Privacy Policy

CLI Pulse — Last Updated: August 6, 2026

CLI Pulse is a developer tool for monitoring usage, quotas, and cost across AI coding providers (Claude, Codex, Gemini, OpenRouter, and others). Our privacy goal is straightforward: your provider API keys never leave your device, and everything else we sync is kept to the minimum needed for cross-device viewing.

This document is the single source of truth for what we collect. If you find anything in the app, App Store listing, or GitHub README that contradicts this page, this page wins — please open an issue.

Data-by-data breakdown

DataStored whereSent to our server?Purpose
Provider API keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenRouter, etc.) macOS Keychain on this device ❌ Never Used locally to call the provider's own API directly
Provider session cookies (manual cookie headers) macOS Keychain on this device ❌ Never Used locally as Cookie header to the provider
Bridged OAuth tokens from ~/.codex/auth.json, ~/.claude/.credentials.json, ~/.gemini/oauth_creds.json macOS Keychain (app-group shared) ❌ Never Shared between the sandboxed main app and the local helper only
Contents of your ~/.codex/sessions/ and ~/.claude/projects/ JSONL files Read on-device via security-scoped bookmarks you explicitly grant ❌ Never Scanner computes token counts locally
Aggregated usage metrics (per-day token counts, cost estimate, model name, provider name, date) Supabase, linked to your CLI Pulse account ✅ Yes So iPhone and Apple Watch show the same history as your Mac
Provider quota state (remaining, limit, plan tier, reset time) Supabase, linked to your CLI Pulse account ✅ Yes So mobile clients display current quotas without running the scanner themselves
Your CLI Pulse login email Supabase Auth ✅ Yes Required to authenticate you
Apple / Google sign-in tokens (during sign-in) Not persisted — exchanged once for a Supabase session ✅ Yes (during sign-in only) Identity verification with the original OAuth provider
Supabase session access / refresh token macOS Keychain on this device ❌ Never re-uploaded (only received) Keeps you signed in
Device name, OS version, helper version Supabase ✅ Yes Shows which Macs/iPhones are reporting
Git activity metadata (commit hash, HMAC of project path, commit timestamp, merge flag) Supabase — only when "Track git activity" toggle is ON ✅ Yes (opt-in only) Powers the Yield Score feature
Git commit messages, diffs, file paths, author identity ❌ Never Explicitly excluded even when Yield Score is on
Alerts you resolve locally (quota depletion alerts) UserDefaults on this device ❌ Never Suppression list to prevent re-firing
Crash reports (stack trace, app version, OS version, non-PII device model) Sentry (sentry.io), scrubbed before leaving the device ✅ Yes (when a crash/error happens) So crashes are visible to us without waiting for an App Store review
Anonymous install statistics (random install id, install channel, app version, OS major.minor, and whether a CLI was ever found) Supabase — not linked to any account ✅ Yes, unless you turn it off Tells us whether the app actually works for people who never sign in

About that last row

Every other upload in this table happens only when you are signed in and is attached to your account. Anonymous install statistics are the one exception, so they get spelled out here rather than buried in a table cell.

Since v1.44 you can use CLI Pulse without an account. That means we cannot tell whether the app works for the people using it that way — whether it found their CLIs, whether they ever saw a number. Two counters, and nothing else:

  1. CLI Pulse was installed — recorded on first launch.
  2. CLI Pulse found a CLI to track — recorded the first time this happens, and never updated afterwards.

Sent with each: a random identifier generated on your Mac, which channel the app came from (App Store, direct download, or Homebrew), the app version, and your macOS version rounded to major.minor (15.1, never the full build string).

Not sent, ever: your account or email (there is no account involved, and no login token is attached to the request), your name, your device's name, serial number or hardware identifiers, your IP address, any file path or project name, which provider you use, or any token count or cost figure.

The identifier is random — not derived from your hardware, and not a hash of anything about it. It lives in the app's preferences, so uninstalling CLI Pulse deletes it; reinstalling produces a new, unrelated one. We cannot connect it to you, and we cannot connect two installs to each other.

Turning it off: Settings › Privacy › “Send anonymous install statistics”. Off means nothing is sent at all. Local-only mode also turns it off — you do not need to set both. The app tells you about this on first launch, before it sends anything.

The key point: the two categories of data you'd be most worried about — provider API keys and raw session-log contents — never touch our servers, full stop.

How data moves

┌─────────────────────────┐         ┌──────────────────┐
│  Your Mac               │         │  AI provider     │
│  ┌─────────────────┐    │         │  (OpenAI,        │
│  │ API key in      │─── Direct ──▶│  Anthropic,      │
│  │ macOS Keychain  │    │ HTTPS   │  Google, ...)    │
│  └─────────────────┘    │         └──────────────────┘
│                         │
│  ┌─────────────────┐    │
│  │ JSONL session   │    │         ┌──────────────────┐
│  │ logs (local)    │──── read ────│ CLI Pulse        │
│  └─────────────────┘    │  only   │ Supabase backend │
│                         │         │                  │
│  ┌─────────────────┐    │         │ - Email          │
│  │ Token counts,   │─── HTTPS ───▶│ - Usage numbers  │
│  │ costs (numbers) │    │         │ - Quota state    │
│  └─────────────────┘    │         │ - Device list    │
└─────────────────────────┘         └──────────────────┘
                                             │
                                             ▼
                                     ┌──────────────────┐
                                     │  Your iPhone /   │
                                     │  Apple Watch     │
                                     └──────────────────┘

The scanner runs entirely on your Mac. Your API key never passes through our servers — it goes directly from your Keychain to the provider.

Security practices

Your controls

Data retention

Third-party sub-processors

We do not share data with any party not listed above. We do not sell data.

Children's privacy

CLI Pulse is a developer tool intended for users 17 or older. We do not knowingly collect data from children.

Changes to this policy

We will update the "Last Updated" date above when this policy changes and note material changes in release notes. The authoritative version lives at https://cli-pulse.github.io/cli-pulse/privacy.html.

Roadmap: end-to-end encryption

We've looked at adding E2EE to the Supabase-stored metrics. Today, the sensitive data (API keys, session log contents) already never leaves your device, so the marginal privacy gain from encrypting the numeric metrics is smaller than it sounds. Implementing E2EE also conflicts with cross-device sync, which requires multi-device key management we don't want to ship half-built. If you have a specific threat model where E2EE on metrics matters to you, please open an issue — we'd rather hear the use case than guess.

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