Privacy

Session names, talent names and file paths stay on your Mac. This website does not watch you.

This website

sessionhud.com is static files on Cloudflare. It sets no cookies except the one that keeps you signed in to your account page, and it does not embed analytics, fonts or ads, and does not send your browser to a third party. Cloudflare sees the request metadata any HTTPS host sees — IP address, user agent, timestamp — in order to serve the page and keep the network up. We do not run a tracker on top of that.

If you email support@sessionhud.com, we keep the thread for twelve months after it goes quiet, and then delete it. That is the whole retention policy for support email; the rest of what we keep is listed under How long we keep it.

The Mac app

SessionHUD is a local companion. It talks to Pro Tools on this Mac only, watches record folders without writing to them, and optionally listens for MIDI Time Code. It does not create an account. It contacts our license service to start an evaluation, activate a serial, renew a Mac’s authorization in the background, or release a seat. A Mac on a subscription can work offline for up to 30 days after renewal; one on a perpetual license can work offline indefinitely and checks in when it can. These requests do not contain session contents.

It also checks for updates automatically by downloading a small file, sessionhud.com/appcast.xml, that lists the current version. That request carries what any download does — your IP address, and the app’s name and version in the user agent — and nothing about your Mac, your sessions or your license. It never installs an update without asking.

Starting the 14-day evaluation

The first time it runs, and again whenever this Mac has no license (for example after you release one), SessionHUD asks us for the signed license that runs your 14-day evaluation. Asking again returns the same evaluation. That request contains one thing: a one-way hash (SHA-256) of this Mac’s hardware identifier. No name, no email address, no session information, no file paths, nothing about what you are recording. We cannot reverse the hash into a serial number, a Mac, or a person.

We store that hash with the date your 14 days started and the license we issued for them, so that asking again returns the same evaluation rather than a fresh one. We also note the country and region (a state or province) the request came from, as Cloudflare reports it, so we know where SessionHUD is used. We never store the IP address that was derived from, and nothing finer than a region. That is the whole of the row. It is what makes the evaluation a real 14 days rather than a date you could reset, and it is the only reason we keep it.

We cannot tell from it who you are or what studio you work in, and we do not combine it with anything else. There is no analytics, no crash reporting and no telemetry anywhere in the app.

• Session, track, talent and client names, and file paths, live in memory and in files on that Mac, and are marked private wherever they are logged.
• Take numbers, and whether SessionHUD called a value confirmed, a best guess, last known or not known, are treated as technical signal. Diagnostics is useless without them.
• The log you can copy from Diagnostics leaves those names and paths out unless you turn on Include content, on purpose, before copying.

When something does leave the machine

Only if you turn it on:

• Browser viewer and local API. Readable from this Mac only until you turn on the Browser button; while it is on, readable from your local network too, unless you set Reachable from to This Mac only in Settings ▸ Browser & API. There is no password and no pairing code: anyone who can reach the address can read it — any account on this Mac, and while the Browser button is on, anyone on that network. What they can read is the take number, the session name, whether Pro Tools is recording, and whatever your layout shows, including talent and client names if you put them on it. Nothing is sent anywhere, nothing is written, and it never reaches Pro Tools. The manual describes the setting.
• Virtual camera. Visible to every app on the Mac once it is running. It shows the layout, not a SessionHUD watermark. Other apps can record or transmit that picture; that is their doing, not a SessionHUD upload.

There is no cloud relay in this product. License requests do not carry session contents. Renewal normally becomes due once per day; failed requests retry no more than hourly while the app is running.

When you buy

The sale is handled by Link (link.com, Stripe’s payment service) as merchant of record, through Stripe’s Managed Payments — Link is the seller, takes the payment and each subscription renewal, sends the receipts and renewal notices, and handles tax. Your card details never reach us and are covered by Link’s and Stripe’s privacy policies. Link keeps its own record of the payment; asking Link to delete your data cancels your subscriptions with it.

What we receive is the email address you give at checkout, a Stripe customer reference, the item, date, amount and payment status, and the invoice Stripe creates. For a subscription we also hold what Stripe tells us as it changes: its status, how many Macs it covers, its price, its renewal date, and whether a cancellation is pending — that is what decides whether its Macs keep renewing. We keep a private copy of that invoice PDF so its receipt remains available after Stripe’s own link expires. We store these records so we can send you a serial number and download link, and so your account page can show your licenses and receipts later. The receipt is not public: an emailed link can be used once to start a private 30-minute browser session, and that same session is required to open a receipt. Returning from checkout starts the same kind of session once, within an hour of the purchase, so your serial is on screen when you finish paying; Stripe’s reference for your checkout is what identifies it. We will not sell this information. There is no password or standing user account; the emailed link is the identity check. When you ask for that link, the page tells you whether the address has a license, so you can find the one you paid with. That also means anyone who types your address can learn that it bought SessionHUD, and nothing more: no link, serial or receipt is shown, the link only ever goes to the address itself, and requests are rate-limited. If you opted in at checkout we also write to you about releases and about other tools we make; if you did not, we do not.

