Privacy

Last updated November 7, 2026

Pane is a window manager that runs on your Mac. It doesn’t have accounts, ads or analytics, and it never records your screen. This page lists everything that does leave your Mac, and what trypane.app keeps when you visit, start a trial or buy.

Pane is made by Alan Daniel (“we”, “us”). Questions about this page go to support@trypane.app.

The short version

• Your windows stay on your Mac. Pane needs the Accessibility permission to move and resize windows. What it sees through it (which apps are open, window titles, where windows are) is used on your Mac and never sent anywhere. Pane doesn’t ask for Screen Recording.
• Three things go over the network from the app on their own: your license key being checked, the check for updates, and crash reports. A fourth, feedback, only when you write it and press Send. Each is described below, with what it sends.
• The site has no ad pixels or third-party analytics. A first-party session cookie may remember how you arrived (the path, campaign parameters, and the referring site’s host) so a trial or purchase can be attributed.
• We don’t sell or share data with anyone for advertising.

What stays on your Mac

• Your canvas. Where each window sits, your stacks and their names, and the zoom are saved in Pane’s preferences, keyed by app name and window title, so a relaunch puts everything back. An expired trial does not delete this.
• Your license key, in your Mac’s Keychain.
• Your settings and shortcuts, in Pane’s preferences.

What Pane sends

License activation (to Polar)

Polar (polar.sh) sells Pane for us and issues license keys, including the 3-day trial key. When you paste a key, Pane sends Polar:

• the key;
• your Mac’s name (for example “Alan’s MacBook Pro”), as the label for this activation, so you can tell your Macs apart when you manage them;
• your Mac’s model identifier (for example Mac16,1) and macOS version;
• a one-way hash of your Mac’s hardware identifier, so the activation only works on this Mac. The identifier itself never leaves your Mac.

Each time Pane opens it asks Polar whether the key is still valid (the key, the activation and the same hash). Polar answers that a trial key has expired the same way it answers for any expired key; Pane then asks you to buy and does not treat the key as valid. Deactivating a Mac removes its activation. Polar’s handling of this data is covered by Polar’s privacy policy.

Update checks (to download.trypane.app)

Every few hours Pane asks download.trypane.app whether a new version is out, and downloads it when there is one. Your Mac’s IP address reaches our server, as it does for any request. We don’t store it. We count requests by Pane version and country, alongside a hash made from the IP address, the date and a secret: it tells us how many different Macs checked on a given day, and can’t link a Mac from one day to the next. Downloading Pane from this site is counted the same way.

Crash reports (to api.trypane.app)

If Pane crashes, macOS writes a crash report on your Mac. The next time Pane opens, it sends us reports written since the last time, so we can fix what went wrong. A report contains Pane’s version, your macOS version and Mac model, and technical detail about the crash: what each part of Pane was doing, and which system libraries were loaded. It doesn’t contain your windows’ contents or titles. Before sending, Pane replaces your user name and home folder with USER.

Reports are stored with Cloudflare and kept for as long as they help fix bugs, and no longer than 12 months. To stop sending them, run this in Terminal:

defaults write dev.alan.pane sendCrashReports -bool NO

Feedback (to api.trypane.app)

Pane’s menu has Send Feedback. Nothing is sent unless you write something and press Send. We then get what you wrote, your email address if you chose to give one, your Pane and macOS versions, and the country the request came from. It doesn’t include your windows or their titles, and your IP address isn’t stored.

Messages are stored with Cloudflare, so we can read and answer them, and kept for no longer than 24 months. Ask us at support@trypane.app to delete yours.

Buying Pane, and the free trial

Polar is the merchant of record: it takes your payment (when you buy), handles sales tax and VAT, and emails your receipt and license key. Polar collects your name, email address, billing country and payment details; we never see your card number. A trial does not collect a card.

We receive your email address, name, country and order, so we can help with your purchase or trial license. When you start a checkout or a trial, trypane.app passes your IP address to Polar to work out the right tax (on paid orders) and to prevent fraud.

The 3-day trial asks only for an email address. Polar creates a $0 order, issues a license key that expires three days after it is issued, and emails the key. If you already have a trial or a paid key on that email, we look that up in Polar instead of creating another.

When you buy Pane or start a trial, we add your email address and name to our mailing list at Resend (resend.com), so we can send you news about Pane, such as new versions and offers. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing stops them all; you can also ask us at support@trypane.app to remove you. Receipts and license keys come from Polar and aren’t affected. Resend’s handling of this data is covered by Resend’s privacy policy.

Campaign attribution

On the first page of a visit, trypane.app stores a first-party session cookie named pane_attr with: the path you landed on (landing_path — the path only, not the query string); campaign parameters when the URL has them (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term, ref); and, when the browser sent a Referer that isn’t trypane.app, that host only (for example t.co — never the full URL). The cookie lasts for the browser session, is shared across trypane.app and www.trypane.app, and is not sent to third parties.

When you start a paid checkout or request a trial key, those fields are copied onto the Polar order as metadata so we can see which channel a purchase or trial came from. If the URL had no campaign source, the metadata source is the referring host, or direct. There are no third-party pixels, advertising SDKs or ad trackers on this site or in the app.

trypane.app

• The site sets no cookies of its own except the pane_attr session cookie above, and Cloudflare’s Turnstile challenge cookie when a form needs to tell a person from a script (the trial).
• It runs on Cloudflare, which processes each request (including your IP address) to deliver the page and protect the site, and keeps short-lived request logs we can use to find errors.
• If you joined the waitlist before launch, we kept your email address only to tell you when Pane was available. Ask and we’ll delete it.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, to correct it, or to delete it, by writing to support@trypane.app. Depending on where you live (for example under the GDPR or California’s CCPA) you have further rights, including complaining to your data-protection authority. We answer within 30 days.

Pane isn’t directed at children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If Pane starts sending something new, this page will say so before the version that does it ships, and the date at the top will change.