Privacy Policy

We keep metadata about your plugins, never the plugins themselves; there are no trackers; a handful of named companies process data for us; and you can export or delete everything in one click.

This policy is for Plugin Whisperer at pluginwhisperer.com, run by Sean Myer, Inc., 8424A Santa Monica Blvd. #305, West Hollywood, CA 90069, USA. It covers the web service and the two apps that feed it: Plugin Whisperer for Mac and the Windows helper.

Your account. Your email address, how you sign in (a one-time code and link we email you or, where we offer it, a passkey: we keep the passkey's public key and the name your device or password manager gave it, never a secret), sign-in times, and, if you turn it on, a two-factor secret. We need this to run your account.

Your account settings. Your plan, whether chat is switched on, your aggregate-data choice, and the time you confirmed you are 18 or older.

Your consents. Which version of the Terms you accepted and when, and your age confirmation, each as its own record.

Your library. For each plugin: the catalog entry it matched, a token for the folder it lives in plus the path inside that folder, formats, version, framework, whether it is still present, when it was first and last seen, and a keyed hash of the file's fingerprint. Your username is replaced by a token before the manifest leaves your browser or the app.

Your profiles. A name for each machine, its operating system, which DAWs you ticked or an app found (with their versions), and when it last synced.

Your connected computers, if you use Plugin Whisperer for Mac or the Windows helper. When you connect a computer, the app sends your computer's name with your own user name taken out, your operating system, the app's version and a hash of a random id the app made when it was installed, never anything read from the hardware. We keep those with the time the computer connected and was last seen, and we send you a notice that a computer was connected.

From then on the app sends your plugin list by itself when it changes (while that setting is on, as it is at first) and when you press Resync or the app was just updated. The list is the same one a browser scan sends: for each plugin, its name, maker, format and version, its path inside its folder, its bundle id, the size of its file, a fingerprint of its descriptor file or of the first 64 KB of its executable (never the files themselves), its AU component codes and VST3 module details, on Windows the company, product and version written into the file and, for a bridged plugin, the path of the bundle it launches. The app also sends which DAWs it found on that computer, with their edition and version. A standard plugin folder is sent as a token and its standard path, never as your own path; a folder you added yourself is sent under its own folder name, which starts every plugin path inside it.

Your sign-in to Plugin Whisperer for Mac. The app signs you in through your own browser and keeps the session it receives in your Mac's login Keychain, as the app's own item (if the Keychain refuses, only in memory until you quit). Its library window is this website built into the app, so it collects exactly what the website does and nothing more.

Your edits. Favorites, hidden plugins, notes (up to 2,000 characters), projects, merges, duplicate decisions, and any description, tag, maker or artwork you override. Artwork you upload is re-encoded and stored under your account.

Your chats (paid accounts only). Session titles, folders, messages, and which plugin records each answer cited.

A quote for our website, if you gave us one. The words, the name you agreed to show, and our note of when and how you agreed. Section 12 says how it is used.

Usage of the chat. Token counts and the metered cost of each answer, kept in a ledger and never shown to you as money.

Billing references. Your Stripe customer id, subscription id and price id, plan dates, the last amount paid and its currency. We never hold your card number, billing address or tax details — Stripe does.

Operational records. Redacted payment events (ids, statuses, amounts — no email, name, address or card digits), an audit log of every plan or entitlement change, and scrubbed error messages.

Suggestions you send to the shared catalog. The field and value you propose, linked to your account until you delete it.

Feedback you send through the app. Your message, the kind you picked, and your machine details only if you ticked that box.

Why we are allowed to hold each of these. Your account, your profiles and connected computers, your library and your edits, your chats and your billing references are held because they are what the service you bought is made of — we cannot run it without them (the contract between us). Our own records of how the service runs — which features are used and when, scrubbed error logs, the audit log, the nightly backups, and a chargeback entry where a payment was disputed — and the notice that tells you a computer was connected are held on our legitimate interest in running a service that works, keeping it secure, and not being defrauded; that interest is named here so you can weigh it, and section 11 says how to object. The anonymous ownership totals of section 5 rest on the same interest, with the switch that turns them off. Your address on the community list is held on your consent, which you can take back at any time. And the records the law itself makes us keep — the note of each consent you gave, and the financial and audit rows that outlive a deleted account — are held because it does.

Which features you use, and when. That a scan finished, that a question was asked, which plugin's card you opened — each as its own record under your account id. It is how we learn what the product is actually for. It never holds your search words, your questions or a file path; section 6 says exactly what is in it and section 7 says how long we keep it.

Plugin binaries, presets and project files. The scanner opens only the small descriptor files inside each plugin (Info.plist and moduleinfo.json) and, for plugins it still cannot identify — up to 100 per sync on a Mac, and every single-file plugin on Windows — reads the first 64 KB of the plugin's executable to fingerprint it. It never runs native code, and no plugin bytes ever leave your machine — only the fingerprint does.

