Privacy Policy

The short version

• Your WhatsApp history, your media, your contacts and your exports stay on your computer. They are never uploaded, and we have no way to read them.
• On its own, Chatcove makes exactly two kinds of network call: an update check, and a licence check. Neither carries any part of your chat data.
• Nothing else leaves your computer unless you choose to send us a problem report. It is optional and never automatic, and you see everything in it before it goes. It carries technical details, never your chat history, although a screenshot you choose to include shows whatever was in the Chatcove window at the time.
• If you buy, we hold your email address and your licence record. That is the whole customer database. If you send us a problem report, we keep it only as long as we need it to fix the problem.
• This site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and stores no identifier in your browser. It also remembers, in your own browser, which site or link first brought you here, and passes that along to checkout if you buy, so we can tell which places actually bring buyers. It sets no cookies and holds no identifier.
• We have never sold personal information and we do not run advertising.

Who we are

Chatcove is made and sold by Codama Advanced Engineering, Inc., a Delaware C-Corporation with its registered office at 8 The Green, Ste A, Dover, DE 19901, USA. For data protection purposes we are the controller of the personal data described below. Reach us at hello@chatcove.app.

Part 1: the app on your computer

Your chats never leave your computer

Chatcove asks your iPhone to make a standard encrypted backup, decrypts it locally, reads the WhatsApp databases, and writes your export to a folder you choose. Every one of those steps happens on your machine. No message text, no photo, video or voice note, no contact name, no phone number and no export file is ever transmitted to us or to anyone else.

This is not a policy commitment we could quietly break. There is no code that uploads your history and no server that could receive it. The app makes two network calls on its own, and a third only when you ask it to send us a problem report. All three are below, with their contents fully listed.

Network call 1: the update check

Chatcove checks for a new version on launch and once a day after that, and immediately if you ask it to. The check downloads a small version file from the public GitHub repository we publish releases to. It carries no chat data, no licence key and no email address.

It does carry one identifier, and we would rather spell it out than let you find it yourself. The update library we use attaches a random identifier that it generates once per installation and keeps in a file on your computer. Its purpose is to let a release be rolled out to a percentage of installs at a time. It is random, it is not derived from your hardware, and it is not linked to your licence, your email or anything else we hold. GitHub also sees the IP address the request came from, as it would for any download.

If you would rather Chatcove made no automatic requests at all, you can turn automatic update checks off in Settings. With them off, no check is made on launch or on a timer, and Chatcove only contacts GitHub if you click the check button yourself.

Network call 2: the licence check

Chatcove is licensed for up to 2 devices, Mac or Windows, and enforcing that needs a small server. When you activate a licence, and periodically afterwards to confirm the computer is still one of yours, the app contacts our licence server. The entire request body is these four fields, and nothing else:

• Your licence key. The key you were emailed. It is signed by us and carries your email address, your tier and the date it was issued.
• A device id. A random identifier generated once when you first activate, and stored encrypted on your computer. It is not derived from your hardware: not a serial number, not a MAC address, not a fingerprint of your machine. It identifies an installation, not a person or a computer.
• A device name. Your computer's name, so that when you hit the 2-device limit we can show you a list you actually recognise and let you free a slot. Worth being blunt about this one: macOS usually names a Mac after its owner, so this field often contains your real name, and a Windows PC name can too. If you would rather it did not, rename your Mac in System Settings, or your PC in Windows Settings, before you activate.
• The app version. For example 0.1.3, so we can tell which build a licence is running.

You can browse your entire history, and use the app day to day, without the network. Activating a licence registers your computer with our licence server. If you activate while offline, Chatcove works for up to 21 days and registers when you next connect. After a successful activation Chatcove keeps working offline for a grace period and re-checks quietly when you are online again.

Network call 3: a problem report, only if you send one

If something goes wrong, you can send us a problem report, either from Report a problem in the app or from Send report on an error card. Neither button sends anything by itself. Chatcove first shows you everything the report would contain, and you can read it, edit it, and uncheck anything you would rather keep to yourself. The report is uploaded only when you then click Send report. Nothing is ever sent automatically, and you never have to send one: Chatcove works exactly the same whether you do or not.

