Nothing leaves your Mac unless you ask.

The short version

• Refetch has no account, no sync, no analytics, no telemetry and no tracking.
• Everything you capture is stored in a folder on this Mac, and only there.
• Refetch never records the clipboard in the background. It captures only what you hand it.
• Two things reach the network: link previews you asked for, and a license check you started.

What is stored, and where

Captures, their metadata, the authoritative copies of any files you drop in, and the regenerated preview thumbnails live in Refetch's own Application Support container. Settings, under Data, shows the folder and lets you open it in Finder. Delete the folder and Refetch has nothing.

Files you import are copied into that store, so moving or deleting the original never breaks the capture. Preferences - appearance, layout, launch at login, your chosen opening gesture - are stored in app-only preferences.

What Refetch sends

Link previews

When you capture a web link, the URL is stored first. Refetch may then contact that URL, its declared preview image, its favicon, and Apple's native Link Presentation service to build a recognition preview. Rendering a full page is a separate, explicit, per-capture action in the inspection popover; it loads that page in an ephemeral web view, which executes the page's JavaScript and contacts the third parties that page references. Refetch never renders a page on its own - not on capture, not in the list, not in the background.

The license check

Refetch is paid software, sold through Polar as the merchant of record. Validating a license key is the only thing Refetch sends off this Mac that is not a capture.

• Where. api.polar.sh, over HTTPS. Refetch runs no license server of its own.
• What. The license key, the activation instance id, and a device label - your computer's name, so you can tell your Macs apart. Nothing else. No captures, no content, no usage data, and no identifier derived from your hardware. Refetch does not fingerprint your Mac.
• When. Once, when you activate a key. After that, at most once every 30 days, in the background. Never during launch, and never on a path you are waiting on. Deactivating a Mac sends the key and instance id once more, to release the seat.
• What comes back. Polar's reply includes the purchaser's email address. Refetch does not decode that field, so it is never stored, logged or displayed.
• When it fails. Silently. A failed background check changes nothing you can see for 30 days.
• Where the key lives. In the Keychain. A secret-free copy - a masked preview, the device label and the date of the last successful check - is also written to Refetch's preferences, so a Keychain problem cannot lock out someone who has paid. The key itself is never written there.

During the trial, and after it ends, Refetch makes no licensing request at all: there is nothing to validate.

Permissions

Choosing Shift twice as your opening gesture requires Input Monitoring, because it observes modifier keys outside Refetch. An ordinary keyboard shortcut does not. Refetch does not require Accessibility or Full Disk Access for normal use.

Security

• The app is sandboxed, hardened-runtime, signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple.
• Updates arrive through Sparkle and are verified with an EdDSA signature against the downloaded bytes before anything installs. Nothing installs silently.
• The bundled privacy manifest declares no collected data and no tracking.

Your data, your call

Export is initiated by you, in Settings under Data, and produces a JSON archive on your disk. Refetch does not upload exports. If a capture's authoritative file is missing, export says so and names the file rather than reporting success.

This website

refetch.sh is a static site. Three things measure it, and none sees what you save in the app:

• Umami Cloud counts page views and the site's Download, Buy, demo and support actions without cookies, cross-site tracking or a personal identifier. Campaign links are reduced to source, medium, campaign, content and landing path. Full URLs and checkout parameters are never sent. Search parameters and URL fragments are excluded. Refetch has its own isolated Website ID under the shared Umami account. It runs on every public visit.
• Vercel Analytics separately counts cookieless public page views and the same site actions. Its URL guard strips search parameters and fragments and rejects every admin route.
• Google Analytics receives the same page and action categories only after you press Accept in the cookie notice. Until then the Google tag is not loaded. You can change your answer at any time under Cookie settings in the footer; the choice itself is kept in your browser's local storage, along with your theme preference.

The download button sends you to the newest release on GitHub. Nothing on this site asks for an email address or an account.

Questions

If anything here is unclear or does not match what you observe, get in touch. Discrepancies between this page and the app are bugs.