Privacy Policy
The short version: the application collects nothing about you or your work, and has no accounts. Your invoices, your clients, and your payment records stay in files on your own computer. It makes exactly one kind of network request — checking that your licence is valid — and nothing else, ever. The only personal data we hold is what you give us when you buy the app or write to us for help.
1. The application
The app makes exactly one kind of network request: checking your licence.
There is no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, no update check, no account, no sign-in, and no cloud sync. Your invoices and client records are never sent anywhere.
The licence is checked when you type in your serial, and after that at most once a month — in the background, when the app starts, to confirm it has not been refunded or withdrawn. Nothing is checked while the app is simply running. Activation carries four things and only four: your serial, an anonymous identifier for the computer, the version of the app, and which operating system you are on (the word “windows” or “macos”). The monthly check afterwards carries the first three and not the fourth. The computer identifier is a one-way hash — it tells us that two requests came from the same machine, and nothing else about it. It is salted so that the same computer looks different to each of our apps.
If the app cannot reach us, it keeps working. A timeout, no internet, a hotel wi-fi portal, or our own servers being down are all treated the same way: the app carries on exactly as before and tries again another time. There is no deadline after which it stops, so a machine that is offline for a year, or permanently, still works. The only thing that ever switches a licence off is a signed answer from us saying it was refunded.
Everything else is a property of how the app is built, not a setting you have to find and switch off.
The practical consequence, stated plainly because it cuts both ways: we have no copy of your data, so we cannot recover it for you. If your drive fails and you have no backup, the invoices are gone. That is the trade for us never holding your clients' details, and it is why the app has a one-click database backup — use it.
2. What the app stores on your computer
Everything the app remembers lives in SQLite database files on your own computer — one file per company you bill under — in a folder you can choose. By default:
- Windows:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\A Week From Wednesday\Companies\ - macOS:
~/Library/Application Support/A Week From Wednesday/Companies/
Each file holds that company's invoices and their line items, your client names and addresses, your payment records, your own business details, your default payment terms, and the path to your logo image. Choosing a logo copies the image into that company’s own folder as a PNG, so moving or deleting the original afterwards does not affect your invoices.
A small app.json beside that folder holds your settings: where the companies folder is, which company was open last, the appearance, your aging colours, your backup schedule and when the last one ran, your invoice sort order, and the collection messages you have edited. It contains no invoice or client data.
Exported PDFs are written only to the folder you pick in the save dialog. The app also writes a temporary PDF when you use Preview invoice, into your system temporary folder, so your PDF viewer has something to open.
Three more files live in the same folder: license.json, which holds your signed activation; custom-dictionary.txt, the words you have added to the spell checker; and a Backups folder of automatic copies of your books, if you have turned those on. Nothing else is written anywhere. There are no hidden caches, no logs sent off the machine, and no registry keys holding your data.
3. What you control
- Delete everything by deleting the folder above. Uninstalling the app deliberately leaves it in place, because an uninstall should never destroy your billing history — so if you want the data gone, delete the folder yourself.
- Copy it anywhere. They are ordinary SQLite files. Preferences ▸ Download database backup writes a copy wherever you choose, and any tool that reads SQLite can open it.
- Move it. Preferences ▸ Where companies are stored relocates the whole folder — a USB stick, or an encrypted volume. The
WEDNESDAY_DATA_DIRenvironment variable moves the app's entire data directory.
Because these files are not encrypted, anyone with access to your user account can read them. If your client records are sensitive, use full-disk encryption (BitLocker on Windows, FileVault on macOS), which is the right tool for this and is probably already on.
4. System access
The app asks the operating system for nothing unusual. It reads and writes its own companies folder, reads the logo image you choose, writes PDFs where you tell it to, and asks the OS to open a finished PDF in your default viewer. It does not read your other files, your contacts, your calendar, your clipboard, or your browsing history, and it requests no camera, microphone, or location access.
