Perch Privacy Policy

Effective date: October 10, 2026

Perch is a free macOS app made by Shane Burkhart.

Summary

Perch doesn't collect, store, or transmit your personal data. Everything stays on your Mac.

Perch has no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, no ads and no crash reporting. It doesn't check for updates.

What Perch reads on your Mac, and why

Perch only reads what it needs to show you, and it reads it locally.

• Project folders you open. Perch lists files, shows their contents, counts lines of code and measures folder size.
• Git metadata. Perch runs git status and git diff in your projects to show what changed.
• Claude Code's local usage logs (~/.claude/projects). Perch reads the token counts in these logs to show your daily, weekly and monthly totals. It doesn't keep or send the conversation text.
• Claude Code's usage limits. Perch runs your installed claude command (claude --print "/usage") to show how much of your plan's limits you've used. To answer, Claude Code contacts Anthropic using your own Claude login. Perch only reads the result that Claude Code prints.
• Claude Code's config (~/.claude.json). Perch adds one entry here to register its local "open file" tool. With this tool, Claude Code can show files in Perch's viewer.

None of this leaves your Mac through Perch.

Network use

Perch doesn't contact any server run by its developer or by anyone else. Its only network activity stays on your Mac:

• A small server on 127.0.0.1 (your own machine) lets Claude Code ask Perch to open a file. It needs a random token that changes each launch.
• A Chromium debugging port that listens only on 127.0.0.1.

Third parties

You use Perch to run Anthropic's Claude Code in a terminal. Claude Code is a separate program. It talks to Anthropic directly, under Anthropic's terms and privacy policy, not through Perch. See Anthropic's privacy policy.

Any other command you run in Perch's terminal works as it would in any other terminal.

What Perch stores, and how to delete it

Perch keeps a few small files on your Mac in ~/Library/Application Support/Perch:

• recents.json: your recently opened project folders
• state.json: which projects were open, so Perch can reopen them
• theme.json: your light or dark preference
• bridge.json: the port and token for the local file-opening tool
• shell/: prompt setup files for the quick terminal
• Local Storage/: layout sizes and your keyboard shortcut setting

Perch also adds a perch entry under mcpServers in ~/.claude.json. macOS may list recent projects under its own Recent Items.

To delete everything, quit Perch and delete ~/Library/Application Support/Perch. You can also remove the perch entry from ~/.claude.json. To clear recent projects only, choose File > Open Recent > Clear Recent.

This website

This website (perchapp.sh) uses no cookies, no analytics and no tracking scripts, and it collects nothing about you. Like most hosts, Vercel, which hosts the site, may process standard server logs such as your IP address and user agent when you load a page. That processing is governed by Vercel's privacy policy.

Children

Perch is a developer tool. It isn't directed at children, and it collects no data from anyone.

Crash reporting

If we add crash reporting in the future, it will be opt-in and this policy will be updated first.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we'll post the new version here with a new effective date.

Contact

Questions? Email Shane Burkhart at shaneburkhart@gmail.com.