Security and privacy
What leaves your machine: almost nothing.
Terera is a teleprompter for Windows and Mac. It reads your scripts and hears your voice, which is why speech recognition runs on your computer. This page explains its model downloads, the free trial’s one message and its licence checks, and how to inspect its network behaviour.
The complete network behaviour
The app connects for up to three purposes: getting its speech model, starting the free trial (from Terera 2.1.0), and managing your licence. Setup and validation can involve more than one request.
| When | What | What’s in it |
|---|---|---|
| Model setup or repair | About 190 MB downloads from the model’s public repository on Hugging Face. The installed model runs locally. | The download host can see standard connection information, including your IP address. Your script and microphone audio are not part of the download request. |
| Starting the free trial | From Terera 2.1.0, one request to terera.app when you start the free trial, and another on a later start only if the first could not connect. | A one-way code for the computer (not the code used for licences), the app version and the operating system. Kept for 12 months. Your script, audio and rehearsal history are not included. |
| Activation and periodic licence checks | Keygen checks the licence and registers each machine against one of your three seats. A failed network connection alone does not lock you out. | Your licence key and a device identifier are used for validation. Your script, audio and rehearsal history are not included. The privacy policy explains the licence and purchase information held by our providers. |
Speech recognition runs on your processor and audio is discarded as it is transcribed. Your scripts, formatting and rehearsal history stay in your user profile on the computer. You activate with a licence key rather than creating a user account. New versions are available from the download page.
Verify it yourself
Don’t take the table’s word for it. Terera behaves identically under observation:
- Install Terera and activate your key while online.
- Run any network monitor: Windows’ own Resource Monitor (
resmon, Network tab); on a Mac, Activity Monitor’s Network tab, ornettopin Terminal; Wireshark, or your corporate proxy logs. - Use the app hard: paste a sensitive script, speak, go off script, check your run summary.
- After setup, check that speech recognition and reading continue with the network disconnected. When online, model setup or repair, starting the free trial and licence validation can generate requests.
If you observe traffic that seems unrelated to these purposes, contact security@terera.app. Include the app version and what you observed so we can investigate.
The website, stated plainly
terera.app sets no cookies, carries no advertising or cross-site trackers, and shows no consent banner, because nothing is stored on your device and the only thing read from it is the visit measurement described below, which uses no cookies. Our own fonts and scripts are served from our own origin. There are two exceptions. Cloudflare, which delivers the site, adds its Web Analytics script, which uses no cookies and loads from static.cloudflareinsights.com, so we can count visits and measure page speed. It reads the page address, the referring page, load timings and your browser and operating system version, and stores nothing; we see totals, not people. And on the checkout pages, /buy and /teams, Paddle, the merchant of record, sets the cookies its secure payment flow needs, and only there. Cloudflare also keeps standard server logs; the privacy policy says exactly what that means.
For IT and procurement
| Runtime | Desktop app (Electron). Windows 10/11: per-user install, no admin rights required. macOS 15.5 or later, Apple silicon or Intel: drag to Applications. |
|---|---|
| Speech processing | On-device (sherpa-onnx streaming recogniser). No cloud speech API, no audio retention. |
| Data at rest | Scripts, settings, stats in the user’s profile: %APPDATA% on Windows, where uninstall offers full data deletion, and ~/Library/Application Support on a Mac. |
| Egress allowlist | Model downloads start at huggingface.co and can redirect to its file-delivery hosts. The free trial uses terera.app. Licensing uses api.keygen.sh. Inspect setup requests when preparing a corporate allowlist. |
| Code signing | Windows: Authenticode via Azure Trusted Signing, publisher TERKON PTY LTD. Mac: Developer ID Application, TERKON PTY LTD, notarized by Apple. The download links serve each download’s SHA-256 in a response header. |
| Accounts and auth | None. A licence key, three machines, no passwords to breach. |
| Licensing at scale | A team pack for five people at terera.app/teams; larger teams: sales@terera.app. |
Statements on this page describe the current shipping version and are kept in lockstep with releases. If a future feature changes any of it (an optional update checker, for example), this page and the privacy policy change first, visibly.
Related: where speech recognition runs, in a dated comparison.