Privacy, verified

Local-first tools usually ask for trust. Haypile tries to ask for less of it, by making its central privacy claim something you can measure.

The claim

Haypile makes zero external network connections. Not few, not anonymized: zero.

• Indexing, embedding, and search run entirely in-process. The embedding model is inside the binary; there is nothing to download and no API to call.
• The daemon listens on localhost only.
• There is no telemetry, no update check, no crash reporting. If that ever changes it will be opt-in, documented loudly, and off by default. This commitment is versioned with the code.

How to check it

hay status

Outbound connections: 0 (your documents stay on this machine)

That number is measured live against the running daemon's actual sockets, not asserted from a README. If you want a second opinion, ask the OS directly:

lsof -p $(pgrep -f "hay serve") -i TCP

You will find listeners on localhost and nothing else. Being auditable by standard tools, on an open codebase, is the point.

The boundaries, honestly drawn

Three cases involve the network, each explicitly yours to choose:

Installation. Downloading the binary is a network act, once, from GitHub Releases. The install script does nothing else, and it is short enough to read first.

hay llm setup and hay ask. Haypile ships no LLM. Answer generation talks to a server on your machine (Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, Jan) over localhost. hay llm setup can download Ollama and a model for you; it asks before every download. Once the model is on disk, asking questions is fully offline.

MCP clients. If you connect Claude Code or another cloud-backed agent to Haypile, the passages it retrieves become part of that agent's context, which the agent sends to its own provider. Haypile's behavior does not change; the agent's reach is what you are choosing. For a fully offline answer path, use hay ask with a local model.

Why this matters more than a policy

Privacy policies describe intentions and can change. Architecture describes capabilities and is harder to walk back. Haypile's design removes the capability: there is no code path that phones home, no account system, no server side at all. For client-confidential, medical, or just personal documents, "cannot" beats "will not".