The database lives on your machine.

What gets captured, and where it lands.

A meeting starts. Seriesly's menu-bar daemon detects the Zoom or Google Meet window and asks you, the first time, whether to listen. If you say yes — and only if you say yes, with a one-click skip for any meeting you'd rather it sit out — the audio is captured through macOS's standard audio frameworks and written to a temporary file on your disk.

You are responsible for complying with any applicable recording-consent laws and for notifying the other participants in your meetings where required. Several US states (including California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington) require all parties on a call to consent before it can be recorded. Seriesly does not announce itself to other participants; that's your call to make.

A local speech model transcribes that file. The transcript and the recording are written to a SQLite database in your Application Support folder, where your disk encryption is the layer protecting it at rest. Everything after that — the briefs, the open loops, the topic pages — is computed on your machine from that database, sometimes ahead of time so it's ready when you need it.

Your meeting database lives on your disk, not ours; there is no Seriesly server holding transcripts at rest. When the app needs a model to draft a brief or answer a question, the relevant slice — excerpts, names, action items — passes through our proxy to Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google. The proxy logs request traffic on our side for debugging and abuse prevention, and the providers handle the call under their own logging and retention policies (each publishes its own). If that's tighter than you can tolerate, the bring-your-own-key option in settings sends the call directly from your machine to the provider on your account — we do not see it, and nothing about that request lives on Seriesly infrastructure.

Seriesly is for adults: you must be at least 18 to use the app. If you are buying it for a team, the same applies to every seat.

The file is yours to take.

The database is a single SQLite file. You can open it with the standard tooling — DB Browser, the sqlite3 CLI, anything that speaks the format. You can copy it to a backup disk. You can move it to a new Mac when you upgrade. Weekly digests and team pulses export to plain Markdown from inside the app; the rest you can pull straight from the database.

This matters because most software in this category treats your meetings as their data, not yours. We do not. The way you leave Seriesly is by quitting it; your years of meeting memory leave with you.

What Paddle sees, and we do not.

When you subscribe, you're paying Paddle — not Seriesly directly. Paddle is our merchant of record: they handle the card processing, the VAT and sales tax for your jurisdiction, and the receipt that lands in your inbox. We see the outcome of that transaction, not the transaction itself.

What Paddle sees is the usual checkout payload: your name, the email you bought under, your billing address, the payment method you chose, and the country code that decides your tax rate. They never see meeting content, transcripts, calendars, or anything that lives inside the app. Paddle stores this in their EU and US data centers; cross-border transfers between those jurisdictions are governed by Standard Contractual Clauses. Their own privacy policy at paddle.com/legal governs that side of the deal.

What Seriesly sees, on our side.

When you subscribe, you sign in with Apple or Google inside the app. Paddle handles the transaction; we store the email address that identity provider hands us and a record of your active subscription. We send you release notes when there's a release. That is the extent of the relationship.

The app periodically checks that your subscription is still active. The check uses your signed-in session and the version of the app you're running — no meeting content, never.

We don't run analytics on what you do inside the app, because the only place to run them would be your machine, and we'd rather respect the quiet. This site sets no cookies; Paddle's checkout overlay may set its own — see paddle.com/legal.

Sign-in email addresses and the subscription records tied to them are kept for the life of the subscription plus seven years for tax records, then deleted. Meeting databases are not retained by us — they live on your disk, never on ours. If a confirmed breach ever touches the small pile of information we do hold, we'll email affected users within 72 hours.

Your rights, same shape on both sides.

GDPR if you're in Europe, CCPA if you're in California. The shape is the same and we honor both. You can ask what we know about you and we will send back a copy — for us that is the email tied to your sign-in and a record of your subscription state, which is most of what there is.

You can ask us to delete your account. We erase the license record thirty days after the request, once the refund window has closed. Portability barely applies in our case: your meeting database already lives on your disk, in a file format anyone can open. There is nothing for us to export to you that you do not already have.

If you believe we've handled your data badly and we can't sort it out between us, you can complain to your local supervisory authority in the EU or to the California Attorney General's office. For anything in this essay — access, deletion, complaint, or a plain question — write to support@series-ly.com.