What Quay collects, what it doesn't.

Short version

• Your queries, schemas, and database contents never leave your machine. Quay is a desktop app — every database connection runs locally over your own network.
• We don't run analytics, telemetry, or usage tracking inside the app. Zero phone-home for behavior.
• If you buy a paid plan, our license server records the bare minimum needed to verify your subscription: license id, device fingerprint, and tier. No queries, no schemas, no contents.
• Payment, billing, and tax handling are run by Polar as merchant of record. Their privacy policy applies to anything billing-related.

What Quay collects

Free tier

Nothing. The Free build of Quay does not contact any Quay-controlled server. Marketing-site visits and feedback submissions are the only points where your information could reach us, and both are explicit user actions.

Paid tiers (Pro, Pro Plus)

When you activate a license, the app sends one request to license.quay.uncle-z.com containing:

• Your license key (the one we emailed when you bought)
• A device fingerprint — SHA-256 hash of your hostname, OS family, and a stable hardware UUID. This is irreversible; we cannot recover the original values from the hash.
• A device name you chose at activation, so you can identify it in the device list

Once activated, the app re-checks the license periodically (no more than once every 7 days when active). If our server is unreachable, the cached activation token stays valid for 30 days so an outage on our side doesn't block your work.

Marketing site (this page)

Standard server access logs only — IP, user agent, page path, timestamp. No analytics scripts, no third-party trackers, no cookies set by us. The waitlist form, when used, transmits the email you typed to our ingest service.

What we explicitly never collect

• Database queries, schemas, table or column names, or row contents
• Connection strings, credentials, or SSH keys
• Files you back up, restore, or import
• Click streams, mouse movement, or session recording
• Crash reports — Quay does not auto-report crashes anywhere. If you want to send us a bug, the in-app feedback form posts only what you type.

AI features (Pro Plus, opt-in)

If you enable the AI assistant on Pro Plus and configure your own API key (OpenAI, Anthropic, Ollama, etc.), the queries you send to it leave your machine to whichever provider you chose. Quay does not see those queries, does not log them, does not relay them through our servers. The AI feature is off by default and ships with non-AI deterministic fallbacks for everything it touches.

Third parties we use

• Polar — merchant of record for payments. Sees your billing information; does not see anything inside Quay.
• payment.uncle-z.com gateway — thin signing proxy between Quay and Polar. Holds the Polar API key so it isn't shipped in the desktop binary; sees the same checkout fields Polar does.
• SMTP from quay@uncle-z.com — sends license keys and account emails. We host this ourselves; no third-party email vendor reads your account mail.

Your rights

You can export, correct, or delete the personal data we have about you (basically: your license + device list) at any time by emailing quay@uncle-z.com. We respond within 30 days. Account deletion irreversibly removes your license and all associated device fingerprints from our database.

Contact

Privacy questions: quay@uncle-z.com.