When you type your serial into SessionHUD, the app sends us three things: the serial, a one-way hash of this Mac's hardware identifier, and the name the Mac calls itself — so your account page can say “Studio B Mac Pro” instead of a row of hex, and so we can count how many Macs a license is running on. As with the evaluation, we note the country and region the request came from, never the IP address. When a Mac takes a seat on a license, we email the license’s owner the Mac’s name and that country and region, so a serial used without their knowledge is noticed. The hash is one-way and specific to SessionHUD: it cannot be turned back into an identifier, and it is not a value anyone else can match against their own records. Renewal and app-initiated seat-release requests send the license ID, machine hash and a per-activation credential. The server checks that credential before renewing or releasing that Mac, and returns a signed authorization for renewals — valid for up to 30 days on a subscription, and without an offline limit on a perpetual license. A release code typed on the account page is checked against that same credential; it is derived on the Mac and never sent by the app.

Ask us at any time and we will delete the record; deleting the license record prevents future renewals, and the authorization already on your Mac stops working when its offline period ends. The formal version of that, and the five other things you can ask for, are under What you can ask for.

Who we are, and on what basis we hold it

The data controller is Fontaine Creative LLC, a New Jersey company. Write to support@sessionhud.com. There is no second controller, no parent company and no data broker behind us.

Five things are processed. Three of them rest on Article 6(1)(b) GDPR: the evaluation record is the step you asked for before entering a contract, and the license record and the activation perform the contract itself once you buy. None is optional to the thing it delivers. The fourth is email you asked for, offered to buyers in the United States only; it rests on your consent — Article 6(1)(a) — and it is kept separate from the others on purpose. The fifth, the approximate location noted on an evaluation or an activation, is the only thing here we hold for our own reasons rather than yours, and it rests on legitimate interest, Article 6(1)(f): knowing where SessionHUD is used, so we can plan support and the product around the people using it, and telling a license’s owner roughly where a newly activated Mac connected from. A country and a region cannot identify you, and you can object to it.

• The evaluation record — a one-way hash of the Mac, the date its 14 days started, and the license we issued for them, written on that Mac’s first launch. It is what makes the evaluation a real fourteen days rather than a date that could be reset, and it is what lets the same Mac ask again and get the same answer. There is no email address on this row and nothing that identifies you; it exists before we know who you are, and it is never joined to a license record except to clear its location when the owner of that Mac objects to it or asks us to delete their records.
• The license and purchase record — the email address you give at checkout, Stripe customer, Checkout, subscription and invoice references, what you bought, its date, amount and payment status, a subscription’s status, number of Macs, price and renewal date, and a private copy of the invoice PDF. Without it we cannot send you a serial number or preserve the receipt, and your account page has nothing to show you.
• Email you asked for — your address, and the record that you asked: when, and on which checkout. If you buy from the United States, checkout asks whether you would like email from us about SessionHUD releases and other audio tools we make; outside the United States the question is not asked and your address is never used for it. You opt in at checkout or not at all: the box is never pre-ticked, buying does not put you on the list, nothing about your purchase or your price changes either way, and there is no other route on. Say no and that address is used for your license and nothing else, forever. As of October 2026, we have not sent any of this email.
• The activation — the one-way machine hash and the name the Mac calls itself, sent when you type your serial. Renewal and app-initiated release also send the machine hash, license ID and an activation credential; we retain released and revoked status to enforce your device choices. A license covers a set number of Macs and you administer that set yourself. The hash is what a Mac is to that count; take it away and there is no count. The name is what the row reads as on your account page; take it away and you are pressing Revoke beside a row of hex.
• Approximate location — the country and region (a state or province) Cloudflare reports for the request that started an evaluation or activated a Mac, stored on that row. Never the IP address, never a city. We read it in aggregate — how many installs in which places — and never to look up a particular customer. The one place a single activation’s location appears is the email its license’s owner gets when that Mac takes a seat.

None of it feeds advertising, profiling, scoring or an automated decision. There is nothing here that could.

No EU or UK representative is appointed under Article 27, and that is a decision rather than a silence. The exemption applies to a controller whose processing is occasional, excludes special-category data, and is unlikely to result in a risk to the people in it. All three hold: processing happens when somebody starts an evaluation, buys a license and activates a Mac, not on a schedule; what is held is an email address, a Stripe reference, a hash and a computer name; none of that is health, biometric, political or any other special category. The one thing here that runs because time passed rather than because you pressed something — email you asked for — is offered only to buyers in the United States, so it holds nobody in the EU or the UK. If that changes, a representative is appointed before it ships, not after.

