Antinote Privacy Policy

Effective Date: Oct 7, 2026

The short version

  • Your notes stay on your device. We never receive them.
  • Services you connect yourself are the exception. If you add your own AI, transcription or voice provider (for example Anthropic, OpenAI or ElevenLabs), the note text or audio you use with it is sent directly from your device to that provider. Details in section 4.
  • The app collects no usage or analytics data. Not what you type, not which features you use, not how often you open it.
  • There are no accounts. You never create one, so there is nothing for us to attach data to.
  • The iOS referral program stores a code and a count. Not who you are, not which device you have, not who your friends are. Details in section 8.
  • Our website does use analytics — page views and download clicks. Details in section 5.
  • We only email you if you ask us to, and only about what you signed up for.

1. Your notes

Antinote stores your notes locally on your device — on a Mac, in your user Library folder; on iPhone and iPad, inside the app's own storage — along with the automatic backups it keeps. We have no server that holds your notes and no way to read them. Deleting the app and its data folder removes them completely.

Text recognition (OCR) runs entirely on your device using Apple's built-in Vision framework. Images you capture or drop into Antinote are never uploaded anywhere. (If you turn on AI clean-up of captured text, the recognized text — not the image — goes to the provider you chose; see section 4.)

2. iCloud sync

If you turn on iCloud sync, your notes are stored in your own private iCloud database using Apple's CloudKit. They are end-to-end encrypted and they never pass through a Cmd-N Studios server — we cannot read them, and we could not hand them over if asked. Your relationship there is with Apple, under Apple's privacy policy.

Sync is optional and can be switched off at any time in Settings. Turning it off stops all iCloud traffic.

3. What the app sends over the network

Antinote is not a silent app. Every network call it makes is listed below, is there to make a feature work, and can be switched off individually in Settings > Privacy on a Mac, or Settings > Sync & Privacy > Network access on iPhone and iPad. None of them are analytics, and apart from services you connect yourself (section 4), none of them send your notes.

  • Currency conversion rates — fetches daily exchange rates so the math keywords work. Sends nothing about you.
  • Updates (Mac, direct download only) — checks whether a newer version exists, and checks for urgent notices such as a serious security issue. As with any web request, our server sees your IP address and the app version making the request.
  • License activation (Mac, direct download only) — when you enter a license key, the app sends that key to us to confirm it is valid. It does not send your email address, your name, or a device fingerprint.
  • Referrals (iPhone and iPad) — only when you use the Refer friends page or enter a friend's code. What each call sends is spelled out in section 8.
  • Extension updates (Mac) — checks our public GitHub repository for new and updated community extensions.
  • Model downloads — when you choose an on-device dictation model or voice, the app downloads it from our model server (models.antinote.io) or from Hugging Face. As with any web request, the server sees your IP address. Nothing about you or your notes is sent.
  • Extensions that call an API — some extensions send the text you run them on to a third-party service, using an API key you supply. Keys are stored in your device's Keychain, the calls go directly from your machine to that service, and nothing routes through us. Each extension can only reach the endpoints it declares in its extension.json, which you can read before installing. Turning this off blocks every such call.

Earlier versions of Antinote included optional usage tracking. It was turned off for everyone in version 1.1.7, and the code was removed entirely in version 2.0, along with our crash reporter. There is nothing left to opt out of.

4. Services you connect yourself

Some features work with a third-party service that you choose and set up with your own account and API key. When you add one, the content you use with that feature is sent directly from your device to that provider so it can do the work, and it is handled under that provider's own privacy policy. It never passes through a Cmd-N Studios server, and we never see it. Antinote asks you to confirm this when you add each provider. The one exception is the Antinote demo, described at the end of this section, which goes through our server because it uses our key rather than yours.

  • AI providers (such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, OpenRouter, xAI, Mistral, or a custom endpoint) — the note text a prompt runs on, the prompt itself, and, if you turn them on, dictated transcripts and captured text for clean-up.
  • Cloud transcription (such as OpenAI or Soniox) — the audio recording of your dictation.
  • Cloud voices for read aloud (such as ElevenLabs, OpenAI, Groq or Lemonfox) — the text being read aloud.
  • Extensions that call an API — the text you run the extension on, as described in section 3.

Your API keys are stored in your device's Keychain and are only ever sent to the provider they belong to. None of this happens unless you add a provider yourself; you can remove one at any time. Apple Intelligence runs on your device, and so does Apple's speech recognition, which Antinote uses for dictation and the stop and wake words only in its on-device mode — your audio is never sent to Apple. The same goes for Antinote's downloadable local dictation models.

The Antinote demo (iPhone and iPad)

On iPhone and iPad you can try AI clean-up of dictation and photo captures a few times without an account or key of your own, using the Antinote demo provider. Because the demo uses our key, these requests do go through a Cmd-N Studios server. When you pick the demo, Antinote shows a consent sheet that explains this before anything is sent; nothing goes through the demo unless you choose it, and you can switch to a provider of your own at any time.