Continuous-integration checks fail the build if the scanner package gains any file-writing API.

A standard plugin folder is sent as a token and its standard path, never as your own path. A folder you added yourself, in the browser or in an app, is sent under its own folder name, which starts every plugin path inside it, so give it a name you are happy to send.

What the apps keep on your computer: a copy of your plugin list (Plugin Whisperer for Mac keeps it in its own settings folder; the Windows helper keeps it in a "Plugin Whisperer" folder in your user folder, where the website can read it too), and the device key that lets that computer upload to your account, in your Mac's login Keychain or the Windows Credential Manager or, when that refuses, in a file in the app's settings folder, kept for your account (on a Mac, readable by your account only) (on a Mac, the app keeps your sign-in session in the Keychain too). The key and the session are never shown to you and never written to a log.

We use five companies. Each receives only what its job needs.

Google's paid API does not train on what we send it, and keeps a copy for abuse monitoring for up to 55 days.

We have no third-party analytics provider.

Support mail you send us is delivered to a Google mailbox.

Each of the five processes your data under a data-protection agreement that forms part of the terms we accepted with that vendor, in force from the day our account with it began — there is no separate signature step at any of them. Stripe, which sells the plan to you as merchant of record, also handles your payment details under its own privacy policy, not only on our instructions.

Everything above is processed in the United States. If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, that means your data leaves your country, and each company handles it under the data-protection agreement it has with us: Supabase, Cloudflare, Stripe and Resend write the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and the UK addendum into theirs, and the paid Google API is governed by Google's own data processing addendum. Write to support@pluginwhisperer.com and we will send you the terms that cover any one of them.

We publish how many accounts own a given plugin — for example "about 150 owners". This is on by default and one switch in Settings turns it off.

The switch is on your Settings page. The counting runs every night; no screen in the app shows a total yet. Your plugins are counted only while the switch is on.

The count is computed fresh every night from accounts that have not opted out, are more than seven days old and have completed at least one scan. A plugin you have hidden on all of your machines is not counted. A plugin gets a published count only once it has at least 60 owners, keeps it until it drops below 50, and the number is rounded to the nearest 25 — so nobody can tell from a change in the count whether one particular person joined, left or opted out.

Aggregates are never individual and never sold raw. Opting out or deleting your account takes effect at the next nightly run, within 24 hours.

No ad pixels, no fingerprinting and no third-party analytics scripts or trackers. Your sign-in session is kept in your browser's local storage, not in a cookie — we set no cookie of our own to keep you signed in, and none for advertising or analytics.

Our host, Cloudflare, may set its own strictly necessary security cookies on this domain to block bots and to remember that you passed a challenge (for example __cf_bm), which we neither read nor use to recognize you, and it counts requests at its edge as part of serving the site, with nothing placed on your device.

We also keep our own first-party record of which features you use and when — that a scan finished, that a question was asked, which plug-in's card you opened — tied to your account id and nothing else: no email, no name, no search words, no file paths, no third party; each record is kept for 90 days, then only daily totals remain, and the records are part of your export and deleted with your account.

Your browser keeps, on your device only: your sign-in session, your own settings (the theme, the layout, the last tab you had open), a copy of your library so it paints at once, your last scan, and the folders and list file you picked so you need not pick them again. All of it is read by this site only; signing out clears your library copy and your last scan, and deleting your account clears everything (section 8).

If a Turnstile bot check runs at sign-up or sign-in, it is a challenge, not analytics.

We do not collect any record of what you do on other websites, and we let no other party collect one through ours; because there is no such collection to switch off, a browser "Do Not Track" or Global Privacy Control signal changes nothing about what we gather, and we honor it by default.

We do not sell, rent or share your personal information with anyone for advertising.

Retention is enforced by scheduled jobs, not by intention. Some of those jobs ship at later milestones; the periods above are the design, and our internal data map records which are live.

Both buttons are on your Settings page. If you would rather a person did it, write to support@pluginwhisperer.com from the address on your account and we will do the same thing by hand.

"Download my data" in Settings gives you a zip: your account and consents, every profile's library as JSON and CSV, your connected computers, your chats, your artwork overrides, your allowance as question counts, and the record of which features you used, as JSON and CSV.

A connected computer is disconnected with "Disconnect this computer", in Settings under Machines or in the app itself. The app forgets its device key, from its settings folder and from your Keychain or Credential Manager: at once when you disconnect in the app, and on its next call when you disconnect from Settings. A key that has not been used for 180 days expires on its own. Signing out of Plugin Whisperer for Mac removes your session from the Keychain but does not disconnect the computer; Settings says so, and Disconnect is the separate step. Deleting an app from your computer removes only the app. Disconnect first and turn off Start at login (on Windows, Start when I sign in) in the app before you delete it: the app's settings folder, its Keychain or Credential Manager item, the Windows helper's "Plugin Whisperer" list folder and its start-at-login entry stay until you remove them yourself. Your account is not affected either way.

