Privacy Policy

The short version

• The website collects one thing: your email address, if you join the list.
• The app sends nothing to us. No account, no analytics, no tracking, no crash reporting.
• Your code goes only where you send it: to the AI provider or agent you choose, under your own account.
• We don’t sell or share your information, and we don’t use cookies.

The website

Joining the list

When you enter your email address, we keep it to send you launch news and the occasional build note, and for nothing else. Sign-ups are stored with Netlify (Netlify Forms), which hosts this site. Netlify may also record your IP address and browser with a submission to filter spam. If we start sending through an email service, we’ll name it here first.

You can leave at any time: reply to any email, or write to gshahirelay@gmail.com, and we’ll remove your address.

Visiting

Netlify keeps standard server logs (IP address, browser, the pages requested, and when) to run and secure the site. We don’t add analytics, advertising, tracking pixels or cookies. The fonts and images are served from buildside.dev itself, so loading the page doesn’t contact any other company.

The Side app

Side runs on your Mac and doesn’t send us anything: there’s no account, no usage analytics, no telemetry and no crash reporting. Your projects, tracks, checkpoints and conversations stay on your Mac. What does leave it is what you set up:

AI providers

With Side’s built-in agent, Heron, your prompts and the code it reads go straight from your Mac to the provider you configure (Anthropic, OpenAI or Google), under your key and that provider’s terms. Local models through Ollama or LM Studio stay on your Mac. Side doesn’t route this through any server of ours.

Outside agents

Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Pi and OpenCode run as their own programs on your Mac, signed in to your own account, and send data under their own privacy policies.

API keys

Stored in your Mac’s Keychain and sent only to the provider each one belongs to.

Web pages

When an agent fetches a web page you’ve allowed, your Mac requests it directly.

Updates

Side checks for updates by downloading a small file from GitHub (github.com), which sees your IP address and Side’s version, as with any download. You can turn automatic checks off in Settings › General.

Debuggers

When you install a debugger for a language, Side downloads it from its project’s GitHub releases.

Git

Pushing, fetching and opening pull requests go to the remotes you configure.

Your choices

You can ask what we hold about you (at most, your email address and when you signed up), to correct it, or to delete it, by writing to gshahirelay@gmail.com. We’ll reply within 30 days. If you’re in the EU or UK, we keep your email on the basis of your consent, which you can withdraw at any time, and you can complain to your data protection authority. If you’re in California, we don’t sell or share personal information.

Side isn’t meant for children under 16, and we don’t knowingly collect their information.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes too. If it’s a change that matters, such as the app starting to send something new, we’ll tell the list before it happens.