Your account, your license, and your data

Two separate things that people reasonably assume are one:

YOUR LICENSE lives in your account. Signing in emails you a one-time code; that code proves the email is yours, and the answer that comes back is one word — free, trial, or pro. Nothing else.

YOUR DATA lives on this machine, in %APPDATA%\SubnetSlinger. It is never uploaded. Not the inventory, not the incidents, not the activity log, not runbooks, saved hosts, topology maps, captures, or the Vault.

So: a new sign-in code gets your LICENSE back, never your data. Sign in on a new laptop and Pro unlocks on an EMPTY app. Your findings didn't travel — they were never anywhere but the old machine.

What this means in practice:

• No cloud sync. Nothing of yours lives on our servers to sync FROM. But you can make your own portable backup — File ▸ Back up & restore your work — and carry it to a new machine. See the "Back up & restore your work" article.
• If the machine dies with no backup, the data dies with it. There is no "restore from your account" — your account has never held it. Make a backup before you need one.
• The VAULT is stricter still. Its key is sealed to this Windows user on this device, so copying vault.json elsewhere fails even WITH the right passphrase. That's the point — a stolen file is useless — but it means a dead machine takes those secrets with it. Keep anything you can't re-create somewhere else too.
• Anyone who can read your inbox can request a code and claim your LICENSE. They still get none of your data. Protect the mailbox.

WHAT WE COLLECT — the whole list, not the highlights:

• Your email address — the license is attached to it, and the sign-in code proves the address is yours.
• An account ID — a random UUID. It's what the app actually asks about; the email is just how you sign in.
• Your tier and trial start date — so "is this Pro?" has an answer, and a 30-day trial knows when it began.
• A purchase record if you buy — that a payment for your account succeeded, and for how much.

That is the entire list. Your email is personal data and we won't pretend otherwise — it's how a license is yours and not someone else's.

WHAT WE NEVER ASK FOR OR STORE. Not "we keep it safe" — we never have it:

• No card number, expiry or CVV. Buying opens Stripe in your browser; the card is typed on Stripe's page and we're told nothing but "paid". There is no card field anywhere in this app.
• No Social Security or national ID number. No passport or driver's license number.
• No date of birth. No home address. No phone number.
• No name — unless your email happens to contain one.
• No password. There isn't one to steal: sign-in is a one-time code, so there's no password of yours in our database, and no password of yours to reuse anywhere else.
• No employer, job title, or company details.

A license needs to know WHICH ACCOUNT paid, not WHO you are. Anything beyond that would just be a liability to hold, so we don't hold it.

WHY SO LITTLE. Every field you collect is a field that can leak. The smallest set that makes licensing work is an email and an ID — so that's the set. It also means a breach of our database exposes a list of email addresses and tiers. Bad, but survivable, and nothing about your network is in there to expose.

HOW IT'S USED. Only to answer one question: what does this account own? Your email is used to send you a sign-in code and a receipt. It is NOT sold, NOT shared with advertisers, NOT used for tracking or profiling, and NOT used for marketing you didn't ask for. There is NO telemetry, NO analytics, NO usage tracking, and no way for us to see what you scanned, found, or ran — not because we promise not to look, but because it never reaches us.

OTHER THINGS THAT LEAVE THE MACHINE — because a tool can't answer a question about the internet without asking the internet. Being straight about these beats a slogan you'd disprove with a packet capture:

• Home / IP info shows your public IP, ISP and city by asking ipwho.is. With a blank box that lookup is about YOU, and it runs whenever Home refreshes. It's the one automatic call that isn't licensing.
• DNS queries go to Cloudflare's DNS-over-HTTPS resolver — it sees the name you looked up.
• WHOIS/RDAP goes to rdap.org — it sees the domain or IP you asked about.
• MAC lookup falls back to api.macvendors.com for OUIs not in the offline table, and sends only the 3-byte VENDOR prefix — never the full MAC, never the device.
• The Deputy and Posse send your question and the tool results to Anthropic ONLY if you choose the cloud provider and supply your own key — you're billed by Anthropic directly, and secret-shaped text is stripped before it goes. Switch the provider to Ollama and the whole thing runs locally: nothing leaves at all.
• Ping, trace, port scans, SNMP and the rest talk to whatever target YOU typed. That's the tool doing its job.

Want none of it? The free tier needs no account at all — nothing is sent for licensing until you start a trial or buy. Use Ollama for AI, skip Home's IP panel, and the app talks to nothing but the network you point it at.