Terms of Service

Section 01What Dusty Desk is (and is not)

• Dusty Desk is software that runs on your own Mac. There is no Dusty Desk cloud behind it: no accounts on our servers, no sign-up, no analytics, no telemetry, no phoning home. The app's server, its data and its AI features all live on your machine.
• Because of that, we never see your screens, keystrokes, clipboard, photos, files or usage. We also cannot help ourselves to them: we hold no copy of your data and no master key to your install.
• Today, access works through key-gated links. Your licence is a key, carried in the link. There are no user accounts and no second factor.

What Dusty Desk is not: a monitoring product, a managed service, or a place your data lives. If you need someone to hold your data and be accountable for it, this is the wrong shape of tool and we would rather say so here than after you have paid.

Section 02Your licence — and what revocation really means

• When you buy a licence you get a perpetual, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use Dusty Desk at the tier you bought, on Macs you own or control. Perpetual means what the word means: the version you were sold keeps working, there is no renewal you must pay to keep using it, and nothing inside it counts down toward a day it stops.
• The licence is a file, not an account. It names your tier and carries an updates-until date, and it is checked on your own machine. There is no entitlement server to call. That is the whole point: a licence that has to ask permission is a licence that phones home, and Section 1 says we do not.
• The updates-until date decides which versions you may install — not whether the software runs. A version released after that date is not covered by your licence. The copy you already have is untouched by it, permanently. See Section 11.
• Vista Pro is the commercial-use tier. The $29 and $89 tiers are licensed for personal use. Using Dusty Desk for work you are paid for, on a business's machines, or to support clients, needs Pro. That is a difference in what you are permitted to do, not a difference in what the software lets you do — see the note below.
• You may not share, sell, rent or sublicense your licence or your keys; strip, bypass or tamper with the licence checks; or repackage the software for redistribution. Reading the code on your own machine is fine. Reselling it is not.

Section 03Price, trial, refunds

Dusty Desk is a perpetual licence. It is explicitly not a subscription. You pay once. There is nothing to cancel, no card kept on file for a future charge, and no date at which your copy stops working. This resolves the one contradiction that held this contract up for months: "never phones home" and "your access expires unless you keep paying" cannot both be true, because an expiring licence needs something to check the date against. We chose the one that lets the software stay silent.

What the updates window does, and what it cannot do

• Your licence file carries an updates-until date. Versions released on or before it are yours. Versions released after it are not covered until you renew.
• Letting it lapse never disables anything. The build you installed keeps running exactly as it did the day before the date passed. No nag screen counts down, no feature switches off, no grace period ends in a lockout. If it ever did, the licence would have to know today's date and care, and that is the door we deliberately did not open.
• Renewing simply extends the window forward. You can renew after a gap; you are not buying back the months you skipped, you are buying the next twelve.
• The base $29 tier has no updates window attached to it at all.

The trial

Fourteen days, everything unlocked, and no credit card — nothing to forget to cancel, because there is nothing to cancel. It is enforced locally, by a first-run date stamp written on your own Mac.

Refunds

14 days, no questions asked. Refunds are processed by Lemon Squeezy, the merchant of record, because they are the party you bought from. The full refund policy is part of these terms, including the one honest limit: a refund ends your licence, and we have no way to switch off a copy already on your Mac.

Section 04Rules of use

Dusty Desk is remote-control software. That comes with one non-negotiable rule and a few things that follow from it.

• Only control computers you own, or are explicitly authorised to control. Using this software to access, watch, or drive a computer without its owner's authorisation may be a crime — unauthorised access, wiretap and privacy laws all apply — and is a breach of these terms regardless of what the local law says.
• Viewing or recording another person's screen without their knowledge is forbidden here even where the law is silent. If someone else uses a machine you can reach, tell them.
• Keep your keys and links secret. They are credentials (Section 9). Anything done through your keys is on you.
• You are responsible for what you, your guests, and anyone you hand a key or a link to do with the software, and for complying with the laws that apply where you are.
• Do not use Dusty Desk to break the law. Full stop.

