Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 2026

Rentalist is a desktop application. The design premise of the product is that your financial data — bookings, expenses, guest information — stays on your computer. This policy explains exactly what information is and isn't transmitted when you use the application.

Data stored on your computer

All of the following is stored locally on your machine and is never transmitted to any server:

• Booking records, including guest names, contact information, payment history, and dates
• Expense records, amounts, vendors, and categories
• Pricing data, budgets, and financial analytics
• Guest directory, mailing lists, and inquiries
• Email messages Rentalist reads from your inbox, or that you paste or import yourself, and the booking details it takes out of them
• Settings, including tax rates, fee defaults, and platform configurations
• All backup files created by the application

Anything you paste into Rentalist, or import from a file on your computer, is read and interpreted on your machine. It is not uploaded anywhere, and no outside service — including any AI service — is involved at any point.

Internet usage

Rentalist does its work offline. It uses the internet for three things, and only these three:

• Checking your subscription. If you bought Rentalist directly from rentalist.pro, the application checks your subscription status with our payment provider, Lemon Squeezy. That request sends your license key and a name identifying the computer you're on. If you bought through the Apple App Store or the Microsoft Store, that check happens on your own computer using the receipt the store issued, and your purchase and renewals are handled by the store itself.
• Checking for a newer version. The version you download from rentalist.pro fetches a small file from our website that lists the current version number, and compares it to the version you're running. The request carries no license key and none of your data — it is the same kind of request your web browser makes when it opens a page. App Store and Microsoft Store versions get updates through the store instead.
• Reading your inquiry email, if you turn that on. Rentalist connects to your own email provider — your mailbox, your account — and to nothing else. The next section explains exactly how that works.

These requests do not transmit any booking records, guest information, financial data, or any other content you have entered into the application.

Everything else the application needs, it already has: holiday dates are built in and calculated on your computer, and the federal mileage rate is either built in or entered by you from the IRS's published figure. Links inside Rentalist — to the IRS, to a booking site's help page — open in your own web browser; the application isn't sending anything when you click one.

There is no analytics, no usage tracking, and no telemetry of any kind in the application. Your data is never sent to us. We don't keep it, see it, or want to. We will never knowingly expose your data outside of your computer.

Connecting your email (optional)

Rentalist can read the inquiry emails your booking sites send you, so you don't have to retype them. It is off unless you turn it on, you turn it on one property at a time, and you can turn it off at any time.

When it is on:

• Rentalist connects from your computer straight to your own email provider. There is no Rentalist server in between, no third-party service, and no AI. The email is read and interpreted by the application itself, on your machine.
• Access is read-only. Rentalist cannot change, move, or delete anything in your mailbox, and it cannot send mail. It doesn't even mark a message as read.
• It only opens mail that matches what you have turned on — messages from the booking sites you have enabled and, if you switch on receipt capture, messages from your own address. A personal message from someone else who happens to have your email address is never opened.
• Nothing is saved into your records on its own. What Rentalist finds waits in a review list until you accept it, item by item.
• Your app password is scrambled before it's stored on your computer, and the key that unscrambles it lives in your operating system's own vault — your Mac's Keychain, or Windows' built-in data protection. Neither the scrambled password nor the key ever goes into a backup, and neither is ever sent to us. If you restore a backup onto a new computer, Rentalist will ask you to enter that password again. To be straight with you about the limit of that: encrypting the password protects it in storage and in backups, but it is not protection against another program running on your computer under your own account.
• Nothing from your mail is sent to us or to anyone else. It goes from your email provider to your computer, and stops there.

Purchase and payment information

Rentalist is sold through LemonSqueezy, which acts as the merchant of record. If you purchase directly through rentalist.pro, your payment information is handled entirely by LemonSqueezy and is subject to their privacy policy. Rentalist does not store or have access to your payment details.

If you purchase through the Apple App Store or Microsoft Store, your transaction is governed by Apple's or Microsoft's privacy policy respectively.

This website (rentalist.pro)

This website uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people find useful. It records the ordinary web basics — which pages were viewed, roughly where the visitor is, and what browser and device they used. It is not used for advertising, and we don't run advertising trackers. This applies to the website only: the Rentalist application itself contains no analytics or tracking of any kind.

If you contact us, your message and its contents are received and read by the creator. We don't share support correspondence with anyone else.

Backup files

Rentalist creates automatic and manual backup files stored on your machine. These files contain all of your application data in JSON format. You control where they are saved — the application's default data directory, or any folder you designate. Backup files are not transmitted to any server. Your email app password is never inside a backup — it is stored scrambled on your computer, and the key that unscrambles it stays in your operating system's own vault.

Children's privacy

Rentalist is a financial management tool for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

Changes to this policy

If the privacy characteristics of the application change materially, this policy will be updated and the change noted in the application release notes.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Send us a message.