Privacy policy

The Benchwave app

Benchwave has no account and no sign-in. Your captures, inventory, projects and notes are stored in a local database on your Mac, and Benchwave doesn't send this data anywhere. There's no telemetry and no usage analytics built into the app.

On-device AI features (where available) run entirely on your Mac using Apple's own on-device models. Nothing is uploaded for analysis.

An iPhone/iPad companion app is planned. When it ships, syncing will go through your own Apple iCloud account (CloudKit's private database), the same way Apple's own apps sync. Benchwave doesn't run a server for this and never sees that data; there's still no separate Benchwave account.

This website

The website itself is separate from the app and only collects data where you actively give it to us, through the contact form or a donation.

Contact form

If you use the contact form, we collect your name, email address and message so we can reply. This is sent via Brevo, an email delivery service, and lands in our inbox; we don't keep a separate database of contact form submissions.

Donations and the supporters wall

Donations are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card details, Stripe handles that directly. If you choose to add a nickname and message to the supporters wall, we store the nickname, message, your donation amount and currency (kept private unless you choose to show it), and the Stripe checkout session ID (used only to stop the same donation being posted to the wall twice). We don't store your email address or billing address.

Cookies

The site uses a small number of cookies:

• A short-lived session cookie, set only on pages with a form (contact, donation follow-up), to protect the form from cross-site request forgery.
• A theme cookie that remembers whether you chose light or dark mode, kept for up to a year.
• A language cookie that remembers if you've chosen the Polish version of the site, kept for up to a year. This is separate from the cookie banner below, it's needed for the site to work correctly (so the same page doesn't show different content to different visitors), not for tracking.
• If you accept the cookie banner: a consent cookie recording your choice, and an anonymous visitor ID (a random code, not your name, email or anything that identifies you) so we can tell a repeat visit from a new one. Both kept for up to a year.

We don't use any third-party analytics or advertising cookies, nothing here is sold or shared with ad networks, and none of it is used to build a profile of you as a person. You can decline the banner, or change your mind at any time via "Cookie preferences" in the footer.

Server logs and abuse prevention

Like most websites, our server automatically logs basic technical information, such as IP address, page requested and browser type, for security and to keep the site running reliably. We also use simple rate limiting to prevent spam on the contact and donation forms. None of this is shared with advertisers.

Download counters

We keep a simple running total of how many times the app (per version) and the other files we publish, such as the sample data pack and the translation kit, have been downloaded. This is just a number per file, no personal data, no cookies, and it isn't tied to you in any way.

Page views and campaign links

Whether or not you accept the cookie banner, we keep a simple aggregate count of how many times each page is visited, and, if you followed a link we tagged with utm_source or utm_campaign (for example in a social media post), which one. This baseline count never uses a cookie and never stores your IP address or any other identifier, it's just numbers going up.

If you accept the cookie banner, we additionally log each page visit and download against your anonymous visitor ID, so we can see things like which pages a typical visit covers and which sites people are arriving from (the referring page, if any). This is first-party only, stored on our own server, never shared or sold, and not linked to your name, email or any account, there isn't one.

Who else sees your data

We use a small number of service providers to run the site and app, each only for the purpose below:

• Stripe for payment processing.
• Brevo for delivering contact form emails.
• Our hosting provider, to run the server the site and database live on.

We don't sell or share your data with anyone else, and we don't use it for advertising.

Your rights

You can ask us what data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, most commonly a supporters wall entry or a past contact message. Email seb@benchwave.co.uk and we'll sort it out.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, we'll update the date at the top of this page.

Questions? Get in touch →