Privacy

Last updated October 19, 2026.

Your books stay on your Mac

BookForge keeps your books, notes, covers and audio as files in a folder on your Mac. We do not receive or store them.

AI requests go to the provider you choose

When you use an AI feature, BookForge sends the text it needs straight from your Mac to the AI provider you set up (for example OpenAI, Google Gemini or Anthropic), using your own API key. That provider's privacy policy applies to those requests. Your API keys are kept in your Mac's keychain and only sent to the provider they belong to. Ollama, narration and transcription run on your Mac.

What we do collect

• Your email address, when you start a free trial, buy a subscription or sign in to your account, so we can send your licence key and let you manage it.
• Licence checks: BookForge sends your licence key, a one-way hash of your Mac's hardware ID and your Mac's name to our licence server, to confirm the licence and count your Macs. The hardware ID itself never leaves your Mac.
• Update checks: once a day BookForge downloads the list of releases from updates.book-forge.com. Like any web request, this reveals your IP address to the server.
• Payments are handled by Stripe. We receive your email, the plan and whether payments succeed; we never see your card number.

BookForge and this website do not use analytics or advertising trackers.

Who processes it

Stripe (payments), Clerk (account sign-in), Neon (our database), Resend (email), Cloudflare (hosting of downloads and updates) and our self-hosted licence server.

Your choices

You can see your licences and Macs on your account page, remove a Mac there, and cancel your subscription at any time. To have your account and records deleted, email support@book-forge.com.