: it is what would let us stop one machine taking an unlimited number of free trials, and the refusal is not switched on today.
Your orders: What was bought, when, and the Stripe checkout it came from. No card number: see the next section.
Cloud words, as numbers: Credits bought, credits spent, and usage totals. A count of words is not a transcript, and counts are all there are.
A record of the emails we sent you, and of any change support made: So that an email cannot be sent twice, and so that any change to somebody's account has a reason attached to it.

What is never there: audio, screenshots, transcripts, the prompts sent for polishing, or the polished text. None of it is written to a database, a cache or a log on our side. Our logs carry identifiers and sizes as numbers, and nothing that was said.

The companies involved

Clerk: Signs you in and holds the email address your account is registered with.
Stripe: Takes the payment. You enter your card details on Stripe's own checkout page, not ours — card numbers never reach our servers, and we could not see one if we wanted to.
Cloudflare: Runs this website and our servers, and delivers the few emails we send: your licence details after a purchase, and a note before a trial ends. Your payment receipt comes from Stripe, not from us.
A model provider: Only when you have cloud polishing on: the one you chose with your own key, or the one our credits route to. Nothing reaches them unless you switch it on.

This website

There is no analytics on this site, no tracking pixels, no session recording and no advertising. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.

The Auto / Light / Dark switch remembers your choice in your browser's own local storage, on your device. Every page of this site reads it, so the site stays in the scheme you picked; nothing else does, and it never leaves your browser.

Signing in to your account sets the cookies Clerk, our sign-in provider, uses to keep you signed in — __session, which carries the session itself, __client_uat, which records when it last changed, and their suffixed variants. They are strictly functional, they are the only cookies this site sets, and the pages that carry them are never stored in any cache.

How long things are kept

Anything you dictated: never stored, so there is nothing to keep and nothing to ask us to delete.
Your sign-in, your Macs, your trial, the record of the emails we sent you and your cloud usage totals: until your account is deleted, and then deleted with it.
Each order you paid for, your licence and the record of your cloud-word credits: kept for as long as accounting and tax law requires, even after your account is deleted, with your email address taken off the account they are kept under — [FOUNDER: retention period, once your accountant has confirmed it]. The credit record includes a timestamped history of the credits you spent: a spend history of how many words and calls, and when, with nothing you said in it.
A checkout you started and did not pay for: its order row, which holds nothing personal, is removed after 30 days, whether or not your account has been deleted.
Email you send to support: kept for 180 days, used only to answer you, then deleted.

To have your account deleted, write to support@yapscribe.com from the address it is registered to.

What you can do yourself

Turn polishing off entirely — one switch, and then nothing leaves your Mac.
Turn Screen Context off, or never grant Screen Recording at all.
Clear History, and Clear all learned data, in Settings.
Delete a stored API key from your Mac's Keychain yourself.
Release a Mac from your licence, which also cuts off its cloud access.

Who we are, and how to reach us

YapScribe is made by Vigilainte Inc., 8 The Green, Ste D, Dover, DE 19901, USA. Questions about this page, or about anything held about you, go to support@yapscribe.com.

Changes to this page

If what the app does changes, this page changes with it and the effective date below moves. The app's own Settings screen always states what your current settings send, in the same words, and that sentence is the one to trust if the two ever disagree.