Where it is

Fontaine Creative LLC is in New Jersey. Cloudflare serves this site, runs the license Worker, stores the private receipt copy and stores encrypted operational database backups; Stripe takes the payment and creates the invoice. Both are US companies. So if you are in the EU, the UK or Switzerland, buying SessionHUD moves your data to the United States, and we are not going to write around that.

The transfer mechanism is our processors’ own. Stripe and Cloudflare each publish a data processing addendum incorporating the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, and we are bound by those terms as their customer. Fontaine Creative LLC operates no separate transfer program, because there is no separate transfer to operate — the data sits in their systems, not in a system of ours beside them.

How long we keep it

• The evaluation record — kept. Deleting it is what would hand the same Mac a second fourteen days, so the row outlives the evaluation it ends, exactly like the unsubscribe list below. It holds no address and names nobody.
• Support email — twelve months after the thread goes quiet, then deleted. Long enough that a problem coming back still has its history; short enough that an email about a session two years ago is gone.
• The license, purchase record and receipt PDF — the life of the license. A perpetual license does not end, and a subscription license outlives a lapsed subscription so that subscribing again from the account page brings back the same serial, so either way that means until you ask us to delete it, except for any transaction record the law requires us to retain. A license record we deleted is a serial we cannot give you back, and a receipt PDF we deleted is no longer available from the account page.
• Database backups — daily operational copies age out automatically. Most are deleted after thirty-five days, Sunday copies after one hundred days, and monthly or manually requested recovery copies after four hundred days. They are private recovery files, not available through the product. If we restore one, we reapply deletion requests made after that copy was created.
• Approximate location — as long as the evaluation or activation row it is on, and deleted with it. Objecting clears it from your rows without touching anything else.
• A replaced serial — kept, marked retired, with the date and whether it was replaced or retired by revoking a Mac, so support can answer “that serial was replaced on this date”. Nothing activates against it. Deleting the license record deletes it too.
• A released Mac — kept, and marked released. Releasing a Mac from SessionHUD, or with its release code, frees the seat straight away; it does not erase the row. “This Mac was on this license and is not any more” is a support answer, and a deleted row cannot give it. Deleting the license record deletes those rows with it.
• Email you asked for — until you unsubscribe. Every message we send will carry the link, one click will be the whole of it, and there is no reason to give and no confirmation step to finish. Until the first message, writing to support withdraws it.
• An address that unsubscribed — kept, on a list that exists only so we never write to it again. Deleting that row is what would let the address back on, so it outlives the opt-in it ends. Deleting the license record deletes it too.
• Magic links — the link expires twenty-four hours after it is issued and stops working as soon as it has been exchanged once for a browser session. The row recording it is kept and holds a hash of the token, the address it went to, and when it expired.
• Account sessions — a one-way hash of a random browser token, the address it authorizes, when it started and when it expires. The raw token stays in a Secure, HttpOnly browser cookie. A session stops working after thirty minutes; expired rows are removed during later sign-ins and on a deletion request.
• Recovery-email cooldown — a one-way hash of the normalized address and the last successful request time. It prevents more than one account-link email going to the same address in ten minutes. It is operational security data and is deleted with the license record on request.

What you can ask for

Write to support@sessionhud.com from the address on the license. There is no password or standing user account — the address you paid with is the identification, and it is where the single-use account link goes. We answer within thirty days.

• Access. Everything we hold about you: the license and purchase records, receipt PDFs, and the Macs the license is on. Your account page already shows you most of it without asking us.
• Correction. An address that is wrong, or one that no longer reaches you — we move the license to the new one.
• Deletion. We delete the record. Deleting the license record removes the account page and prevents authorization renewal. Existing offline access ends when the current authorization expires. A subscription still renewing is cancelled at the same time, so a deleted license is never charged again.
• Withdrawal. Unsubscribe — from any message, or by writing to us — stops the email at any time, and nothing else moves: the license, the serial and the account page never depended on it. It is not deletion — the address stays on the do-not-write list above, which is the only way the unsubscribe can be honored.
• Objection. To the approximate location we note. We clear it from your rows, and the evaluation, the license and every Mac keep working exactly as before.
• Portability. The record as a file you can keep or hand to somebody else. It is a small file.

We do not sell or share personal information — in the CCPA’s sense of those two words, or any other sense. We never have, there is no sale to opt out of, and there is no do-not-sell link because there is nothing behind it. Asking for any of the above costs you nothing: the price does not change, no feature is withdrawn, and your purchased features remain the same, subject to authorization renewal; deleting the license record prevents renewal. There is no account tier to move you down to.

Children

SessionHUD is professional audio software sold to studios and engineers. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child’s data has reached us, write to support@sessionhud.com and we will delete it.

Effective 19 October 2026. This page describes the shipping app and this website, not a future cloud service.