Privacy, Terms & Refunds

Last updated: October 13, 2026

Crest, Take and Minutes are Mac apps made by one independent developer and sold at crestnotch.app. This page says what the apps and this website collect, the terms of using them, how payment works, and how refunds work. Questions? Email contact@crestnotch.app.

Privacy Policy

What the apps do on your Mac

Everything the apps do runs on your Mac. Crest's widgets, Take's recordings and Minutes' audio, transcripts and summaries stay there, except Authenticator codes you choose to sync, which travel end-to-end encrypted as described below. On their own, the apps report only a few anonymous counts, all described below, and the "Share anonymous install count" switch in each app's settings turns them all off. Crest's update check says which tier it is on and whether its agent hooks are on, plus what became of the Authenticator card and whether it was installed with Homebrew. Versions before 6.5.1 also say whether the day-3 Pro reminder was shown. From 6.5.3, Crest also counts which Crest Pro and free week offers it showed you and which ones you pressed, with no install id, account or email attached. Crest also asks once how you found it, and sends your answer only if you give one.

The apps go online to sign you in, start a trial or a purchase, check the licence every few days and look for updates. Crest also asks our server twice a day whether a sale is on.

A few features fetch what they show straight from the source, only for the widgets you use, and none of it passes through us:

• Lyrics in Crest come from LRCLIB, which gets the song's title and artist.
• Weather in Crest comes from Open-Meteo for your rough location, looked up from your IP address by ipwho.is (or GeoJS if that fails). If you pick a place instead, Open-Meteo looks up the name you type.
• Pull requests in Crest come from GitHub, with the token you add.
• Album art for a song playing in Spotify comes from Spotify.
• Claude in Crest goes through Claude Code and your own Claude account.
• The multilingual engine in Minutes, if you choose it, is a one-time model download of about 600 MB from Hugging Face.

What we collect

• Your email, when you give it. Downloading an app and using Crest's free tier need no account. We store your email when you create an account, start a free trial or buy. It is where your licence lives, and we use it for your activation link, sign-in and password emails, receipts, trial reminders, and now and then news about the apps or an offer.
• Your password, as a salted hash. We never store the password itself. If you sign in with Google or Apple instead, we store the account id and the email that Google or Apple shares with us.
• A device identifier. When you start a trial or activate a licence, the app sends your Mac's hardware identifier. It is how a trial stays one per Mac and how the 2-Mac limit works, and it is used for nothing else.
• An anonymous install count. When an app checks for updates, it sends a random install id that it made up the first time it ran. We use it only to count how many Macs use each app. It is not linked to your account, your email or your licence, and it says nothing about what you do in the app. With each check we also keep the app's name and version and a one-way hash of the check's IP address, never the address itself. Crest's check also says whether it is on the free tier, the free week, after the free week, or Pro, whether its coding-agent hooks are installed, what became of the Authenticator card (shown, added to a page, or put away), and whether Crest was installed with Homebrew (it checks only whether Homebrew's Crest folder exists), so we can count Macs in each group. When you buy from inside a Crest installed with Homebrew, the purchase notes that too, so we can count sales that started there. Versions before 6.5.1 also say whether the day-3 Pro reminder was shown, and pass that answer to the Pro checkout. From Crest 6.5.3, the app also tells us when Crest shows you a Crest Pro or free week offer (at most once a day per offer) and when you press one: which offer, which plan you picked, whether you are on the free tier, the free week, after it, or Pro, and roughly how long ago Crest was installed. We keep those words with the time and the country the request came from. They carry no install id, account or email, and we never match them to you. The same switch stops them. To stop sending the id and these words, turn off "Share anonymous install count" in the app's settings. Updates keep working either way.
• How you found us, if you say. Once, after Crest Pro or its free week starts on a Mac, Crest asks "How did you find Crest?". If you answer, we keep your answer, and any words you type for Other, with your account's email, so we can see what brings people to Crest and count each person once. Choose Not now and nothing is sent. The thank-you page after you buy on our site asks the same question and keeps that answer with the payment's transaction id, never your email.
• Download counts. When you download an app, the site records which app, your country, the site that sent you, the first page you landed on here, the page you downloaded from and which version of it you saw. Each download gets a random id, so we can tell a download that reached a Mac from one that did not. When the file reaches a Mac, we keep a one-way hash of your IP address that changes every day, to see whether a free trial started from the same connection within two days, and we delete it after three days. Your email is added only if you are signed in.
• The link you email yourself. If you ask for the download link by email from your phone, we use your address once to send that one email, keep only a one-way hash of it for three days to stop the form being abused, then delete it, and never add you to a list.
• Payment details stay with the payment company. We never see or store your card, PayPal or wallet details. We receive your email, what you bought, the amount, your country and which version of our page you saw.