A report can contain:

• Technical log lines, from the app itself and, when a backup fails, from the backup tool it runs, which is verbose. They are redacted before you see them: your iPhone backup password and your licence key are removed, and the name of your home folder is masked wherever a file path appears.
• Details of the app and your computer: the versions of Chatcove and of macOS or Windows, your Mac's model or your PC's processor architecture, and basic facts about it such as its chip or processor, memory, free disk space and language setting.
• Your iPhone's model and iOS version, whether it is paired with this computer, and the details of any error that occurred.
• A timeline of the app's steps, such as when a backup started and where it stopped, and the results of Chatcove's checks on your computer's setup.
• Your licence status: whether you are on the free version or licensed, and your licence id, which is our internal reference for your licence record. Never the licence key itself.
• Screenshots of the Chatcove window, but only the ones you leave checked.
• Your email address and a description of the problem, if you choose to add them. We use the email address only to reply to you.

Chatcove never copies your WhatsApp data into a report: no messages, no contacts, no photos, videos or voice notes, no part of the WhatsApp database and no export files. It never includes your licence key or your iPhone backup password either. The one thing worth a careful look is the screenshots. Each one shows the Chatcove window as it was, so if a conversation was open at the time, that conversation is in the picture. You see every screenshot before anything is sent, and anything you uncheck stays on your computer.

A report goes to the same server that handles the licence check, which we run ourselves. The server is hosted on Railway, and the report is stored in our database on Supabase. When a report arrives, our team is emailed a copy through Infobip, with the log and screenshots attached, to team mailboxes hosted by Google. Alongside the report, the server stores a one-way hash of the IP address it came from, which we use only to spot abuse. Nobody outside our team and those providers sees a report, and we use it only to investigate and fix the problem you reported and to reply to you about it.

If you would rather not upload anything, choose Save to file instead. Chatcove writes the same report to a file on your computer, and you can read it and email it to hello@chatcove.app yourself, or not send it at all.

We keep a report only as long as we need it to investigate and fix the problem. There is no automatic deletion period, and we will not pretend there is one. Ask us at hello@chatcove.app and we will delete a report, including the copies emailed to our team.

What Chatcove stores on your computer

All of this stays local. Apart from the licence details the licence check sends, and the log lines in a problem report you choose to send, none of it is sent anywhere.

• The iPhone backup, the decrypted databases and the search index, in a private folder inside Chatcove's application data folder (Application Support on a Mac, AppData on Windows). This is the bulk of your data, and you can delete it from inside the app at any time. You can also move the backup folder to an external drive.
• Extracted media, and your exports, written to the folder you pick. Exports default to your Downloads folder.
• Your licence key, your activation record and your device id, each encrypted with the system's safe storage: on a Mac that is macOS safeStorage, protected by your Keychain, and on Windows it is protected by your Windows user account. Your email address is never written to disk in the clear: it is read back out of the encrypted key when it is needed.
• Your iPhone backup password, if you let Chatcove remember it, also encrypted with safeStorage. If encrypted storage is not available on your computer, Chatcove refuses to save it rather than storing it in the clear.
• App preferences, which include your iPhone's name and identifier, the folders you chose, and your export settings.
• Diagnostic logs. The main log is stripped as it is written, so message text, names, phone numbers and file paths do not reach it. The separate log from the backup step is the raw output of the backup tool and contains file paths, which include your macOS or Windows username. Neither is ever sent to us automatically. A problem report includes recent log lines, redacted as described above, but only if you choose to send one. If you attach a log to a support email instead, you are sending it deliberately, and you can read it first.

Uninstalling Chatcove and deleting its application data folder removes all of it.

Part 2: this website

Analytics

chatcove.app uses Cloudflare Web Analytics. It records page views and coarse technical facts such as the page URL, referrer, country, browser and device type. It sets no cookies, stores nothing in your browser, and does not build a profile or track you between sites or across visits. We use it to see which pages people find useful.

