Privacy
manabiu runs on your own computer first. By default, everything you make in it — the words you looked up, the sentences you saved, the recordings from speaking practice, your review progress — stays on this computer. It doesn't come to us, and it doesn't go to anyone else. Below, every exception is spelled out — because "we collect nothing by default" is only worth anything once you know what the exceptions are. Like the product itself, this page says what's true rather than what sounds good.
Stays on your machine, never uploaded
- Looking words up (splitting, readings, pitch, dictionary) — local models and dictionaries, working offline.
- Recordings from speaking practice — analysed and scored on your computer. The recording itself never comes to us. (When you save a line, the app may keep that piece of audio in a database on this machine so you can play it back — still on this machine, still not leaving it.)
- Your word list, the sentences you captured, your review progress and your stats — kept in a SQLite file under
~/.manabiu, which you can export or wipe at any time. - We have no server collecting any of it, and the app has no tracking, no telemetry, no usage stats — with no exceptions: the app never goes online to count things. (Downloading a model is an ordinary CDN request, and the server-side count tells us how many machines have installed it. That's all — see "This website" below.)
Goes to the cloud only if you turn on phone sync (Pro)
That switch is off by default, and while it's off not one byte leaves this computer. If you turn it on:
- Review state (when something is due, how many times you've practised it) goes to a database — but there isn't a single readable word in it: words, meanings and sentences are indexed by hash, and the content itself sits in object storage.
- Words, sentences, and the model audio the app makes (for playback when you review on your phone — not your own recordings) go to object storage, and only your account can fetch them, through short-lived one-time links.
- The only reason any of this is stored is so your other computer or your phone can share the same progress.
- At any time, Settings has a one-press "clear the cloud copy" (your right to be forgotten) — the cloud copy is wiped immediately and local data isn't touched. Deleting your account clears the data with it.
- Everything is sent over HTTPS.
What reaches other companies (also spelled out)
- AI chat: if you enter your own DeepSeek key, what you type in chat goes to DeepSeek — that's between you and DeepSeek, under DeepSeek's privacy policy. We don't handle it and we don't hold your key. No key, no step.
- Activation: activating Pro goes online once, sending your key and a machine fingerprint (a hash of the machine ID — no name, no email, nothing identifying) to the activation server in exchange for a licence. After that, every start-up is entirely offline.
- Cloud providers: when you download a model, check for updates, or sync, your IP reaches our providers (Cloudflare, Supabase) exactly as it would with any web request. That comes with being online — we don't record anything extra on top of it.
This website
- Plain static pages: no cookies, no tracking scripts, no analytics, and no third-party fonts or CDNs.
- There is one thing we do look at: how many times the home page was opened, how many times the installer was downloaded, and how many machines finished a first install. All three come from the server-side request counts a CDN produces anyway (the same as any website's server log) — nothing is placed in your browser or in the app: no cookie, no beacon, no device ID, and no way to tell one person from another. We only see totals, and we use them to tell whether this site explains things well enough and whether people get stuck installing.
- The demo on the home page runs on made-up data. Whatever you press or say in it goes to nobody.
What you can do
- Export: take your word list out any time (Anki TSV / CSV / JSON). It's your data.
- Delete it here: delete the
~/.manabiufolder and nothing is left on this machine. - Delete it in the cloud: one press of "clear the cloud copy" in Settings. Deleting your account clears the data too.
Changes
If anything here changes in substance, this page is updated and it gets a line in the app's changelog.