Stet is two products with two different answers to every question on this page, so it keeps them apart. Stet Desktop is an editor that runs on your machine. Stet Sync is an optional service that hosts the workspaces you choose to share.
Everything below describes what is built today, not what is planned.
It works with no account and no sign-in. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no update check. Your documents, their full history, every proposal and every decision you made about one, sit in a folder you chose on a disk you own.
Off until you turn it on, one workspace at a time. Sharing a workspace uploads a copy of that workspace. Workspaces you do not share never leave the machine. There is no step where the app decides to sync something for you.
Read the full Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Both are versioned, and old versions stay at permanent links.
The app ships no AI and calls no model. It watches a folder, captures what changed, and shows it to you. That is the whole job, and it needs no network to do it.
Four things can send data out of the app. You start all four, and each one is off until you do:
Nothing else in the app makes an outbound request. If you download Stet, open a folder, and never sign in, it never contacts a server, including ours.
Stet grades each incoming change as significant, normal, or trivial. The grade decides what leads your review queue, what warns you before you accept a batch, and in Hybrid folders, what waits for you while the rest lands on its own.
The grader is a fixed list of hand-written rules. Any one of these promotes a change to significant.
| Signal | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| A number changed | We shipped 12 boxes. | We shipped 20 boxes. |
| A date changed | Launch on 2026-08-15. | Launch on 2026-09-01. |
| A dollar amount changed | Budget is $1,200. | Budget is $1,450. |
| A negation changed the meaning | We can meet the deadline. | We can't meet the deadline. |
| A sentence was deleted | Ship Friday. Tell the client. | Ship Friday. |
| A paragraph was deleted | a whole paragraph | gone, nothing in its place |
| A heading changed | ## Budget | ## Costs |
| Frontmatter changed | status: draft | status: final |
| A link target changed | [docs](old.example.com) | [docs](new.example.com) |
| A low-overlap rewrite | a long passage | mostly new words on the same spot |
When two signals disagree, significant wins. Trivial has its own short list, whitespace, punctuation, capitalization, and a single swapped word, and it applies only when no significant signal is present. Everything else is normal. The full rule set is in the documentation.
No model is consulted. No network call is made. No text leaves your machine. The same change always gets the same grade, on any machine, offline, forever. You can read the rules and predict the output before you see it.
The rules are implemented twice, once in Rust and once in TypeScript, so the app can grade a change without a round trip between the two halves. The two copies are held to the same table of test cases, mirrored line for line between them, so they cannot drift apart without a test failing.
Grading also keeps its own counters, so Stet can tell you how much it caught. Those counters live in a JSON file inside your workspace folder, next to the documents they describe. They count events, never content, and they are not sent anywhere.
The reason to build it this way is not only privacy. A rules engine you can read is a rules engine you can audit. When Stet tells you a change is significant because a date moved, that is a claim you can check.
Stet does not ship a model, does not resell tokens, and never sends your documents to an AI provider. When Claude or Cursor or a script of your own edits a file in a Stet workspace, that agent is running on your machine under your own agreement with whoever makes it. Stet is not in that path. It sees the file after the write, the same way it would see an edit from a person.
One practical consequence for anyone evaluating this at a company: adopting Stet does not add an AI vendor to review. There is no model to approve, no API key to hand over, and no prompt data to ask about, because there are no prompts.
Sharing is hosted by us, so sharing means storing. This is the complete list.
Outside those acceptance records, we do not log your IP address in our database. IP addresses are used in memory to rate-limit abuse, and they appear in our hosting provider's standard server logs.
Everything travels over HTTPS. Servers are in the United States.
A shared workspace has an owner. Everyone else is a viewer, a commenter, or an editor, set per person by the owner.
The word "editor" is doing less work than it does elsewhere. An editor proposes. Their change arrives in the owner's review sidebar with a byline, exactly like an agent's, and the owner decides whether it stands. Approval is not a setting a collaborator can talk their way around. It is the same review gate the rest of the product is built on.
Per-document review links are capability URLs. Anyone holding the link can read and comment without an account, so treat the link itself as the credential and send it accordingly.
These providers process data on our behalf. The list is kept current, and a new one appears here in a new version of the privacy policy before it touches anything.
Deleting a shared workspace from the app starts a 30-day window, after which its documents and history are purged from our server. Doing it yourself is faster than asking us and does the same thing.
Account deletion is honored by hand today. Email support@getstet.app and we will delete the account, its sessions, and its sign-in records. Removing comments left through a review link works the same way, by asking.
Terms-acceptance records are the exception. They survive account deletion for six years, because they are the evidence that an agreement existed.
Email support@getstet.app. It reaches me directly. Report a vulnerability and you will get a real reply, a fix, and credit if you want it.
Questions about any of this before you adopt Stet at work are welcome at the same address.