Privacy
The desktop and phone apps
Betelgeuse collects nothing. There is no account, no telemetry and no analytics. Your workspace is a folder of Markdown files on your computer, and it stays there.
The app connects to the internet only for these:
- Sync pushes to and pulls from the git remote you set up (for example a private GitHub repository). Once you've set one up, it does this in the background every few minutes; turn that off under Settings → Git & sync. The phone app keeps its access token on the phone.
- Plugins: the plugin store, plugin downloads and their updates come from GitHub Releases.
- Import from Notion downloads the images your pages show from where they are hosted (such as Notion's cover gallery), so the imported pages are fully local.
- Links you open go to your browser.
AI agents. When you connect an AI agent (Claude Code, Cursor and others) to your workspace, the agent reads and writes the pages it can see and may send them to its AI provider. That is between you and the agent's provider, under their terms. Pages you hide from AI stay out of the agent's reach through Betelgeuse; an agent you give direct access to the folder can still read them.
The web app
The web app at app.betelgeuse.pro needs a GitHub account, and has no telemetry or analytics. Your pages stay in the GitHub repositories you choose: your browser reads and writes them through GitHub's API directly, and they don't pass through our servers.
- Your session is an encrypted cookie holding the tokens GitHub issues for you. We keep no copy and no user database. Our server uses it only to give your browser a current token.
- Your browser keeps a copy of your workspaces and any edits not yet sent to GitHub, so they open quickly and survive a closed tab. Signing out deletes that copy.
- Plugins install from the same store as the other apps, fetched through our server, and are kept in your browser. They run inside the page, so install only ones you trust.
- Hosting: it runs on Vercel, which processes the usual request data.
- Images and cover photos: images your pages embed load from where they are hosted. Searching for a cover photo asks Unsplash, using the words you type.
This website
The site sets no cookies and runs no analytics, ads or trackers.
- It is hosted on Vercel, which processes the usual request data (IP address, browser, time and page) to serve and protect the site, and keeps it for a short time.
- To show the star count, latest release and contributors, your browser asks GitHub and shields.io directly, so they see that request like any other.
- Downloads come from GitHub Releases.
Contact
Betelgeuse is made by Devian Labs. Ask about privacy in GitHub Discussions, or privately through a security advisory.