Section 05Guests and Quick Share

• Quick Share lets a guest look at — and, if you allow it, help drive — your screen through a throwaway link. Guests see nothing until you admit them: a guest knocks, and no frame is sent before you tap Admit.
• Links expire on a short timer, can require a passphrase, can be one-time, and can be revoked or the guest kicked with one tap.
• Guest presence — cursors, reactions, doodles — is ephemeral and never saved to disk.
• Admitting a guest is your consent decision, and inviting one is your responsibility. Share only with people you trust, and only screens you have the right to share — mind other people's information sitting visible on your desktop.

Section 06Fleet — many computers, one owner

• Fleet lets you manage several computers from one dashboard. Each one gets its own token, stored only as a hash and sent in request headers rather than in a URL. Access is default-deny until you grant it.
• Fleet keeps a local, append-only session ledger — metadata only: hashed identities, durations, and which capabilities were used. No names, no keystrokes, no screen content, no IP addresses. It lives on your Mac, it is retained indefinitely because nothing deletes it, and removing it is your call.
• If other people use the computers in your fleet — family, staff, a collaborator — any notice or consent the law requires before monitoring or remote access is your obligation, not ours.
• Rolling Dusty Desk across an organisation's machines needs the separate agreement mentioned at the top of this page, not just these terms.

Section 07Remote support sessions

Dusty Desk includes a lane where another person's computer connects out to your Mac and streams its screen to you for a bounded session, optionally accepting your input. Joining needs a one-time code with an expiry; the session has a hard lifetime; access is revoked when it ends. The computer being helped has to be a Mac for this to work at all — a Windows or Linux machine can connect, but it will tell you the feature is not available on its platform yet rather than send a picture.

Section 4's rule applies with full force here, and it is worth spelling out because this is the feature most likely to get someone in trouble:

• Get the other person's informed agreement before the session, and make sure they understand whether you will be able to drive or only watch.
• Tell them when the session starts and when it ends.
• Never talk someone into running the agent on a machine that is not theirs to offer.
• Remember that on their side, a permanent Fleet join leaves a credential file behind on their computer, while a one-off support session does not.

Section 08Your data is yours

• Everything the software stores — keys, licences, shares, fleet records, the session ledger, the approvals ledger, bug notes, certificates — lives in the app's folders on your Mac. You own all of it. The privacy policy lists every file and exactly what is in it.
• Deleting those folders deletes nearly all of it, and we keep no copy. Privacy Section 11 lists the handful of traces that survive — start-up logs that contain your key, the saved link on your phone, macOS permission grants, alert texts already sitting in Messages, and the agent folder on any computer you enrolled permanently.
• The flip side of no-cloud: we cannot recover lost keys or data for you. If you lose a key you rotate or regenerate it locally. Back up what matters to you.
• Bug reports you file in the app are written to a file on your own Mac, capped at the newest 500, and are not transmitted to us — along with your note they record the page you were on and your browser's full user-agent string. If you want our help with one, you send it to us yourself.

Section 09The honest data path

No shipped code phones home. But a truthful map of what leaves your Mac has more than one leg, and we would rather you knew all of them than be surprised by one.

• Remote links ride a Cloudflare tunnel your own Mac establishes. Phone-to-Cloudflare is encrypted, but that encryption terminates at Cloudflare's edge before the traffic is handed to the tunnel client on your machine. Remote sessions are therefore not end-to-end encrypted, and Cloudflare's infrastructure is technically positioned to see session content — screen frames, input, typed text, dictation transcripts, clipboard, notification bodies, Lens photos, and the key in the URL. Cloudflare's own terms govern their side.
• Same-Wi-Fi links on the plain ports are unencrypted on your local network. The TLS ports use a certificate your Mac generates for itself and that you approve once on your phone.
• Screen content travels in the base tier too. Ghost View sends live screenshots of your Mac to your phone, and it is part of the base trackpad tier, not the Desktop View upgrade. If you are on a remote link, your screen is on that link.
• Owner alert texts — for example when someone claims a key, which can include that person's name and email — are sent from your Mac's own Messages app over Apple's iMessage service, to the number you typed into Settings. The number is empty by default and there is an on/off switch. Texts already sent stay in your Messages history after you delete the app.
• Voice dictation uses your phone's built-in speech engine. Depending on your browser, device and settings, the audio may be processed on the device or sent to the browser or OS vendor's servers — we cannot see or control which. Only the finished text reaches Dusty Desk.
• Lens photos go from your phone to your Mac over whichever link you are using, and are then handed to a companion service on the same machine. The handoff stays on your Mac; what that separate product does afterwards is outside these terms.
• AI features — grammar cleanup and text polish — call the AI endpoint configured on your machine, a local one by default. Dusty Desk never sends your text to a paid or metered cloud AI service. Because the endpoint is configurable, someone who deliberately points it at another machine sends the text there.
• The approvals ledger records your commands. If you use Dusty Desk as an approvals desk for an agent running on your Mac, the commands you dictate or type are written down verbatim, along with the raw tool call and the working directory. It never leaves your Mac. Privacy Section 2 has the detail.
• Links contain keys, and keys settle in places. Beyond "keep your links secret": a key rides in the URL, so it also ends up inside the QR images written to your disk, in the start-up log files (the banner prints your key and complete keyed links into them), and — on a remote session — in a URL that passes through the tunnel provider's edge. Treat links, QR codes and share links like house keys.

