Privacy and data
Cards is designed around a local-first architecture. Your source code, card histories, and agent conversation transcripts remain on your local machine under your direct control.
Local-First Data Flow
Cards stores all work objects locally. The hosted dashboard at cards.management only processes account identity, licensing, billing, and team memberships.
Data Flow and Storage Locations
| Data Type | Description | Location | Transmitted To |
|---|---|---|---|
| Source Code | Your project files and repositories. | Local Disk | None (Stays Local) |
| Card Content | Descriptions (CARD.md), plans (plans/ directory), comments, and history. | ~/.cards/cards-repos/<id>/ | None (Stays Local) |
| Agent Transcripts | The step-by-step logs and tool execution history. | ~/.cards/cards-repos/<id>/streams/ | None (Stays Local) |
| Licensing & Billing | User account (authenticated via WorkOS), subscription tier, and active seat allocation. | cards.management database | WorkOS (identity), Polar (payment processor) |
| Inference Tokens | Prompts and responses sent during agent runs. | Local Agent Harness | Model Provider (direct connection) |
Local-first guarantees
- Zero codebase exposure: Cards never reads or transmits your source code to our servers. All parsing, context gathering, and diff generation happen locally in the extension and your local Git installation.
- Offline-ready card history: Because each card is a local Git repository, you can view, edit, and search your card history completely offline.
- Direct model provider traffic: The Cards extension does not proxy your LLM requests. The agent harness connects directly to your configured model provider (such as Anthropic or OpenAI) using your API keys. Your data is subject to the terms of service and data retention policies of the provider you select.
Managing backups
Because Cards does not sync your data to a cloud service, you are responsible for backing up your card history.
Backing up card repositories
All cards are stored in ~/.cards/cards-repos/. You can include this directory in your standard system backup routine (e.g., Time Machine, Arq, or restic).
Disabling telemetry
The Cards extension collects anonymous usage diagnostics to help us identify performance bottlenecks. We never collect source code, card text, filenames, or API keys.
To opt out of all telemetry:
- Open your VS Code Settings (
Ctrl+,orCmd+,). - Search for
Telemetry: Telemetry Level. - Set the level to
off(orcrashto only send crash reports).
Permissions and safety
How Cards divides safety responsibility between Git-hook metadata validation and agent harness execution permissions.
What Cards does not do
Understand the boundaries of the Cards extension: we are not the agent harness, do not run the agent loop, host models, store card content in the cloud, or impose workflow gates beyond the two optional plan and merge approval gates.