Privacy Policy

Caddy Docs (“Caddy”) is a macOS app made by Blake Morris. This policy is short because the app does very little with your information.

What Caddy collects

Nothing about you. Caddy has no account system, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no advertising. No information about you, your Mac, or your documents leaves your computer through Caddy except for the Ask requests described below. In versions before 3.0, an optional Collab could also send information, as described below. Ask, described below, is the one feature that sends anything to Apple, and only the question you type and the passages it needs, only when you ask.

Caddy Pro, the optional subscription, is sold by Apple through the App Store. Apple takes the payment and tells Caddy only whether the subscription is active. Caddy never sees your name, your card, or your Apple Account.

Caddy Collab (versions before 3.0)

Caddy Collab was retired in version 3.0. The retained description below applies to versions before 3.0.

All of your confidential data stays confidential.

Caddy can start a Collab on one Caddy, with people you invite. When you do, the files, notes, names and comments in that Caddy pass through a server so they can reach the other Macs. That server is ours, and it cannot read any of it.

Your Mac locks everything you wrote before it sends it, with a key your Mac makes when you start the Collab. The key never goes to the server. It travels inside the invitation link and nowhere else, and the invitation link is the only way into a Collab: the invite code on its own reaches the server and opens nothing.

Here is exactly what is locked, and what is not.

Locked, so nobody but the people you invited can read it: every file you share, and its name. Every shared note, its text and its title. Every note while you are still typing it: in a Collab the other people see your words as you write them, before you have saved anything, and those words are locked on the way across exactly like the saved ones. Every comment. The name of the Caddy, the name of every workspace in it, the name each person chose to be called, and how a Collab’s panes are arranged.

Not locked, because the server needs it to pass things along: the color of a Caddy, which Character it is wearing, who is in a workspace right now, where their cursor is, including where it is in a note they are typing, how large a file is, when it arrived, and the random identifiers the server files things under. So we can see that a Collab exists, how many people are in it, and that a file of a certain size arrived at a certain time. We cannot see what any of it is.

The words you type before you save are not kept anywhere. The server passes them to the other people in the Collab and forgets them in the same moment: they are not written to its disk, not added to the history of the note, and not sent to anybody who joins later. What is kept is the note you saved, locked, the same as it always was.

We do not have your key, so we cannot read your Collab, hand its contents to anybody else, or recover it for you if every person who was in it loses the invitation.

Files, notes and everything else in a Caddy that is not in a Collab never leave your Mac at all. Your local notes, tasks, flashcards, file paths and folders never leave it either, Collab or not.

In a Collab, the way the panes are arranged is shared: everybody sees the same panes in the same order and the same proportions, and anybody can rearrange them. The size of your drawer, which screen edge it sits on, any pane you have popped out into its own window, and the document you have selected, scrolled or zoomed are all yours alone and never travel.

No Caddy is shared until you start a Collab on it, and only that Caddy. When you end a Collab, the server’s copy goes. Files the other people already received are on their Macs, and nothing can reach those.

The server is one machine in Chicago, run for us by Fly.io, with an encrypted disk. Send a Copy is different: it makes one file on your Mac and hands it to the Share sheet, and Caddy sends nothing itself.

What Caddy stores on your Mac

Caddy keeps references to the documents and folders you add, the notes you write, and your settings inside its own sandbox container at ~/Library/Containers/com.caddydocs.Caddy. It reads your documents where they already live, and never copies or changes them.

That container is everything Caddy retains, for as long as you keep the app. To remove all of it, drag Caddy to the Trash and then delete that folder. Your own documents are untouched.

Ask

Ask is part of Caddy Pro and needs macOS 27 and Apple Intelligence. When you ask a question about a Caddy, the question and the passages of your documents it needs are sent to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, the same service that handles Apple Intelligence requests a Mac cannot run on its own. Apple states that what is sent there is used only to answer the request, is never stored, and is not accessible to Apple. Caddy keeps the question and the answer only on your Mac, and sends nothing until you ask.

If you would rather nothing left your Mac at all, turn on Local only in Ask’s settings. Ask then uses only the model on your Mac and makes no connection of any kind.

Third parties

Caddy includes no third-party code. Two companies are involved, each only when you choose: Apple, which sells and bills Caddy Pro through the App Store under Apple’s own privacy policy and answers Ask questions in its Private Cloud Compute, as described above, and Fly.io, which hosts the Collab relay for versions before 3.0, described above, and cannot read what passes through it. Open in Word, Open in Preview, and Reveal in Finder hand a document to the app that owns it, at your instruction, and that app governs what happens next. If a document in one of your Caddies lives only in the cloud, as OneDrive, iCloud Drive and Dropbox files often do, then opening or previewing it asks the provider you already run to download it to your Mac first. Caddy opens no connection of its own for that, and that provider’s own policy governs what it does. This website is served as static files with no analytics, no cookies, no trackers, and no third-party requests of any kind.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, the new version will be posted at this address with a new effective date.

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