Authenticator sync

If you turn on sync in the Authenticator, your codes are encrypted on your Mac before they leave it, and only your Macs and your recovery key can open them. Our sync server never sees your 2FA secrets, your codes, the names of the sites and accounts they belong to, your notes, the names you gave your Macs, or your recovery key. It knows your account by a random id, not by your email address.

What it stores and can see: your encrypted codes, how many you have and their rough size; when each one was added, changed, moved to Recently deleted or deleted, and which of your Macs deleted it; your Macs' public keys, the public half of your recovery key, and when each Mac was added or removed; and when your Macs sync. A deleted code leaves a small record for 365 days, so a Mac that comes back after a long time can't bring it back. While you approve a new Mac, the server holds the kind of Mac asking (for example "MacBook Air") for about an hour and a half, or until the email telling you about it is sent if that takes longer. It counts recovery attempts, approval requests and resets, and keeps those counts for 2 days. Some request records are kept for up to 7 days so that a request sent twice is only applied once. Cloudflare, which runs the server, keeps each request's IP address, time, app version and Mac id in its logs for up to 7 days. What a request carried is never logged.

We email you when a Mac is added to your codes, when your recovery key is used, and when a reset of your codes is requested, cancelled or done. The sync server keeps a record of each of these emails, with your address partly hidden, for 90 days.

Turning off sync on a Mac removes that Mac from sync. Your encrypted codes stay on our server for your other Macs and your recovery key. A reset by email deletes your encrypted codes, your Macs' keys and your sync history from the server, 72 hours after we email you a link to cancel it. We keep a record that the reset happened for 90 days, then delete it. If you ask us to delete your Crest account, we delete your synced codes from the server too.

Measuring this website

Beyond the anonymous counts described above, the apps measure nothing. This website does, so we can see which pages help people and where they get stuck.

• Microsoft Clarity records how visitors use the pages: clicks, scrolling and page views, which it can play back as a session recording. It sets its own cookies. Microsoft's privacy statement covers what it does with that data.
• Cloudflare Web Analytics counts page views and load times. It uses no cookies and does not identify you.
• Paddle's checkout loads its own scripts when a page offers a purchase, including ProfitWell, Paddle's own tool.
• Our own page count. Each page you open tells our server which page it was, the site that sent you, whether you are on a Mac, and which version of the page you saw. No cookie, id or IP address is kept with it.
• Trying two versions of a page. Some visitors see a slightly different version of a page so we can learn which one works better. Only which version you saw is stored, in your browser.
• Where a sign-in from the app started. When you sign in from the app, your browser passes along which page or link first brought you to crestnotch.app and your most recent download from it, so we can see which pages lead to trials. It is stored with your account and never shared.
• Our own download steps. The download window tells our server each step it reaches (it opened, the download started, where it was closed), with the app, the page, the site that sent you, your country and which version of the page you saw. No email, cookie or IP address is kept with those steps.
• Google Ads. If you reach us from one of our Google ads and you are outside the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, we keep the ad's click ID with your download and, if you sign up, with your account. We use it to tell Google Ads which clicks led to a download, a trial or a purchase, and what the purchase was worth. We share only the click ID, the step, its time and the amount, never your name or email. Outside the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, pages also load Google's ad tag, which can set Google cookies to recognise a visit that came from an ad. Inside those places it is not loaded at all, and the account and sign-up pages never load it.

