privacy
Trawl is built so your files stay on your Mac. This page explains the little data that does leave it, and why.
What stays on your Mac
Your files, photos, videos, recordings and their contents. Trawl's index, including what it recognises in photos and hears in audio, is created and stored only on your Mac. We never receive it.
Meaning search runs on a small AI model bundled inside the app. It turns your documents, photo descriptions, spoken words, page titles and copied text into numbers that capture what they are about, on your Mac. Those numbers stay on your Mac too.
Browser memory reads the history, downloads and bookmarks your browsers already keep on your Mac (Safari, Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge, Firefox and others), so you can find pages, videos and searches by what they were about. Trawl reads them in place and never uploads them. To show a YouTube video's picture, Trawl downloads its thumbnail once from YouTube's image server (only the video's id is sent) and keeps it on your Mac. Switch it off in the Trawl menu: Remember browser history.
Clipboard memory keeps what you copy (text, links, file names and images) for 90 days, encrypted with your Mac's keychain. Copies that password managers mark as secret are never read, and Trawl skips anything that looks like a password, sign-in code, card number or API key. What you copy is never sent anywhere, including to smart ranking. Switch it off in the Trawl menu, or use Forget clipboard history to erase it.
Voice search only listens after you press the mic button, stops on its own when you pause, and turns speech into text on your Mac. No audio is recorded or sent.
What we receive
- Your account: your email address and name, and if you sign in with Google, your Google profile name and picture. Used to sign you in and manage your trial and plan.
- Your plan: your trial dates, plan, and payment status. Payment details are handled by Dodo Payments; we never see your card number.
- Smart ranking (optional): when switched on, Trawl sends the search you typed plus the names, folder names and short tags of your top results, or the title and website of a page from your history (never the files, never anything you copied) so they can be ranked by meaning. This is processed by our ranking provider and not stored by us. Switch smart ranking off and nothing about your searches leaves your Mac.
- Update checks: Trawl asks our server for the latest version number. No personal data is sent.
- Anonymous usage stats (app): which buttons and keys are used, how many results a search returned (in rough ranges like "5-19"), which setup steps were finished, and sign-in method. Linked to a random install id, and to your account if you're signed in. Never what you type, file names, folder names, paths or file contents. Switch it off under Account → Anonymous usage stats, or in the Trawl menu.
Who processes it
- Neon (accounts, sign-in and our database)
- Dodo Payments (checkout, billing, tax; our merchant of record)
- Google (only if you choose Sign in with Google)
- Our AI ranking engine provider (smart ranking, only when switched on; processes the search and result names, does not keep them for us)
- Vercel (hosts this website and measures visits without cookies)
Your choices
You can switch off smart ranking at any time, sign out, or ask us to delete your account and data by emailing vince@vincedotcode.com. We reply within 30 days.
Website measurement
This website sets no cookies and shows no ads. To learn which pages and campaigns bring people to Trawl, it counts page views, the site or campaign link you arrived from, how far you scroll, which buttons you click and whether you download. A random id is kept only for the open browser tab and is gone when you close it. We use Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights, which are also cookieless.