Privacy Policy

01 Signing in is optional

You can use Sensecast, and buy Pro, without signing in — nothing is required to get started. An email sign-in exists for one reason: a Pro purchase made on sensecast.app or in the Mac, Windows or Linux download needs somewhere to live so it can unlock Pro on every device you sign in on.

If you sign in, we keep on our side only:

• A keyed hash of your email address — not the address itself, which the sign-in code is sent to and then forgotten by the server.
• Your signed-in devices — a name you can see, the platform, and a hash of the app's install id. Five at most; you can sign any of them out.
• Which purchases are attached — so a Paddle order, or an App Store or Google Play receipt you link, unlocks Pro on your other devices.

Sign-in codes arrive by email from [email protected] and are not kept once used or expired. You can remove your email — and everything above with it — at any time in the app (Settings → Pro sign-in) or at sensecast.app/account.

Signed in or not, there is no browsing history, location history or preference profile held on our side — the rest of this policy explains why.

02 What the app stores on your device

The following is written to your device's local application storage. It is not transmitted to us, and it is removed when you delete the app.

• Saved locations — the places you add, along with their coordinates and display names.
• Preferences — units, theme, chosen forecast provider, dashboard tile order, widget setup and notification settings.
• Your own API keys — if you supply a key for OpenWeatherMap or WeatherAPI, it is stored on the device so the app can use it. Keys are held in the app's local storage, which is sandboxed to Sensecast by the operating system but is not hardware-encrypted key storage; use a key scoped to this purpose, and remove it from Settings when you no longer want it there.
• Storm reports you generate — the report text and figures.
• Your Pro status — whether a subscription or Lifetime Pass is active, and when it was last confirmed.
• A diagnostic log — up to the last 150 things the app did in the past 14 days: which weather sources it tried, what failed and when, and the forecast location it was fetching. API keys are removed before anything is written. It never leaves your device unless you choose to email it to us (section 14).
• An install identifier — a random string the app generates for itself. It is not a device ID, an advertising ID, or anything issued by Apple or Google, it is not linked to you, and it is regenerated if you delete and reinstall. It is used only for purchase anti-abuse (section 5), occasional entitlement re-checks, and — when you generate a storm report — a one-shot purchaser flag that is not stored with the report (section 7).

03 Location

Sensecast asks for location permission so it can show the weather where you are. You can decline and use the app by searching for places by name instead.

• Your coordinates are read on the device and used to request a forecast.
• Those coordinates are sent directly from your device to the weather service you are using — for example NOAA, Open-Meteo or Bright Sky — with one exception: MET Norway.
• MET Norway forecasts go through our server. MET Norway's terms ask mobile apps to fetch through a proxy instead of calling it from every phone, so the app asks api.sensecast.app, which asks MET Norway. The proxy receives your coordinates, rounds them to about 1 km, and keeps recent forecasts in memory (never on disk) so that nearby users share one request to MET Norway. It does not log these requests or record who made them. If the proxy is unreachable, the app contacts MET Norway directly.
• To turn coordinates into a place name, the app may send them to BigDataCloud's reverse-geocoding endpoint, rounded to four decimal places.
• If location permission is unavailable, the app can fall back to an approximate, city-level location derived from your IP address by ipapi.co. That request necessarily discloses your IP address to them.
• We do not keep a location history. The app stores the places you deliberately save, and nothing else.

04 Who your device talks to

Sensecast is a client for public meteorological and hazard services. When it fetches a forecast, a radar tile, an outage map or a hazard feed, your device connects to that provider directly (MET Norway, through the proxy described in section 3), and the provider necessarily sees your IP address and the coordinates or map area requested. Each is governed by its own privacy policy, not this one.

If you supply your own OpenWeatherMap or WeatherAPI key, your device also contacts that service under your own account with them.

Links in the app — to our website, to a source agency, or to a store listing — open in your device's browser when you tap them. Sensecast does not send anything with them beyond the request your browser makes.

05 Purchases and receipt verification

Sensecast Pro is sold through Apple In-App Purchase, Google Play Billing, and — on sensecast.app and in the Mac, Windows and Linux downloads — through Paddle.com as Merchant of Record. We never see or store your card number, billing address, or any payment detail. Apple, Google and Paddle handle payment entirely; the stores tell us nothing about you personally, and Paddle's order is attached to your email by the checkout token, not by a card.

When you buy or restore Pro, the app sends the store's receipt — or your sign-in session — to our verification service so we can confirm with Apple, Google or Paddle that the purchase is real. This exists to stop forged and shared receipts, not to profile you. That service records:

• The store transaction identifier issued by Apple or Google.
• The product purchased and the platform.
• A one-way hash of the random install identifier described in section 2 — used only to count how many devices are presenting the same receipt, so a single purchase is not shared across an unlimited number of devices. We cannot reverse it, and it identifies an installation, not a person.
• The time, and whether verification succeeded or failed with a reason.

Your IP address is processed transiently to rate-limit that endpoint against abuse. It is held in memory only and is not written to the purchase record.

That record is retained while the entitlement is live, as the proof of what we granted and why — it is what lets us resolve a dispute if a purchase is questioned. It contains no name, email address, or location.

Separately, if Pro was granted without a live store receipt on the device (for example a tester build or a restored non-store grant), the app may periodically ask api.sensecast.app whether that install is still entitled. The request carries the install identifier only. An unreachable server is treated as "still entitled" so an offline paying customer is never locked out by a network blip.

06 Notifications

Severe weather alerts, daily briefings and other notifications are scheduled and delivered locally by your device. Sensecast does not operate a push notification server and does not register a push token with Apple or Google for messaging. Nothing about a notification you receive is reported back to us.

As a consequence, alerts depend on the app being able to refresh in the background on your device. See section 4 of the Terms of Use — they are not a substitute for official emergency warnings.

