Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-05-25 · Kerr & Company LLC, Grand Rapids, MI

Outlier is a Mac-native local AI app. The privacy story is short because the design choice is to keep things on your Mac unless you opt in.

What never leaves your Mac

Your prompts, chat history, memory, personas, projects, and uploaded files.
Anything Outlier's local models generate. Inference runs on Apple Silicon via MLX, on-device.
License keys after activation. Stored at ~/.outlier/license.json with 0600 perms.
Bug reports created via Help & Diagnostics. Saved to ~/.outlier/bug_reports/ locally. You decide whether to email them.

What does leave your Mac (only when you opt in)

Model downloads from HuggingFace — when you activate a tier for the first time, the weights download from huggingface.co/Outlier-Ai. HuggingFace sees your IP and which repo you fetched. No prompts, no chats, no model output is sent. After the download, the model runs locally forever.
Cloud API providers (OpenAI / Anthropic / OpenAI-compatible) — only when you explicitly switch to a cloud model in the picker AND provide your own API key. Your prompts and conversation history are sent to that provider per their terms. Your API key is stored locally; we never see it.
Web search — only when you toggle 🌐 search on for a turn. Sends your search query (not your full prompt history) to DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, and Wikipedia (and, during Deep Research only, additionally Crossref, OpenAlex, StackExchange, and Hacker News / Algolia). Results are then fed back into the local model.
App update check — Outlier periodically polls a public GitHub URL for new release metadata. HTTP GET only. Update payloads are cryptographically signed (minisign) and verified before install.
Founders / Pro license activation — when you paste your Polar license key into Settings → license, the key is sent to api.polar.sh (Polar's customer-portal endpoint) to verify your tier, along with a device label (your Mac's hostname plus a short random install id) so you can tell your activated devices apart in the customer portal. No prompts, files, or usage data leave your Mac during activation.

All of the above are surfaced in the in-app Privacy Ledger (Settings → Privacy → Privacy ledger). The list there is generated from the literal fetch() call sites in the source.

What Outlier does NOT do

No inference telemetry. We do not log your prompts, model outputs, or which questions you ask.
No analytics SDK in the desktop app. (The marketing site at outlier.host uses Plausible for anonymous pageview counts only — no cookies, no IP storage, no cross-site tracking.)
No account required to use Free Nano + Lite or BYOK cloud.
No automatic crash reporting. Crash logs are saved locally to ~/.outlier/crashes/. You decide whether to email them via the Bug Report flow.
No reading your filesystem outside what you explicitly mount as a Project, attach as a file, or grant via macOS file/screen permissions.

Payments

Paid tiers (Pro $20/mo, $149/yr, Founding $99 / Founders $200 lifetime) are processed by Polar. Polar handles payment, license issuance, and customer portal. We do not see or store your payment method. Refund requests within 14 days: email matt@outlier.host.

Children

Outlier is not directed at children under 13.

Changes

If we change this policy materially, we will note the change at the top of this page and bump the "Last updated" date. We won't make a change that suddenly enables cloud telemetry on existing installs.

Contact

Questions: matt@outlier.host

This policy is plain English. If a lawyer reading it tells you something is missing, email and I'll add it.