Privacy Policy — Recursive

Short version. The Recursive desktop app sends no telemetry, analytics, or crash reports. Your code, prompts, and work never leave your machine through us. The only data we store is what's strictly required to sell and validate your license: your email, your Stripe purchase details, your license key, and the devices it has been activated on.

1. Who we are

Recursive is a product of Future In Detail LLC, a limited liability company organized in the State of New York, United States. Throughout this policy, "we," "us," and "our" refer to Future In Detail LLC, and "Recursive" refers to the desktop application, the website at recursive.computer, and the license and billing infrastructure that supports them.

For any privacy-related question, you can reach us at [email protected].

2. Scope

This policy covers the Recursive website, the Recursive desktop application, and the licensing and payment systems that support them. It does not cover third-party services you choose to connect to Recursive (for example, Anthropic, OpenAI, GitHub, or any plugin you install) — those services have their own privacy policies, and your use of them is governed by their terms.

3. What the desktop app collects

Nothing. Recursive has no built-in telemetry, usage analytics, or crash reporting. The app does not phone home with information about how you use it, what files you open, what prompts you send, or what code you write. Your work stays on your machine unless you explicitly send it somewhere (for example, by committing to GitHub or by calling an AI provider's API).

The only network traffic initiated by the app itself is:

Periodic license validation against our licensing server (see below).
Update checks against our release server to tell you when a new version is available.
Any request you or an agent explicitly make — for example, calling an AI provider's API with your own API key, or fetching a plugin from a registry you configured.

4. What the website collects

The recursive.computer website has no third-party analytics, no advertising trackers, and no behavioral cookies. We use localStorage on your browser to remember your theme preference (light or dark). That preference stays in your browser and is not transmitted to us.

5. License and purchase data

When you buy a license or subscribe to a paid feature, we process a small amount of personal data so that we can deliver your license key and verify it when you activate the app. Specifically:

Email address — used to deliver your license key, send receipts and renewal notices, and identify your account if you contact support.
Payment details — collected and processed by Stripe. We never see or store your full card number; Stripe returns a customer and subscription identifier that we associate with your license.
License key — a cryptographic identifier tied to your purchase. We store a hash of the key; the key itself is delivered to you by email.
Tier and policy — the product you purchased (for example, Remote Access, Supporter, or Commercial) and the feature set that comes with it.
Device bindings — a machine identifier for each device you activate the license on, the number of activations, and the last time each device checked in. This lets us enforce the per-tier device limit.
Audit log — a 90-day event log of activations, deactivations, and license state changes, used for abuse detection and support.

6. How we use this data

We use the data above only for the following purposes:

Issuing, validating, renewing, and enforcing your license.
Processing payments, refunds, and billing disputes.
Sending transactional emails: welcome, receipts, renewal reminders, payment failures, cancellations.
Detecting and investigating license abuse (for example, a single license activated on dozens of machines).
Responding to your support or privacy requests.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not use it to train machine-learning models.

7. Third-party processors

The following third parties process data on our behalf. Each has been chosen because it is a reputable provider with its own strong privacy commitments:

Stripe (Stripe, Inc.) — payment processing, subscription management, invoices. See the Stripe Privacy Policy.
Resend (Resend, Inc.) — transactional email delivery. See the Resend Privacy Policy.
Cloudflare (Cloudflare, Inc.) — hosting for our licensing server, website, and release artifacts. See the Cloudflare Privacy Policy.

8. How long we keep it

License records are retained for as long as your license exists, plus a reasonable period afterwards to handle renewals, support, disputes, and legal obligations (typically up to seven years for records connected to a financial transaction). Audit log entries are automatically deleted after 90 days. If you ask us to delete your data, we will do so to the extent we are not required to keep it for tax, accounting, or fraud-prevention reasons.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete the personal data we hold about you, and to object to or restrict how we use it. To exercise any of these rights, email [email protected] from the address associated with your license. We will respond within 30 days.

You may cancel your subscription at any time from your Stripe customer portal. Cancelling a subscription stops future billing and, at the end of the current term, disables the paid features tied to the subscription.

10. Children

Recursive is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we will delete it.

11. International users

Recursive is operated from the United States. If you use Recursive from outside the United States, you understand that your data may be transferred to, stored in, and processed in the United States and other countries where our processors operate.

12. Security

We take reasonable measures to protect the data we store. License keys are hashed at rest. Administrative access to the licensing infrastructure is protected by passkey authentication. Stripe webhook payloads are cryptographically verified before being trusted. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach ever affects your data, we will notify you as required by law.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. If we make a material change, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, notify you by email. Continued use of Recursive after a change means you accept the updated policy.

14. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about how we handle your data, can be sent to [email protected].