07 Storm reports and photographs

The storm report generator builds its documents on your device from public meteorological observations; reports don't include photographs. Sensecast requests photo-library access for one on-device feature: choosing a Custom Photo wallpaper for the weather dashboard. Photographs stay on your device — wallpaper files are never uploaded to Greigh Studios.

When a report is generated, the app may register its Ref ID with api.sensecast.app so a recipient can confirm it at sensecast.app/verify. That registration stores only fields the printed report already shows (place name, coordinates, incident time, weather and grid metrics, app version, and a boolean that the generating install was Pro-entitled). The install identifier is sent once to derive that boolean and is then discarded — it is not kept in the registry or returned by the public lookup. Registration is best-effort: a report still generates and shares offline; it simply cannot be verified online until registration succeeds.

The full document (PDF/share sheet) stays on your device until you choose to share it; sharing goes wherever you send it through your operating system's own share sheet.

08 The waitlist and the contact form

This website has two forms: the launch-notification waitlist and the contact form. Both are separate from the app and from everything above, both are optional, and they are the only places this product asks for an email address.

The launch-notification waitlist

The email list at the bottom of sensecast.app is for people who want to hear about Sensecast news.

• The address you type is stored, along with which page it came from, in a plain append-only file on the same server that runs purchase verification (api.sensecast.app). We do not store your IP address or any device information alongside it.
• It is used for one thing only: an occasional email when there is Sensecast news worth sending. There is no newsletter schedule, no send history, and no unsubscribe list to manage.
• The first time an address signs up, it also triggers a one-line internal notification to us so we know someone joined; that notification contains the address you entered.
• To have your address removed before then, email us — see Contact.

The contact form

The form on sensecast.app/support sends your message to us through the same server.

• It sends your name, your email address, the topic you chose and your message to api.sensecast.app, which emails them straight to our support inbox. The server does not keep a copy.
• We use what you send only to reply to you. Your message and our reply stay in that inbox like any other email; ask and we will delete them — see Contact.
• Your IP address is processed transiently to rate-limit the form against abuse. It is held in memory only and is not written anywhere. The server also refuses messages that don't come from sensecast.app itself.
• If the form can't reach our server, the page opens your own email app with the message filled in instead, and nothing passes through our server at all. Writing to [email protected] directly works the same way.

09 What we do not do

• We do not sell or rent personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
• The app contains no advertising, no advertising identifier, and no ad SDK.
• The app contains no ad network, analytics, crash-reporting or cross-app tracking SDK — no Firebase, no Crashlytics, no Sentry, nothing that follows you elsewhere.
• We do not track you across other apps or websites, and the app has no reason to request App Tracking Transparency permission.
• We do not build advertising or marketing profiles.
• We do not read your saved locations, your API keys, or Custom Photo wallpapers — those never reach us. The only storm-report data we hold is the optional Ref ID registry described in section 7.

10 Your choices and rights

• Location — grant, restrict or revoke it at any time in your device settings. The app works without it.
• Notifications — turn any category on or off in Settings, or revoke the permission entirely.
• Photos — requested when you pick a Custom Photo wallpaper. The photo stays on your device.
• Delete everything — deleting the app removes every saved location, setting, API key and storm report from your device. If you signed in with your email, remove it in the app (Settings → Pro sign-in) or at sensecast.app/account.
• Your purchase record — the verification record in section 5 survives an app deletion, because it is tied to your Apple or Google transaction rather than to your device; that is what allows you to restore purchases on a new phone. To request its erasure, email us with your store transaction identifier or purchase receipt. Note that erasing it may prevent restoring that purchase later.
• Your storm-report Ref ID — email us the Ref ID from a report you generated and we will remove that registry entry (section 7). Note that removing it means recipients can no longer verify that report online.
• Your waitlist address — email us the address you signed up with and we will remove it from the launch-notification list described in section 8.
• Your contact-form messages — email us from the address you used and we will delete your messages and our replies from the support inbox (section 8).

Depending on where you live you may have rights under laws such as the EU/UK GDPR or the California CCPA, including the right to access, correct, delete or restrict processing of personal information. Because signing in is optional and we hold very little directly identifying data, in most cases there is little on our side to disclose or erase. Where there is — a sign-in, a purchase record, or a waitlist signup — contact us at the address below and we will act on it.

11 Children's privacy

Sensecast is a general-audience weather application and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children, and the waitlist form is not directed to them either. Because the app needs no sign-in and has no messaging, there is no routine way for a child to submit personal information to us through the app — the email sign-in exists for adults who bought Pro. If you believe a child has provided us with information, contact us so we can remove it.

12 International use

Our verification service — and the server the waitlist form writes to — is operated in the United States. Weather providers your device contacts are operated in their own countries — a forecast from the Japan Meteorological Agency is a request to a server in Japan. If you use Sensecast, or sign up on this website, from outside the United States, you understand that this processing occurs internationally.

13 Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the app changes. When we make a material change we will revise the "Last updated" date above, and where the change is significant we will note it in the app's release notes. Continuing to use Sensecast after a change takes effect means you accept the revised policy.

14 Contact

Questions about this policy, or about data we may hold, can be sent to [email protected]. The party responsible for your information is Greigh Studios LLC, Michigan, United States.

Contact Support in the app (About & Legal, or Connection Diagnostics) opens your own email app with a message to [email protected] and a diagnostic log underneath, which you can read in the app first and edit or delete before sending. The log contains the app version, platform, language and time zone; your weather-source, unit and notification settings and whether Pro is active; your forecast city with its coordinates rounded to about 10 km; and up to the last 100 app events from the past 14 days. It never contains API keys or your exact location. Nothing is sent unless you press Send, and we use what you send only to help with your request.