The privacy policy spells all of this out in more detail. Where these terms and that policy overlap, the more protective statement wins.

Section 10No uptime promise

Dusty Desk is self-hosted. Your Mac is the server, and the tunnel is third-party infrastructure we do not operate. We make no uptime, availability, or connectivity commitment. Today's tunnel links are ephemeral by design: they die when the tunnel process dies and mint a new address on restart.

Section 11Updates and support

• The software does not auto-update and does not check for updates — there is no update mechanism in it at all, which is part of what "never phones home" costs. New versions are yours to fetch and install when you choose, and features may change between versions.
• Your updates-until date (Section 3) governs entitlement — which versions your licence covers — and nothing else. It does not trigger a download, does not notify you, and does not touch the copy you are running.
• Support is best-effort from one person, with no response-time commitment. See the support page for how to reach us and what to include.

Section 12No warranty ("as is")

The software is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind — express, implied or statutory — including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free or secure. Some places do not allow certain disclaimers; where the law gives you rights we cannot disclaim, those rights stand.

Section 13Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent the law allows: we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, data or goodwill — and our total liability for all claims under these terms is capped at the total amount you have paid for your Dusty Desk licence and any updates renewals. An earlier draft capped it at what you paid in the previous twelve months, which was written for a subscription: against a one-time perpetual licence that cap would fall to zero in your second year, and a cap of zero is not a bargain, it is a disclaimer wearing a number. This is self-hosted software from one person, priced accordingly; the cap is part of that bargain. Nothing here limits liability that cannot legally be limited, such as fraud or wilful misconduct.

Section 14Your responsibility for misuse

If a third party brings a claim against us because you — or someone using your keys, links or fleet — used the software in breach of Sections 4 to 7, above all to access a machine without authorisation, you will defend us against that claim and cover the resulting costs and damages.

Section 15Termination

• You can end this agreement at any time: stop using the software and delete its folders. Your data was always on your Mac; deleting it is entirely in your hands.
• We may end your right to use Dusty Desk if you materially breach these terms, especially Section 4 — and we may stop supporting, re-issuing or honouring a key. Read Section 2 for what that can and cannot do to a copy already installed. Ending your licence does not touch, delete, or give us access to your data.
• Nothing here expires on its own. A perpetual licence does not lapse, and letting an updates window run out ends your entitlement to new versions — not this agreement and not your right to keep running the version you have.
• Sections 8, 9, and 12 to 19 survive termination.

Section 16Changes to these terms

These terms are versioned and dated. If we change them we will publish the new version here, and we will not quietly swap terms under you.

Section 17Governing law and disputes

Section 18Notices and contact

Notices to you go to the email address you used at purchase — which, because Lemon Squeezy runs the checkout, is the address you gave them.

Section 19The boring but necessary bits

• These terms, plus your purchase receipt, the refund policy and the privacy policy, are the entire agreement between us about the software.
• If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stands.
• If we do not enforce a term today, we can still enforce it tomorrow.
• You may not assign this agreement. We may assign it to a successor of the Dusty Desk business, and your licence survives the assignment.
• A Spanish translation is planned once the English text is settled; the English version controls until then.