  • What is sent: the dictated or captured text being cleaned up, together with a random key the app generated on your device and an Apple DeviceCheck token. The demo does not serve editor prompts, extensions or read-aloud, and it never sees a note you do not run it on.
  • What our server does: antinote.io checks that the device still has free clean-ups, forwards the text with our own API key to the AI service we pay for, and returns the answer to the app. The text is forwarded in memory and is not stored or logged.
  • What we keep: only the random key and how many clean-ups it has used, so the free ones can be counted. The key is not your Apple ID, your device's identifier, or anything that identifies you, and Apple's DeviceCheck tells us only whether a device has already had its demo, never which device it is.
  • Who handles the text: the AI service behind the demo is currently OpenRouter, which routes the request to OpenAI; each handles the text under its own privacy policy. We may change this service, or switch the demo off, without an app update, and this policy will be updated when the service changes.

5. Our website

Unlike the app, antinote.io does use analytics. We use Amplitude to understand how people find and download Antinote. It records:

  • Page views and browsing sessions
  • Download and purchase-button clicks, and file downloads
  • Whether your device runs an unsupported OS, so we can show the right message
  • If you submit the iOS beta signup form, the email address you entered is included with that event

Apart from that last case, we do not attach your identity to website analytics, and we do not combine them with anything from the app — the app sends us nothing to combine them with.

Our sites are hosted on Cloudflare, which keeps standard server request logs including IP addresses, for security and abuse prevention.

6. Email

We collect your email address in exactly two situations: when you deliberately enter it into a signup form on our website, such as the iOS beta list, and when you email us directly for support. Signup lists are managed with Resend. We use those addresses only for what you signed up for. We do not sell, rent, or share them, and every message includes an unsubscribe link.

7. Purchases

Payments are processed by Stripe. Your card details go to Stripe and never touch our servers. We receive and keep what we need to sell you software and support you afterwards: your email address, name, country, the amount and currency, and the license key issued to you. We keep purchase records as long as tax and accounting law requires.

On iPhone and iPad, Antinote's one-time unlock is sold through the App Store. Apple processes the payment and we receive no personal information about you — the app only asks the App Store whether the unlock was purchased. The 7-day free trial is tracked on your device alone. The unlock earned through the referral program (section 8) is also granted without any personal information. If you got Antinote through Setapp or the Mac App Store, your purchase relationship is with them and is covered by their privacy policies, not this one.

8. Referral program (iPhone and iPad)

Antinote for iOS lets you share a referral code with friends. When three friends use it, you receive an App Store offer code for the lifetime license, redeemed through the App Store like any other purchase; a friend who uses a code gets seven more days of trial. This is the one feature where the app does keep something on our server, so here is exactly what that is.

What we store: a random six-character code, a secret's hash that lets your own devices prove the code is yours, a count of how many friends have used the code, the time of each use, and, once you claim the reward, which App Store offer code was assigned to your referral code and when. That is the whole record. There is no name, email address, Apple ID, device identifier, IP address or note attached to it, and nothing links one code to another. The offer code is redeemed with Apple, under Apple's privacy policy; we never learn who redeemed it.

What the app sends, and when:

  • When you open Refer friends for the first time — a request to create a code. It carries nothing; the server invents the code and the secret and sends them back.
  • When you use a friend's code — the code, a one-time token from Apple's DeviceCheck service, and whether your copy of the app is a TestFlight or App Store build (DeviceCheck has a separate test environment). If you already have a code of your own, it is sent too, so the server can refuse your own code.
  • When the app checks your count — when you open the Refer friends page, and at most once a day in the background — your code and its secret.
  • When you claim the reward — your code and its secret. The server answers with the offer code and a link that opens it in the App Store.

How "one code per device" works without us knowing your device: the rule is enforced with Apple's DeviceCheck. Apple keeps two bits of state per device for our app; we set one of them when a code is used and read it before accepting another. The DeviceCheck token the app sends can only be read by Apple, it is not stored or logged by us, and Apple never tells us which device it belongs to.

Between your own devices: your code and its secret are kept in your device's Keychain and in your iCloud key-value storage, so the same code and the same count follow you to your other iPhones and iPads. That data moves through your Apple account, under Apple's privacy policy; we never see it. The lifetime license itself, once redeemed, is an App Store purchase tied to your Apple Account like any other.

Retention: referral rows, including the offer-code assignment, are kept indefinitely, because the count and the assignment are what keep your reward and your friends' credit intact. If you would like a code deleted, email johnson@cmdnstudios.com with the code; since nothing ties it to you, quoting the code is how you prove it is yours. Deleting it removes the count and the offer-code assignment; a license already redeemed with Apple is unaffected.

9. Children

Antinote is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

10. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

  • Access the personal information we hold about you
  • Have inaccurate or incomplete information corrected
  • Have your personal information deleted
  • Object to or restrict how we process it
  • Have it transferred to another provider

In practice there is very little to request — we hold your purchase record, your email address if you gave it to us, and a referral code if you quote it to us. Write to johnson@cmdnstudios.com and we will action it.

11. Data security

We keep as little as possible, which is the most reliable protection available. What we do hold is stored with reputable providers under industry-standard safeguards. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. Changes take effect when posted here, and the effective date above is updated. If a change materially affects what we collect, we will say so in the release notes or on our Discord rather than quietly editing this page.

13. Contact