On macOS the app is signed and notarized with an Apple Developer ID, and asks for no entitlements beyond one technical exception needed to load its own Python components — no camera, no microphone, no location, and no access to your files beyond the folders you point it at.
5. When you buy
We do not process your payment, and we never see your card.
Orders go through Paddle.com Market Limited, our merchant of record. Paddle runs the checkout, takes the payment, issues your receipt, and calculates and remits VAT and sales tax for your country. Your card details go to Paddle and never reach us. Paddle acts as an independent data controller for the payment; see Paddle's privacy policy.
What we receive from Paddle is the order record: your email address, your name if you gave one, your country, and the order reference and amount. We use it to send you your download links and to answer questions about your order, and for our own tax and accounting records. That is the lawful basis of contract performance, plus our legal obligation to keep sales records.
We do not build a marketing list out of it. You will not get a newsletter because you bought a $14.99 invoicing app.
6. When you contact us
If you email us, we hold your email and whatever you write, for as long as it takes to help you and a reasonable period afterwards in case you come back about the same thing.
Please do not send us your invoice database or a PDF containing your clients' details unless we specifically ask and you are comfortable doing so — we usually do not need it, and it is your clients' data as much as yours. If you do send a file to help diagnose something, we delete it once the issue is resolved.
7. This website
This site is a set of static pages. We do not set advertising or tracking cookies and we do not run third-party analytics on these product pages.
Two things do involve a third party:
- The checkout. The buy page loads Paddle's checkout script from Paddle's servers, which sets the cookies Paddle needs to process a transaction and to prevent fraud. That happens on the buy page, not on this one.
- Hosting. The site is served by Vercel, which keeps short-lived server logs including IP addresses, as essentially every web host does, for security and to keep the service running.
The download links (/wednesday/download/win and /wednesday/download/mac) redirect to a public GitHub release. Following one means GitHub serves you the file and sees the request, as it would for any download from GitHub.
8. What we keep, and for how long
- Order records — for as long as tax and accounting law requires us to keep sales records, which is several years. We cannot delete a sales record on request without breaking that obligation, and Paddle holds its own copy independently.
- Support email — until the matter is closed, then a reasonable period afterwards. Deleted on request.
- Your invoices and client data — we never have them, so there is nothing for us to keep or delete. They are on your computer and under your control.
9. Sharing
We do not sell, rent, or trade personal data, and we do not share it for advertising. The only parties involved at all are the ones needed to sell you the software and deliver it: Paddle (payments, tax, receipts), our email provider (to send and receive mail), Vercel (hosting), and GitHub (serving the download). We may disclose information if legally compelled to.
10. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, to object to or restrict our use of it, to receive a copy in a portable form, and to complain to a supervisory authority. If you are in the EU or UK, these are your GDPR rights; if you are in California, the CCPA/CPRA gives you comparable ones, and we do not "sell" or "share" personal information as those terms are defined there.
To exercise any of them, email hello@ctrlcolab.com. In practice the whole of what we hold about a customer is an order record and possibly an email thread, so these requests are quick to answer. We will not charge you or make you jump through hoops, and we will not discriminate against you for asking.
For your data inside the app, no request to us is needed or possible — see §3, it is your file.
11. International transfers
CTRL Colab LLC is in the United States, so if you are outside the US, the limited data described above is processed there. Paddle operates internationally and applies its own transfer safeguards, including standard contractual clauses where required.
12. Children
This is business software and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16.
13. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the effective date above and the version number. Because the application collects nothing, a change here will almost always be about the website or the purchase process rather than the app. We will not make a change that quietly introduces telemetry — if the app ever gained a network feature, it would be announced, optional, and off by default.
14. Who we are, and how to reach us
A Week From Wednesday is made by CTRL Colab LLC, the data controller for the purposes of this policy.
For legal service or postal correspondence, please contact us by email and we will provide a physical address on request.
© 2026 CTRL Colab LLC. All rights reserved.