HomunculusPrivacy
Your notes stay yours
Homunculus has no accounts and no servers that hold your notes. Here's exactly what leaves your Mac, and when.
Last updated November 6, 2026.
On your Mac
Your notes are ordinary files in the folder you chose. Homunculus keeps that vault's settings, layout and caches in a hidden .homunculus folder inside it, and its own settings, including your API keys and a log of what each AI call cost, in the app's settings folder on your Mac.
The app has no analytics, no telemetry and no crash reporting. Nothing about how you use it is sent to us.
What goes to your AI provider
When you chat, your messages, and whatever the assistant reads to answer them (notes, PDF pages, images, the results of its tools), go to the provider the assistant uses, Anthropic or OpenAI, with your own API key. That provider's own privacy terms apply to it.
A few features also ask the provider on their own:
- A new chat is named from its first exchange.
- Images you add to the vault are named and described so search can find them. Settings → Media → Pause image caching stops it.
- An assistant that has
web_searchorweb_fetchasks Anthropic to search or read web pages for it.
What stays on device
- Voice dictation runs on your Mac with Whisper. The model is downloaded once from Hugging Face; your audio never leaves the Mac.
- Finding similar notes uses embeddings computed on your Mac, with a model cached inside the vault.
- Search, links, databases, flashcards and undo are all local.
Updates and downloads
The app checks downloads.gethomunculus.com shortly after launch and every four hours for a newer version, and downloads it from there. The request carries nothing about you or your notes. Like any web server, it sees the address it was asked from.
Your phone
Phone access is off until you turn it on. When it's on, your Mac serves the app to your own devices over Tailscale, a private network only they can join. Nothing passes through us. API keys stay on the Mac and are never sent to a phone.
This website
No cookies, no analytics, no ads, and no fonts or scripts from anyone else. The only thing it stores is your light or dark choice, in your own browser. The download button reads the version from the same update feed the app uses.