Where you came from

To learn which places bring people who actually buy, the site notes where your first visit came from and keeps it in your browser's local storage. That note holds only: the campaign tags on the link you followed (such as ?ref=producthunt or utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign), the name of the website that linked to you (just the site, such as reddit.com, never the page), the page you landed on, and when. If a later visit comes from somewhere else, that is noted too. It holds no name, no identifier and nothing about what you read here. It is not a cookie, and the note itself stays in your browser: what reaches us is the short label described below, when you click Buy or Download. You can clear it by clearing this site's data in your browser.

When you click Buy, a short version of that note is added to the Stripe checkout link, for example a1_ref-producthunt_lp-home_bp-pricing, along with the same campaign tags. If you complete the purchase, it is saved with your licence record (see Part 3).

Button clicks

When you click Buy or Download, our server records one event: which button, the page it was on, the short source label above (or "direct"), and your country as our hosting provider already determines it. It does not record your IP address, your browser or any identifier, so these events cannot be tied to you or to each other. Download links go through chatcove.app/download, which counts the click and sends you on to the file on GitHub. It also notes whether that was the Mac or the Windows file, which it works out from the type of computer your browser reports, without storing what the browser sent. That, Cloudflare Web Analytics, and the source note above are all the measurement on this site.

Getting your licence key

Right after checkout, the payment page sends you to chatcove.app/paid with the Stripe checkout reference in the address. That page asks our licence server for the key that checkout paid for and shows it to you, for up to 24 hours after the purchase, then takes the reference out of the address bar. If you use the "Find your license key" form, the email address you type is sent to our licence server only to look up a licence bought with it; if there is one, its key is emailed to the address it was bought with. The form says the same thing either way. We do not store the address you typed; it is held in memory for an hour only to limit repeat requests.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies of its own. The only things it writes to your browser's storage are the source note described above and, if you pick a language or close the language suggestion, that choice, so the suggestion respects it next time. Neither leaves your browser except as described above. There is no advertising pixel, no social tracker, no session replay, no CAPTCHA and no third-party font service: the fonts are served from our own domain. Cloudflare, which serves the site, may set a strictly necessary cookie of its own to filter automated traffic. It carries no profile and we do not read it.

That is why you have not been shown a cookie banner. A banner exists to collect consent for storing or reading non-essential things on your device, and nothing here does that.

Links off the site

The buy button goes to Stripe, the download button goes (through our counting redirect) to GitHub, and the footer links to codama.dev. Once you follow one of those, that company's own privacy policy applies.

Part 3: when you buy

Payment

Checkout runs entirely on Stripe, which is the merchant of record for the sale. Stripe collects your email address and payment details, plus a billing country and any details it needs for tax, and it calculates and remits any VAT, GST or sales tax. We never see or hold your card number. We do not ask for your phone number and Stripe does not collect one for us.

From the completed sale our server reads only these fields from Stripe: the checkout session id, your email address, your billing country, the amount, the currency, and the source note the site added to the checkout link, if there was one.

What we store

Buying creates one record in our licence database. In full, that record is:

• a licence id, your email address, the tier, and the seat limit;
• your licence key, and the date it was issued;
• the Stripe checkout session id, so a repeated webhook cannot issue you a second key;
• the date the key was emailed to you;
• the source note from the checkout link (where your first visit came from, the page you landed on and the page you bought from), if the link carried one;
• the created and updated timestamps, and a status flag we can set if a licence has to be revoked.

Your licence key is stored as issued, and the key itself contains your email address. We keep it so that we can re-send it when someone loses it, which is the single most common support request we get.

Each computer you activate adds one row: the device id, the device name, the app version, when it was activated and when it was last seen. Removing a licence from a computer deletes that row.

The amount, currency and country from your purchase are used to send our own team a notification that a sale happened. They are not written to the database.

Email

Your licence key is emailed to you through Infobip, our email delivery provider. They receive your email address and the message. The same notification described above, which contains your email address, the amount, the currency and your country, goes through Infobip to our own team addresses.

