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perch

Privacy policy

Last updated November 13, 2026.

perch is a free, open-source app made by maybenat. The short version: perch doesn’t collect anything about you. There’s no account, no analytics, no tracking and no crash reporting. Everything it shows comes from your own Mac, and stays there. (This website counts visits, without cookies: see The website.)

The code is public, so you can check every line of this.

On your Mac

Section titled “On your Mac”

perch runs on your Mac and listens only to your Mac (127.0.0.1). It reads:

  • Claude Code’s own files for each running session: its small status record and its conversation, to show you what it’s doing. It never reads Claude Code’s login or key files.
  • For Codex: its session files, and Codex’s own background service on your Mac, which it asks which sessions are open. It never reads Codex’s login file.
  • The helper agents you’ve set up (agents folders), to list them.
  • Each project’s git remote, to match sessions to pull requests.
  • Your pull requests, through the GitHub CLI (gh) and your own GitHub login.

It keeps a few small files of its own in ~/.switchpath, readable only by you: your settings, your paired phones’ public keys, the sessions open in the last two weeks (so it can offer to reopen them), names you give sessions, images you paste into a reply, your tasks, and a log of when phones connected to a terminal (never what was typed or shown).

It changes files only when you ask it to: a file you open and save with ⌘O, a permission rule you add, turning on “answer prompts here” (a hook in Claude Code’s settings), or turning on “agents can add tasks” (a short note in each account’s CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, and a rule letting Claude Code write to the tasks folder). It keeps a copy of each file as it was, and turning these off takes them out.

When it’s open, perch connects to:

  • GitHub, through gh, for your pull requests.
  • Anthropic, only through Claude Code itself: to show your plan usage, perch runs claude -p /usage, as you would.
  • The relay, if you’ve paired an iPhone (see below).

Its fonts are built in, so opening it doesn’t contact a font service or anyone else.

Your iPhone and the relay

Section titled “Your iPhone and the relay”

Your phone and your Mac talk end to end encrypted, with keys made on the two devices. Nobody in between can read what they say, including us.

When your phone isn’t on the same Wi-Fi as your Mac, messages pass through a relay that perch runs (hosted on Railway). The relay:

  • forwards sealed messages it can’t open, and stores nothing;
  • uses connections’ IP addresses, in memory, to limit abuse (how many messages one address can send), and forgets them;
  • may appear in the hosting provider’s standard network logs, like any website.

You can run your own relay instead. Its code is in the repository.

On the phone itself. The camera is used only to scan the pairing code your Mac shows; no picture is kept or sent anywhere. Face ID (or your passcode) is checked by iOS before a terminal opens, and perch only learns yes or no. The keys that pair your phone and Mac are kept in the iPhone’s Keychain. The demo you can try without a Mac runs entirely on the phone, with made-up data.

Notifications. When something needs you, your Mac asks the relay to send your phone a notification. It always says the same thing, “Something needs you in perch”, with nothing about your sessions in it. It goes through Expo’s push service and Apple’s, which see your phone’s notification token, as with any app that sends notifications.

The website

Section titled “The website”

This website counts visits with Vercel Web Analytics: which pages are viewed, the referring site, and the country and device type, in aggregate. It sets no cookies and keeps nothing that identifies you. There are no other trackers, and it serves its own fonts. If you type a name into the prompt at the top of the home page, it’s kept in your own browser only. The site is hosted on Vercel, which keeps standard server logs, like any host.

Children

Section titled “Children”

perch is a tool for developers and isn’t directed at children.

Changes and questions

Section titled “Changes and questions”

If this ever changes, this page will say so first, with a new date at the top. A paid plan for using perch away from home may come later, and if it does, it’ll be described here before it starts.

Questions: open an issue on GitHub. Security problems: please report them privately.