How to opt out: a content blocker that blocks clarity.ms, cloudflareinsights.com, profitwell.com and googletagmanager.com stops those four services, and every part of this site keeps working, downloads and the checkout included. You can also ask us to delete what we hold about you (see below).

Who handles your data

We don't sell or rent your data. It is shared only with the services that run the business: Cloudflare hosts this site and stores accounts, licences and download counts; Resend sends our emails; Paddle and NOWPayments take payments; Microsoft Clarity and Cloudflare Web Analytics measure the website; Google Ads receives the click ID and steps described above and, outside the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, the visits its tag measures.

The apps also reach LRCLIB, Open-Meteo, ipwho.is or GeoJS, GitHub, Spotify and Hugging Face straight from your Mac, and the AI service you set up, only when you use the feature that needs them (see above). We receive nothing from those requests.

Your choices

Want your email off our list, a copy of what we hold, or your account deleted? Email contact@crestnotch.app from that address and it gets done by hand.

Payments and prices

• Card, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay are processed by Paddle, our reseller and merchant of record. Paddle is the seller on your receipt, charges the tax your country requires, and sends the receipt.
• Crypto payments are processed by NOWPayments.
• Prices are in US dollars and include tax. What you see on the page is what you pay.
• Buying creates an account on the email you pay with. One activation link arrives by email: choose a password there, sign in inside the app, and it unlocks. Licence keys are never emailed; yours is on your account page if you ever want it.

Terms of Use

These terms cover Crest Pro, Take and Minutes: all three apps bought together, once or by subscription, and single-app licences bought before October 6, 2026.

• Crest's free tier is free to download and use, with no account. Take and Minutes are free to download and each have a 7-day trial when you sign in.
• You can buy all three apps once, or subscribe to them by the month or by the year. A licence is for your personal use on up to 2 Macs for each app. Please don't share, resell or distribute it.
• A one-time licence never expires. One bought now includes updates through Crest 7: every Crest 6 and Crest 7 release, and the Take and Minutes releases made in that time. The apps keep working after that, on the last version it covers.
• Licences bought before October 6, 2026 keep all future updates to that app at no extra cost, for life. Nobody will ask you to subscribe.
• A subscription renews automatically every month or every year until you cancel, and includes every update while it is paid. Cancel any time from your account page: Pro stays on until the end of the period you paid for. If a payment fails, Paddle tries again and the apps keep working meanwhile. When a subscription ends, Crest goes back to its free tier and the apps keep your settings, recordings and notes on your Mac.
• A one-time licence works offline and is never switched off, unless the payment is refunded or charged back. A subscription runs while it is paid, with 30 days of grace offline.
• The apps are provided “as is”, without warranties of any kind. To the extent the law allows, we aren't liable for damages arising from their use.
• We switch a one-time licence off only when its payment is refunded or charged back.
• On a team, the owner can take back a seat they assigned and give it to someone else. The person who held it then loses access to the team's apps.

Refund Policy

If something is wrong, email contact@crestnotch.app from the address you paid with within 7 days of a payment, a purchase or a subscription charge, and tell us what went wrong. A person reads every one and answers. This covers every purchase: all three apps, a subscription, or a single app bought earlier.

We refund when an app does not do what this site says it does, when it will not run on a Mac that meets the requirements we publish, when you were charged twice or bought the wrong thing, or when something is broken and we cannot fix it for you.

We may decline when an app has already been used to do the job it was bought for, such as a finished recording or an exported transcript, and when no reason is given. Every app is free to download, Crest has a free tier that never expires, and all three have a 7-day trial that needs no card, so nobody has to buy an app to find out whether it suits them.

Card, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay orders are refunded through Paddle to the way you paid. For a crypto order, we arrange the refund with you by email.

Where the law gives you a right to a refund, you keep it whatever this page says, and Paddle, as the merchant of record, handles those requests under its own refund policy.

Contact

Crest · crestnotch.app · contact@crestnotch.app