Last updated: September 25, 2026
Word Machine is made and sold by Levi Saltzman and Lena Moore. “We” and “us” below mean the two of us, and we are the ones who hold anything described on this page.
No sign-up, no password, no profile, no subscription. Buying Word Machine gets you a license key, and that key is the whole relationship. We keep one record for it: your email address, your order number, the key, and which machine currently has it running.
A free trial is the same thing with an end date. You give us an email address and we send a trial key to it; we keep the address, the key, when the seven days started, and which machine is running it. We also note whether you signed up on a phone or a computer and, when the link you followed says so, where you found us (an ad on TikTok, say). One trial per address, and a machine that has already run one cannot start another. The address is used to send you the key and for nothing else: it does not join a mailing list. The form is protected from automated signups by Cloudflare Turnstile, which checks your browser when you submit it.
Your documents are files in a folder you chose, on your own disk. There is no sync and no cloud. We cannot read what you write and we never receive it. The app has no analytics, no telemetry, and no crash reporting, so we do not know what you write, how long you write for, or how often you open it.
It contacts word-machine.com twice at launch, and a third time only if you choose to send us feedback. None of the three carries anything about your writing.
Checking your license sends your key, a random number the app invented for this installation, and the version of Word Machine you are running. That number is not taken from your hardware and means nothing outside our own records. We log the IP address you activate from, so we can see a key being passed around. A license runs on one device at a time: activating it on a new Mac releases the previous one, and this check is how that machine finds out. The version is there so we can tell whether an update actually reached anyone; it is not tied to anything you write or do in the app.
Checking for updates sends the version you are running, your operating system, and your processor type. No key, no identifier, nothing tying the request to you or to your purchase.
Sending feedback happens only when you type something into the feedback box in Settings and press send. It is the one call the app makes because you asked it to, and the only one with no identifier on it at all: we receive what you wrote, the version of Word Machine you are running, and whether you are on macOS or Windows. No key, no installation number, no email address, nothing that links it to your purchase or to any other feedback. We do not record the IP address it came from, and the record we keep is timestamped only to the hour.
To be straight with you about the limit of that: Cloudflare sits in front of our site and sees the connecting IP address on every request, including the license check that does carry your key. We do not keep that address for feedback and we do not go looking, but we are not going to tell you it would be impossible for anyone to line the two up. What we can tell you is that we hold nothing that identifies you, there is nothing in our records to join it to, and we will not add one.
Offline is never punished. Nothing is sent and nothing changes. There is no countdown, no grace period, and no eventual lockout. A blocked connection is treated exactly like no connection. The one exception is a trial, whose end date is kept on your machine and checked against its own clock, so a trial ends on time whether or not you are online. When it ends, everything you wrote still opens and still exports.
Lemon Squeezy is our merchant of record. They take the payment and we never see your card; their own privacy policy governs what they hold. What reaches us is your email address, your order number, and your license key.
If you joined the waitlist we hold what you typed: your name, email address, what you write, and who referred you. We also hold your IP address and browser user-agent string, recorded to keep the form from being abused. It lives on Cloudflare, copied into a Google Sheet we use to read it and into Resend, which sends the mail. We use it to email you about Word Machine and nothing else; every email carries an unsubscribe link that stops all of them.
No analytics, no tracking cookies. Served by Cloudflare, which keeps ordinary request logs.
Email us and we will delete what we hold. The one thing we may keep is the line tying your key to your order, which we need in order to honor the license you bought and to handle refunds.
Questions about privacy go to Levi Saltzman and Lena Moore at hello@word-machine.com.