Your day stays on your PC.

Who runs WinNotch

WinNotch is made and sold by Aryan Patel, an individual in India, who is responsible for the information described here. Questions, or requests to see, correct or delete anything I hold about you, go to support@winnotch.xyz. I aim to reply within 3 working days. These rights follow India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, and apply wherever you are.

Your planner

WinNotch keeps your tasks and their reminders, daily notes, focus history, calendar events you import from an .ics file, the teams you follow, text clips, macros, shortcuts and preferences in one file on your PC: %LOCALAPPDATA%\WinNotch\planner.json. There's no WinNotch account.

Each save keeps the one before it as planner.backup.json in the same folder, so a damaged file can be recovered. Two small files beside them remember update status and the latest currency rates, and license.dat holds your licence activation, encrypted for your Windows account. Settings lets you export a backup, restore one, and open the folder.

The File Shelf stores references to files and folders, not copies. Text clips are saved only when you choose Save copied text; WinNotch doesn't watch your clipboard.

When it goes online

Sports. Scores, fixtures, match details and team badges come from ESPN's public website feeds and image servers. No account or key is used.

Currency. The converter downloads daily ECB reference rates through Frankfurter and keeps a local copy for offline use.

Updates. About every six hours WinNotch downloads a small file describing the newest version from WinNotch's public releases page on GitHub. The installer is downloaded only when you choose Update now. If an update is required, that is remembered on your PC so it still applies offline.

Licence. When you activate WinNotch, and about twice a day after that, it sends your licence key and your PC's name to Dodo Payments, who sell WinNotch on my behalf, to confirm the licence. The PC's name lets you tell your PCs apart on your licence page.

Licence check-in. When the licence is confirmed, WinNotch also checks in with the WinNotch licence dashboard, at dash.winnotch.xyz. It sends your licence key, the ID Dodo Payments gave this PC's activation, the PC's name, and the versions of WinNotch and Windows it's running. The key only proves the activation is real: the dashboard checks it with Dodo Payments and doesn't store it. The dashboard keeps the activation's ID and the ID of the key it belongs to (not the key itself), the PC's name, the two versions, when the PC first and last checked in and how many times, in a Postgres database hosted by Vercel with Neon. If you contact me for support, I may also keep a short note there with your purchase, to remember what we discussed. It doesn't store your IP address. I use these records to help you when you need support and to see where each key is used. To see or delete yours, ask me.

Like any website visit, these requests show the service ordinary details such as your IP address. None of them receives anything from your planner. Everything else, including tasks, notes, focus, Search, the calculator and screen text, works offline.

Windows features

WinNotch reads information Windows already exposes: volume, supported brightness, battery, Bluetooth audio devices and performance counters. Now Playing uses the Spotify session, artwork included, that Windows media controls provide.

Download alerts watch file names and sizes in your Downloads folder, never their contents, and the Downloads list keeps your 20 most recent downloads in your planner.

To stay out of a fullscreen game's way, WinNotch checks whether the fullscreen window in front is a game, using Windows' own Game Bar records and where the program is installed. It keeps no record of what you play.

Task reminders, finished focus sessions and update checks you start can appear as Windows notifications. Windows keeps them in its notification centre until you clear them, and a reminder shows the task's title.

While a focus session runs, WinNotch switches off Windows toast notifications and restores your exact previous setting when the session ends. You can turn this off with Silence notifications during focus in Settings.

Coding agents

Connecting Claude Code or Codex adds a small hook or notify command that passes a short notice to WinNotch on your PC through a local named pipe. The notice shows in the notch and is not sent anywhere else.

Screen text

Screen text grab uses Windows OCR and your installed language packs. The captured image stays in memory and is never saved. You review the text before copying it or adding it to your note.

This website

This site has no analytics, ads, cookies, third-party fonts or sign-up forms, and it doesn't store anything in your browser. The recordings and the film were made in WinNotch on Windows with sample data.

Your licence page is separate, at dash.winnotch.xyz. You sign in there with Google, before buying too, so your licence always belongs to your Google account's email. Google tells the page your email address, whether Google has verified it, and your name; it asks for nothing else, and the page never sees your Google password. One cookie keeps you signed in: it holds that email and name, signed so it can't be altered, and ends when you sign out or after twelve hours. A second, short-lived cookie only links the sign-in to its return from Google and is removed straight after. To show the page, it asks Dodo Payments for the WinNotch licences bought with your email, their keys and status, and the names of the PCs using them, and doesn't keep any of it. Each key works on one PC, so you make a key there for each of your other PCs: the page keeps those keys, encrypted, with the licence they belong to, so it can show them to you again, and records when you revoke one. It also shows when each PC last checked in and which version of WinNotch it runs, from the check-in records described above.

If you were given a code, for a giveaway or as a tester, redeeming it there records the code with your email and when you redeemed it, so I can see who it went to, and adds your email and name to Dodo Payments as a customer so its keys can be issued. Nothing is paid or charged. If I made a code for you by name, I keep your email with it, and send it to you by email.

Those emails, and the occasional notice about a change I make to your licence, are sent through Resend, an email delivery service, which receives your email address and the message to deliver it.

Like any hosted site, visiting this site or the licence page sends ordinary request information, such as your IP address, to their hosting provider, Vercel, which may keep short-lived server logs for security. I don't use those logs to identify visitors.

Buying and support

This site doesn't take payments itself. Checkout happens on the page of Dodo Payments, who sell WinNotch on my behalf and issue its licence keys. They collect your payment details and shares with me only what's needed to deliver and support your purchase: your name, email address, country and order details. I never see your card number.

I keep order records for as long as tax and accounting law requires, and use your email only to deliver WinNotch, answer support, and tell you about updates to the version you bought. I don't sell or share it, and I don't send marketing.

If you email support, I keep the conversation only as long as needed to help you, then delete it. Please don't send your planner.json or a backup unless I ask: they contain your notes and tasks.