Mail you send to any address at chatcove.app is forwarded by Cloudflare Email Routing into a Google mailbox that we read. Support conversations therefore sit in an email inbox for as long as we keep them, like any other company's support email.

Server logs

Our own application logs record a licence id and the buyer email address when a licence is issued. When a problem report arrives, they record only its reference, its size and the app version, never its contents. They do not record IP addresses. Separately, the hosting platform in front of our server keeps its own access logs, which do include the IP address and browser user agent of every request, including the licence checks your app makes. We do not use those logs for analytics or profiling.

Where the data lives, and who processes it

We keep the list of processors short on purpose. These are all of them.

• Stripe (payments, merchant of record). Receives your email, payment details, billing country and tax details.
• Railway (hosting for the licence server, which also receives problem reports, in the United States). Sees request traffic including IP addresses and user agents, our application logs, and any problem report you send.
• Supabase (the Postgres database, hosted in Switzerland). Holds the licence and device records listed above, and any problem reports you send.
• Infobip (email delivery). Receives your email address, your licence key, and the sale notification, and delivers a copy of any problem report you send to our team.
• Cloudflare (website hosting, Web Analytics, and email routing for chatcove.app). Sees site traffic and forwards inbound support email.
• Google (the mailboxes that receive forwarded support email and the problem report copies sent to our team).
• GitHub (public hosting for the app download and the update feed). Sees the IP addresses of download and update requests.

Because our server is in the United States and our database is in Switzerland, buying Chatcove involves a transfer of your email address out of the EEA and the UK, and so does sending a problem report. We rely on the standard contractual clauses offered by these providers for those transfers. Your chat history itself is never involved, because it never leaves your computer.

Why we are allowed to hold it

For readers in the EU, the UK and similar jurisdictions, our legal bases are:

• Performance of a contract for your email address, licence record and device records. Without them we cannot deliver your key, honour the 2-device licence, or re-send a lost key.
• Legitimate interests for the update check, the seat check that stops one key being shared endlessly, the aggregate site analytics, the button click counts, and the source note. We think these are proportionate: the update check identifies nobody, the seat check holds an installation id and a machine name, Web Analytics and the click counts store nothing on your device, and the source note holds only campaign tags and site names, stays in your browser unless you buy, and can be cleared at any time.
• Consent for problem reports. Sending one is your choice, you decide what goes in it, and you can withdraw by asking us to delete it.
• Legal obligation for the transaction records Stripe keeps for tax and accounting.

How long we keep it

We will describe this as it actually is rather than inventing a schedule we do not run.

We have no automatic deletion. Licence records, including your email address and your key, are kept for as long as the licence exists, because a perpetual licence has to stay redeemable for the same reason it has to keep working. If you ask us to delete your data we will do it by hand, promptly, and confirm it to you. Device rows are deleted as soon as you remove a licence from a computer. Support email is kept in our mailbox until we clear it. Problem reports are kept only as long as we need them to investigate and fix the problem, and we delete a report, including the copies emailed to our team, whenever you ask. Our hosting provider, our email delivery provider and Stripe apply their own log and record retention periods, which we do not control, and Stripe is required to keep transaction records for tax purposes even after we delete ours.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to how we use it. In the EEA and the UK these are your rights under the GDPR, including the right to data portability and the right to complain to your national data protection authority. In California, the CCPA gives you the right to know, to delete, to correct, and to opt out of sale or sharing.

On that last one: we do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We never have. There is no opt-out to offer because there is nothing to opt out of. We will never treat you differently for exercising any of these rights.

To exercise any of them, email hello@chatcove.app from the address you bought with, or tell us which address you used. For a problem report, tell us roughly when you sent it, and the email address you added to it if you added one. We will respond within 30 days, and we do not ask for identity documents.

Children

Chatcove is not designed for or directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16.

Changes to this policy

If the product changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. If we ever make a change that materially affects what we collect, we will say so clearly rather than quietly editing a paragraph.

Contact

Codama Advanced Engineering, Inc., 8 The Green, Ste A, Dover, DE 19901, USA. Email hello@chatcove.app. Our Terms of Service cover the rest of the relationship.