Privacy Policy

Last updated: 23 September 2026

Tessa is a window manager that runs on your Mac. It is built so that almost nothing about you ever reaches us, and this policy describes the little that does.

Who we are

Tessa is published by Proprietas Technologies, Inc., a Delaware corporation with its registered office at 131 Continental Dr, Suite 305, Newark, New Castle County, Delaware 19713, United States. Proprietas Technologies, Inc. is the controller of the personal data described here.

Contact us at support@tessa.is.

What the app sends

Tessa makes four requests in its entire life, and only ever to our licence server:

  • Starting a trial, once, the first time you open it.
  • Activating a licence, when you enter your code.
  • Refreshing, at most once a week, to extend the licence it holds.
  • Signing a Mac out, when you release a seat.

Each request carries a SHA-256 hash of a hardware identifier, and a licence code or a signed token. That is all. It does not send your name, your email address, the name of your Mac, a list of your applications, what you have open, or anything about how you use it. The identifier itself never leaves the machine; only the hash does.

There is no analytics, no crash reporting, and no update heartbeat in the app.

What we hold when you buy

  • Your email address. It is your licence: it is what we send your sign-in codes to, and what you type into Tessa to activate it.
  • Your licence: its status, and the payment reference it came from.
  • Your machine hashes, one per activated seat, with the dates they were activated and last seen. These identify a device to us only as a string of hex; we cannot work backwards from one to your Mac.

We never see your card details. Payment is processed by Stripe, who act as an independent controller for the payment itself.

The website

The site sets no advertising cookies and runs no cross-site tracking. Our hosting provider processes your IP address and request headers in order to serve pages to you, as any web server must.

Who processes it for us

  • Vercel — hosting for the website.
  • Railway — the database holding licences and seats.
  • Stripe — payments.
  • Resend — the emails that carry your licence and your sign-in code.
  • Cloudflare — DNS, and the storage the download is served from.

We are a United States company, so data about you is processed in the United States as well as in the regions our providers operate in.

To perform the contract you entered when you bought a licence, and to meet the legal obligations that come with selling something, such as keeping records for tax. Where the GDPR applies, those are Article 6(1)(b) and 6(1)(c).

How long we keep it

Licence and seat records are kept for as long as the licence exists, since a perpetual licence has to be verifiable years later. Records of sale are kept for as long as tax law requires. Sign-in codes are deleted when they are used or expire, whichever is first.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to our holding it. Write to support@tessa.is and we will answer within one month.

If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, the UK GDPR and the GDPR give you those rights, and you may complain to your national data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office. If you are in California, you have comparable rights under the CCPA; we do not sell or share personal information, and we have never done so.

Deleting your licence record means the licence stops working. We will tell you that before we do it rather than after.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects you, the date at the top changes and we will say what changed.