FrameDrop
Privacy policy.
The short version
FrameDrop has no accounts, no logins, and no analytics. The website is a static page. The only thing it records is an anonymous count of clicks on Download and Buy License, with no IP address, cookie or identifier attached. The app keeps its settings on your Mac and sends your search text to our server for one reason: to answer it.
What we do not collect
The app and website do not ask you to create an account or provide a name, email address or password. The site sets no cookies and loads no fonts or trackers, and the free trial asks for no payment details. Lemon Squeezy handles checkout and collects your contact and payment details. It makes purchase records, including customer names and email addresses, available to us for licence and billing support. We do not receive your full card details. Licence API responses can also include customer details; the app and licence gate do not persist those fields.
On your Mac
The app keeps its state in the standard macOS places:
- Preferences (
~/Library/Preferences/com.zahide4.framedrop.plist): settings, the trial start date, the panel position and your summon shortcut. - Keychain: your licence key and activation instance, once you enter one.
- ~/Library/Application Support/FrameDrop: the preview and thumbnail cache (capped at 2 GB and kept under it automatically) and images you grabbed to the shelf.
- The app's cache folder under ~/Library/Caches: the web cache for thumbnails (up to 128 MB).
- The system temp folder: files written for a drag export, while that drag is in flight.
Your preferences, shelf and image caches stay on your Mac. Your licence key and activation instance are sent for validation as described below. Deleting the app removes the app itself but not all of these: preferences, keychain items and caches are standard macOS locations that survive deletion. To remove everything too, quit FrameDrop, delete it, then remove ~/Library/Preferences/com.zahide4.framedrop.plist and ~/Library/Application Support/FrameDrop, clear the app's folder in ~/Library/Caches, and delete the "com.zahide4.framedrop.license" item in Keychain Access.
Trials and licences
To run the free trial and check licences, the app opens a short-lived session with our server at launch and before each search. That request carries a device fingerprint: a SHA-256 hash with a fixed app-specific prefix of your Mac's hardware ID, falling back to its name. The raw hardware ID never leaves your Mac, and the hash cannot be turned back into it. If you have activated a licence, the request also carries your key and activation instance.
Our server stores the device hash, the date that device's trial began, and the licence verdicts it receives from our payment provider, cached for a few hours (licence keys themselves are stored only as one-way hashes). Search requests carry the query, filters, a shared app key and a signed session token containing a shortened device hash, access type and expiry. When you first activate a key, the app also sends it, together with a readable machine label (your Mac's name and the first eight characters of its hardware ID), directly to Lemon Squeezy, our payment provider.
Search queries
Each search sends the query text, a result count and the licence filter to our server. Queries carry no account and no identifier beyond the device session token. Ordinary queries are not logged or stored; they live only in short-lived memory caches, and the licence gate every search passes through never records query text. One exception: a query refused by the adult-content gate is written to the server log with its text, so false blocks can be found and fixed. If a query of yours was wrongly refused, email us and quote it.
Third parties that necessarily see requests
- Hetzner hosts the search API, the licence gate and the release downloads.
- Lemon Squeezy processes purchases, issues licence keys and validates them; their checkout collects your email and payment details under their own privacy policy.
- Thumbnails load through the wsrv.nl image proxy or from the Wikimedia Commons CDN; copying or dragging an image fetches the full original from its source host.
- Vercel serves this website.
Those servers see a normal web request, including your IP address, the same as any site you visit. Our release access logs drop client IP addresses and headers, and release and update requests are counted without them. The licence gate uses client IP addresses in temporary in-memory rate limits to prevent abuse. We do not sell personal data or share it with advertisers or data brokers.
Your rights
We hold device trial records, hashed licence-validation cache entries and any support correspondence you send us; purchase records are also available through Lemon Squeezy. To ask for access to or deletion of data associated with you, write to fent.zahid@gmail.com and we will provide or delete what we can reasonably identify.
Children
FrameDrop is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. The image corpus is filtered but not guaranteed clean, so supervision is advised.
Changes
This revision clarifies purchase records, licence validation and abuse prevention. If this policy changes in a way that matters, the effective date above will move and the change will be described here. Continued use after that point means you accept the new version.