Privacy
Last updated July 2026
Bonsai exists to help with habits that are deeply personal. That only works if you can trust it completely, so privacy isn’t a policy bolted on at the end. It’s the way the product is built.
Your camera stays on your computer
All detection runs entirely on your device. The video from your camera is processed in memory, frame by frame, and immediately discarded. No video, audio, or imagery is ever recorded, stored, or transmitted anywhere — not to us, not to anyone. There is no cloud processing of camera data, full stop.
What the app keeps
Bonsai keeps a simple local count of your moments — when a habit was noticed and gently redirected — so it can show you your own progress. That data lives on your computer and stays there.
What this website collects
If you join the waitlist, we use your email address — and phone number, if you choose to share one — only to contact you about Bonsai early access. That’s it. This site uses no advertising trackers and no cookies. We count page views with Vercel’s privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics — aggregate numbers only, nothing that identifies you or follows you across the web.
The only network requests the app makes
For complete transparency, here is everything the Bonsai desktop app ever talks to over the internet — and what each request contains:
- Detection models, once. On first run, Bonsai downloads the open-source vision models it needs (from Google’s MediaPipe CDN). This is a plain file download — nothing about you is sent, and the models then run entirely on your device.
- Update checks. Bonsai periodically asks our release server (GitHub) whether a newer version exists. The request carries the app’s name and version — never anything about you or your habits.
That’s the whole list. Your camera data, detections, and progress never leave your device.
You’re always in control
- Pause detection anytime, with one click.
- Bonsai asks for camera permission on first launch and never before.
- Delete the app and everything it kept is gone with it.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you want to know more about how something works, we’d genuinely like to hear from you.