How it works
We can't see your collection. By design.
ClearBench is a local-first desktop app. Your catalogue lives on your computer's hard drive, the same place your photos and documents live. The privacy story isn't a policy we promise to honour, it's a consequence of how the software is built.
Where your data lives.
Every record, every photo, every label, every print layout is saved on your computer. The desktop app is a self-contained binary; it reads and writes a local database file in your user folder and never phones home for your collection data.
On your hard drive
Specimens, contacts, catalogues, photos, label snapshots, print jobs, preferences. All of it sits in a local database file under your user folder, alongside your other application data.
Native, not browser
ClearBench is a native Mac and Windows app. There is no ClearBench account, no login screen, no cloud workspace. You install the binary, paste your licence file once, and the app opens straight to your local catalogue.
No server holds a copy
There is no ClearBench database in some cloud region with a row for your collection. Even if we wanted to look, we couldn't, because we never receive the data in the first place.
Backups stay yours
Backups are plain files you save where you want. Drop one on an external drive, a NAS, your own cloud storage, or email it to yourself. You decide where each copy lives.
What does leave your device.
We'd rather show you the short list than wave it away. Here's the entire set of network requests the desktop app can make, what each one carries, and what it doesn't.
Licence activation and re-validation
Lemon Squeezy emails you a licence key after purchase. You paste it into the app on first launch and the app sends the key plus your computer's name to Lemon Squeezy's licence API to activate it. After that the app re-checks the key with Lemon Squeezy occasionally when you're online, roughly once a week. The catalogue itself never goes near either request — only the licence key and the machine name. The app stays fully usable offline for 30 days after the last successful check.
Buying a licence
Checkout happens at Lemon Squeezy, our merchant of record. They handle the card, the tax, the receipt, and email the licence key to the address you paid with. We see the same information any small business gets from a payment processor: name, email, amount, country for tax purposes. Nothing about your collection passes through.
Update checks
The desktop app checks our update server for a newer version. The request carries the current app version and platform; it does not carry your data, your licence, or anything about your catalogue.
What isn't on the list
No analytics. No telemetry on what you type, photograph, or print. No automatic crash reports. No event pings on which menus you click or how often you open the app. If something crashes and you want to send us a copy of the error, you do that by emailing the support address with the log file you choose; nothing is sent automatically.
Optional sync, off by default.
Sync between your own machines is on the roadmap, not in the current version. When it ships it will be off by default and built so we still can't read your collection.
Encrypted on your device first
If you turn sync on, your collection is encrypted on your computer before any bytes leave it. The server receives a blob it cannot read.
The key never leaves you
The encryption key is derived from a passphrase you set. The passphrase is never sent to our server. Lose it and we cannot recover your data, because we cannot read it either.
Off until you turn it on
No sync is the default. The current version has no sync at all, so there's no blob and no server-held copy of anything. When sync ships, the toggle stays off until you switch it on.
Backups you can read.
Local-first is only worth anything if you can get your data out. ClearBench exports the whole catalogue to a plain file you can open in a text editor and feed into other tools.
- ·Export the entire catalogue, including custom collection types, to a single .clearbench JSON file you control. That's the canonical backup; restore it on any machine that has ClearBench installed and your collection comes back exactly as it was.
- ·For sharing rather than restoring, export per-collection CSV, an Excel workbook, or a plain-text dump. Contacts export to a .vcf vCard. None of these are full backups — they're for moving rows into another tool — but they're all human-readable formats you can open today.
- ·Keep multiple backups in multiple places. The .clearbench file is plain JSON, so your own encryption, your own cloud storage, your own retention rules apply.
- ·If ClearBench shuts down tomorrow, your backups still open in a text editor and the data is still legible. We can't strand you.
Why dealers care most.
Hobby collectors benefit from the architecture too, but the dealer case is the one where the difference between "we promise not to look" and "we can't look" matters in money.
Your books are your business
Acquisition costs, sale prices, margins, ROI by locality, top buyers, payment splits. None of it leaves your computer. We can't read your books because we never receive them; we can't be subpoenaed for what we don't hold.
Your customer list isn't an asset on our balance sheet
Buyer names and emails captured at point of sale stay on your machine. There is no shared dealer database, no marketing tool pulling from your sales history, no way for a competitor or an acquirer to come away with your contacts.
Your suppliers don't appear on someone else's report
Where you source from, what you pay, which pieces came from which dealer — that's competitive intelligence. It lives on your computer, behind your password, exactly like a paper ledger would.
The dealer page goes deeper on the day-to-day: Built for dealers →
ClearBench vs cloud collection apps.
The honest side-by-side. Cloud apps win on multi-device-out-of-the-box; local-first wins on everything else that matters for a private asset.
Your collection. Your computer. Your call.
$149 USD a year, single tier, every feature included. 30-day money-back guarantee.
Reading the formal document? Privacy Policy.