Privacy policy

Steerwell is built so that your research never reaches us. This policy says what personal data we do process, why, and who else is involved. It follows the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection and, where it applies, the EU's General Data Protection Regulation.

1. Who is responsible

Black Ueli GmbH, An der hohlen Gasse 23, 4058 Basel, Switzerland (UID CHE-365.774.580). Contact for anything about privacy: contact@black-ueli.ch.

2. What never reaches us

Your Workspaces, recordings, transcripts, notes, findings, survey data, reports and your participants' names stay on your Mac and in the folder you choose (which may be a drive your organisation syncs). Steerwell sends none of it to us and has no telemetry, analytics or crash reporting. Recordings are transcribed on your Mac.

Steerwell connects to the internet only:

• to check your licence with our server (section 3);
• to download the transcription model once, from Hugging Face, when you first transcribe;
• to install R packages you or your agent ask for, from CRAN;
• when you ask it to install an agent: the agent's own installer then downloads it from its maker;
• when you choose a transcription service with your own API key: then the recording goes to that service, under your agreement with it.

The agent you run in Steerwell (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI or another) is your own program under your own account. What it reads and sends to its maker is governed by your agreement with that maker, not by us.

3. Your licence

To run the trial and the subscriptions, our licence server at licence.steerwell.ch keeps:

• your e-mail address, and the name on your seat if one is given;
• an id for each Mac you sign in on: a one-way hash of the Mac's hardware id, which says nothing about the Mac or you by itself;
• when your trial ends on each Mac and, for a seat, when each Mac signed in, when it was last online and which Macs were signed out;
• for a subscription: Paddle's ids for it and for the buyer, the buyer's e-mail address, the price, the number of seats, until when it is paid, and whether a payment is being retried;
• which addresses have a seat on which subscription, and since when.

A sign-in link is kept, only as a hash, for an hour; a sign-in to the seats page for a day, in one cookie that does nothing else. The server keeps no IP addresses and no logs. To deliver requests and to limit sign-in attempts, Cloudflare handles your IP address for the moment of the request.

We use these data only to give you the trial and the licence you paid for, to show the buyer who has their seats, and to send the e-mails below (legal basis: the performance of our contract with you). We keep them while you use Steerwell. Write to us and we delete them, which ends your seat on your Macs; we keep only your address with the end of each trial and the Mac's id, so that a trial isn't started again.

4. E-mail

We send e-mails only when you ask for them, or when someone gives you a seat: sign-in links, and the notice that you have a seat. They come from hello@steerwell.ch, through our mail provider Hostpoint in Switzerland. Replies reach us at the same address. We send no newsletters.

5. Payments

Paddle, our reseller, handles the checkout, the payment, VAT and invoices, as a controller in its own right under Paddle's privacy policy. Your card and billing details go to Paddle, never to us. Paddle tells our server about each subscription and the buyer's e-mail address (section 3). Paddle's records of each sale are also our accounting records, which we keep as long as Swiss law requires (10 years).

6. This website

The site sets no cookies, has no analytics and loads nothing from other sites. It and the download are hosted by Cloudflare, which handles your IP address to deliver them.

7. Who else processes data for us

• Cloudflare (USA): runs our licence server and its database, and hosts this site and the download.
• Hostpoint (Switzerland): sends and receives our e-mail.

They process the data only on our behalf. Where data reach the USA, this happens under the Swiss-US and EU-US Data Privacy Frameworks or the standard contractual clauses.

8. Your rights

You can ask us what data we have about you, and have them corrected, deleted or handed over, and you can object to how we use them. Write to contact@black-ueli.ch. You can also complain to the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC) or, in the EU, to the authority where you live.

9. Changes

When what Steerwell does with personal data changes, we change this policy, say so here with the date, and tell buyers by e-mail.