"Delete everything" in Settings asks you to type DELETE and to confirm with a one-time code we email you (or your authenticator, if enrolled). It then cancels any active subscription, deletes every row tied to your account, purges your uploaded artwork, deletes your sign-in identity, and shows you a receipt.

What remains after delete-everything, and why:

• Pseudonymised financial and audit rows for 24 months, keyed by a hash rather than your account id — records a business has to keep.
• A chargeback blocklist entry, if a payment of yours was disputed — as keyed hashes only.
• Copies may remain in database backups for up to 7 days and in encrypted dumps for up to 90 days.
• The sign-in service's own log of sign-in events (time, IP address, browser type), for a limited time on its side.
• Google's abuse-monitoring copy of chat calls for up to 55 days.
• Stripe's own records as merchant of record, under Stripe's retention and tax law.
• Facts you contributed to the shared catalog, with your account link removed.

You can also delete a single conversation from the chat sidebar, forget one machine, or remove a picture you uploaded from that plugin's cover menu (Use catalog artwork) — each with its own confirm. Deleting your account removes all of them at once.

Both export and delete are rate-limited to stop abuse (export three times a day).

Every table has row-level security, so the database itself refuses to show one account another account's rows — checked by automated tests on every build.

Your browser holds only a public key; server keys and the AI key live only in server secrets. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest at Supabase.

Two-factor authentication (an authenticator app) is optional, and once you turn it on it is required for delete-everything — and only the authenticator will do, because a code emailed to you is not a second factor if someone can already read your email. You enroll it from your Settings page; the administration pages have always required it.

Security headers are set on every page, and a check after every deploy fails if one is missing or weakened.

You must be 18 or older to buy a plan and use chat, because the chat runs on Google's Gemini API and Google's terms require it. The free library does not use that API. We record the time you confirm your age at checkout.

The reason is set out in full in Terms of Service section 3.

You can see, export and delete your data yourself, from Settings, without asking us.

If you are in the EU, the EEA or the UK, this is your law and these are your rights, not a courtesy: to see the data we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to have our use of it restricted, to take it elsewhere in a machine-readable form, to object to any use we base on our legitimate interest, to take back a consent at any time without it affecting what we did before, and to complain to your own data protection authority. Section 5 of this policy, Settings, and the paragraph below are how each of them is exercised.

If the law where you live gives you further rights over your data, write to support@pluginwhisperer.com and we will handle it in the same way.

Export and delete in Settings are immediate and need no request. A formal request for your data — to see it, correct it or delete it — sent to us by email is answered without undue delay and in any event within one calendar month of the day we receive it (counting to the same date in the next month; if that date does not exist because the month is shorter, the last day of that month; if it falls on a weekend or public holiday, the next working day). If your request is complex, or you have made several, we may take up to two further months, and we tell you so and why within that first month. If we decide not to act on a request, we tell you why within the same first month, and you may complain to a data protection authority.

If you give us a quote and your permission — by message or in conversation — we may show it on our website with the name you agreed to and, if you are a paying member, the words "Paid member". We keep a note of when you agreed. Write to support@pluginwhisperer.com to change or remove it, and we will.

We never write one for you, we never publish words you did not agree to us publishing, and we do not pay for them.

Your email address and your account are never shown beside your words. Removing a quote takes it off the site; we cannot recall copies others made while it was public.

If you join the Plugin Whisperer community list, we keep your email address and the time you confirmed it. You are only added once you press the link in the confirmation email we send you, so being on the list is itself the record that you asked to be on it.

The list is used for announcements about Plugin Whisperer, the occasional discount, and a note from Sean. It is never used for anything the service owes you: receipts, renewal notices and any other message we are required to send go to your account's email whether or not you are on this list.

The messages are sent through Resend, which is already listed in the table above. Every message carries our postal address and three ways to leave: the leave link in the message, your mail app's own unsubscribe control, which our message sets up for you, or a note to support@pluginwhisperer.com. Any one of them takes you off.

We keep your address until you leave the list, and then we delete it. An address that never confirms can be sent nothing, and we delete those after seven days.

When this policy changes we publish a new version with a new date and never edit the old one. A material change is posted here, with its date, before it takes effect.

That includes how long we keep things. A period in the table above changes only in a new dated version of this policy, posted here before the new period takes effect — never by a quiet edit to the version you are reading.

support@pluginwhisperer.com — Sean Myer, Inc., 8424A Santa Monica Blvd. #305, West Hollywood, CA 90069, USA.