Privacy

What stays on your device

• The text you paste into copypaster. It is never transmitted, logged, or stored on our servers.
• Your typed output. The keystrokes go to whichever app has focus on your machine — copypaster doesn't see them.
• Your config: WPM, typo frequency, theme, etc. It lives in a JSON file in your user-data folder.

What we collect, and why

1. Trial heartbeats

While you're on a free trial, the app sends a small heartbeat to our backend so we can count remaining pastes and detect tampered counters. The heartbeat includes:

• An anonymous machine identifier (a SHA-256 hash of hostname + MAC addresses — not reversible to your name or email).
• Your operating system (e.g. "win32"), app version, and device hostname (whatever your machine reports — often "DESKTOP-XYZ").
• The number of trial pastes used.
• Approximate location: country, region, city — derived from your IP by Cloudflare. We do not store your IP address itself.
• Your system's IANA timezone string (e.g. "Europe/Berlin").

This is how we know whether your trial is still active. Once you have a license, heartbeats stop and license validation takes over.

2. Product analytics

When analytics is enabled (default on), the app logs events about how it's being used so we can improve it. Each event includes:

• Event type — e.g. install, first_open, paste_started, paste_completed, activation_attempt, app_error.
• Length, in characters, of the text being typed (for paste events) — never the text itself.
• Which application the text was typed into, as a category from a fixed list (for example "VS Code", "Word", "Chrome"). The app reads the name of the program that has focus when typing starts and matches it against that list, and sends the matching category, or, if the program isn't on the list, its bare program name (for example "obs64") so we can add it. It never reads a document name or a web address.
• And, when that program is a web browser on Windows or Linux, which web app you were typing into. To work that out, the app reads the browser window's title on your device and checks it against a fixed list of about fifty-five web apps (for example Google Docs, Gmail, Canvas, ChatGPT). What gets sent is the app's name from that list or, for a site that isn't on it, the short site name taken from the end of the title (for example "notion") so we can add it.
• Since September 7, 2026 (version 1.5.6), the browser window's title itself is also sent with the paste event, on Windows and Linux, and only when the text was typed into a web browser. Before it leaves your device the app removes the browser's own name from the end, replaces anything that looks like an email address with "[email]", replaces any part that contains a file path with "[path]", and cuts what is left to 120 characters. We use it to learn which web apps and pages copypaster is used with, nothing else. It is kept for the same 180 days as every other event. macOS sends no title at all (the app never reads one there), a title is never sent for any program that is not a browser, and turning analytics off stops it along with everything else. Web addresses are still never read.
• From the release after 1.5.7 (September 2026), each paste event also carries four facts about the text and your machine, none of which is the text: the percentage of the text that is outside basic ASCII (accented letters, non-Latin scripts, symbols), your keyboard layout as one of four families (QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY or other; not readable on macOS), your system language setting (for example "de-DE"), and whether characters outside basic ASCII were sent as keystrokes or through the clipboard. We use them to find out whether copypaster works as well on non-English text and non-US keyboards as it does on English ones. Turning analytics off stops them with everything else.
• Platform, app version, your subject identifier (the same trial-machine hash, or your license key once activated), country / region / city (from Cloudflare), and timezone.

The contents of your clipboard are never part of an event. If we wanted to know whether a particular string of text was pasted, we couldn't tell you. The data doesn't exist on our side.

You can turn analytics off in Settings → Analytics. When you do, the app tries once to send a single final event recording that choice — so that we can tell an opt-out apart from someone who simply stopped using the app — and then sends nothing at all after that. It tries once and does not retry, so if you are offline at that moment even that event never arrives. Turning analytics back on records that too. Trial heartbeats are separate and continue while you're on a trial.

3. Crash and error reports

When analytics is enabled, the app also reports errors that would otherwise be invisible to us: crashes, unhandled exceptions, and interface failures. A report contains the error type, its message, and the first line of its stack trace, plus the app version and the same subject identifier as any other event.

Reports are scrubbed before they leave your machine. Stack traces normally embed your home directory, and the account name in it is often a real name, so the app replaces your username (and anything shaped like an email address) with a placeholder before sending. Reports are also capped and de-duplicated, so a repeating fault sends one report rather than thousands.

Crash reporting follows the same switch as everything else: turning analytics off in Settings → Analytics turns it off too. We do not make an exception for crash data, even though it would be useful to us, because it is still data about someone who asked us not to collect any.

4. License activation

When you activate a license, we store the email tied to your Stripe receipt and the devices you've activated on (the machine identifier + a friendly hostname). You can see and revoke these on the Manage page.

5. Trial extension (email opt-in)

If your free trial runs out and you choose to enter your email to unlock 3 bonus pastes, we store that email linked to your anonymous machine identifier. We use it to send the one-click verification link and, if you opt in, the occasional product update. Every marketing email includes an unsubscribe link. Entering an email is entirely optional — you can also skip the prompt and just buy a license.

Since September 9, 2026, if you visit the download section on a phone or tablet you can ask us to email you the download link instead. We send the links, and we keep the address in the same place as the trial-extension emails above, under the same terms: the occasional product update, every marketing email with an unsubscribe link. No machine identifier is attached, since you have not installed anything yet. The links carry a short tag saying which page the request came from, so we can tell whether the feature is used at all.

Since September 21, 2026, an address given in either place may get follow-up email: at most two messages, which can include a reminder of the download link and a discounted first month. They come from a separate sender address that a person reads replies to, and every one has an unsubscribe link that stops all of them for good. Before sending we check the address against our licence records so that someone who already bought is not asked to buy; that check happens on our server and shares the address with nobody. The app's email prompt says this next to the field from the version released after that date.

6. Marketing site analytics

This website (copypaster.app) uses Cloudflare Web Analytics and Microsoft Clarity for page-view counts and basic interaction telemetry. Both are configured to avoid storing personal data. They are not used inside the app.

7. Uninstall survey (Windows)

When you uninstall copypaster on Windows, the uninstaller opens a one-question page on this site asking why. Answering is optional: closing the tab sends nothing. If you do answer, we store the reason you picked, anything you typed (with email addresses removed), the app version, and the same anonymous machine identifier as your other events, so we can see what went wrong before you left. The page opens only when you uninstall yourself, never during an update or a scripted removal.

What we don't do

• We don't read or send web addresses, and we don't send the title of any document in any program that isn't a web browser. The one title we do send, since September 7, 2026, is a browser window's, after emails and file paths have been removed on your device and it has been cut to 120 characters, as described in section 2. It is never sent from macOS, and never once analytics is off.
• We don't sell your data.
• We don't share it with third parties beyond payment processing (Stripe), email delivery (Resend), and the analytics services named above.
• We don't train AI models on it.
• We don't try to identify you behind the machine hash. The hash exists so that licenses bind to a device — not so that we can profile you.

Retention

• Trial records: 30 days after the last heartbeat.
• Analytics events: 180 days, then automatically deleted.
• License records: kept for the lifetime of your license, plus a reasonable period for refunds and support.

Your rights

Email [email protected] if you want a copy of what we have on you, or want it deleted. We'll get back to you within a few days — it's a small operation, but we read every email.