Akastroid collects nothing about you. What it sends about your runs and pictures, the few other requests it makes, and how to switch them off.

This is the operative document. The terms and privacy pages summarize it in plainer language; where a summary and this page differ, this page is what you agreed to.

Version 1.2 · Effective 16 October 2026

The short version

Akastroid collects nothing about you. What it sends about your runs and pictures is set by two switches, described in section 3.

Never your frames, your file names or folders, your name, or anything that identifies this computer.

In the application there is no analytics library and no account.

Apart from those two switches, three other requests exist. When you enter a licence key, Akastroid contacts our activation server once (see section 2). If update checking is switched on (it is by default), Akastroid asks a file hosted on GitHub whether a newer version exists, sending the version you are running and your platform, and, as with any request over the internet, your IP address is visible to the host serving it. And when an installation opens on a version it has not opened before, it sends one anonymous confirmation of that: your platform, that version, and the version it was running before, if any. Nothing else, and never more than once per version: once on a fresh install, and once after an update. This exists because the application is not yet notarised with an Apple Developer ID, so some installs hit a Gatekeeper warning before they can open at all; comparing this count against how many people downloaded is the only way we have to see how often that happens. Reporting it again after an update is how we see whether a release actually reaches people. It reuses the update-check setting rather than adding a separate one, and, because this promise means something, it only ever applies to an installation that has not yet finished a single image. If you already had Akastroid before this was added, updating changes nothing for you: this does not fire retroactively for an existing install.

Switch update checking and the two switches off under Help → Check for updates, and once your licence is activated, Akastroid makes no network requests at all. It works identically with the machine offline either way, including processing, which never needs a network under any circumstances.

The website is a separate thing. akastroid.com runs Google Analytics, which sets cookies and records which pages are visited. That is about the site, not the software (see section 8). Nothing links the two.

1. Who we are

Adiavi Labs, of 45F, DB Block, Hari Nagar, New Delhi 110064, India, is the data controller for the limited information described in section 5. Contact: hello@akastroid.com.

2. Activation

A licence covers one computer, or two on a Pro Studio licence, and counting that is the one thing that cannot be done on your own machine: a second computer has no way to know about the first. So when you enter a licence key, Akastroid makes one request to our activation server.

What is sent: your licence key, a short value identifying this computer, and a name for the computer so you can recognise it on your account page. The identifying value is a hash of a system identifier your operating system already provides, not the identifier itself, and not reversible into one.

What is not sent: anything about your images, file names, folders, camera, settings, or how you use the Software. Not then, and not afterwards.

When: once, at the moment you enter the key. Not on launch, not on processing, not on export, not on any schedule. Once your licence is confirmed Akastroid never contacts the activation server again.

If we cannot be reached: Akastroid works normally for fourteen days and confirms itself when you are next online.

We keep, against your licence: the hashed computer value, the name you gave the computer, and when it was activated and released. You can see that list, and release every computer on it, at akastroid.com/account. Deactivating in the application deletes the local record and frees the place.

3. What the application does with your files

Akastroid reads the frames you point it at, processes them on your computer’s own CPU, and writes the results where you tell it to.

While it is working it writes a scratch cache of intermediate frames to your system temporary directory. This cache is deleted when the session closes, and any cache left behind by an interrupted run is removed the next time the application starts.

Your source frames are never modified.

Run notes and the finished picture

Two switches under Help → Check for updates send information about your runs to our server. Both are on unless you turn them off, and the no-telemetry file described in section 4 stops both.

Send a note when a run finishes. How long the run took, how many frames went in, the settings it used, the processing log and, if it failed, the error. Every file name and folder is removed before it leaves.
Send the finished picture to Akastroid. Akastroid asks about this the first time it opens, with the switch shown on. With it on, each run that makes a picture sends it in full, with the telescope and camera names, the frame count and the exposure. After a deep-sky or planetary run it also sends the stacked image the picture was made from (made smaller when over 45 MB) and a 1,200 pixel JPEG of the picture, once per session. Never your frames, a file name, your name or anything that identifies this computer.

Sent pictures are kept and used to improve Akastroid’s processing. As with the other requests, the country the connection came from is recorded; the IP address itself is not stored.

4. How this can be verified

You do not have to take our word for any of it. The claim is checkable:

Watch the network. Run Akastroid behind Little Snitch, LuLu, Wireshark, or your firewall’s logging, turn off the two switches in section 3, and process a session. You will see no requests at all: activation has already happened, the first-open confirmation (if this is not a fresh install, it never ran at all; see the short version above) has already happened, and the update check is the only other one, and only if it is switched on.
Pull the plug. Disconnect from the network entirely. Everything works.
Turn the update check off. Then watch again: nothing at all, on a fresh install included. The same setting stops the first-open confirmation too.
Or opt out permanently, without losing update checks. Create an empty file named no-telemetry beside the licence, in ~/Library/Application Support/akastroid/ on macOS, or %APPDATA%\akastroid\ on Windows. While it is there the first-open confirmation never runs, on any version, and updates keep working. Development builds never send it at all.

The part of Akastroid that reads and processes your frames is a separate Rust engine with no networking code in it. Not disabled: absent. There is no code path by which an image could be sent anywhere, because none was written. The activation request lives in a different module entirely, is made from one place, and never sees a frame.

5. What we do hold

Apart from the run notes and pictures in section 3, we collect nothing through the application. We do hold information you give us directly:

What	Why	How long
Your email address and licence key	To issue and support your licence	While your licence is active
The email address you give to download	To know whether the free version leads to a purchase, and to send you release notes for the build you took	2 years from your last download
The computers a licence is active on	To enforce the one-computer limit in clause 2.3 of the Licence Agreement	While the licence is active
Payment records	Legal and tax obligation	As long as tax law requires, typically 6-7 years
Emails you send to support	To answer you	2 years, then deleted
A rating and answers you submit on the feedback page, and the address if you add one	To read and count what people think of the software, and to reply if you asked something	2 years, then deleted
Diagnostic reports you choose to send	To fix the problem you reported	Deleted when the issue is closed
That an uninstall happened, with the platform, version and country	To know how many people leave, not only the few who say why	2 years, then deleted
What you write on the uninstall page, and the address if you add one	To learn why people leave, and to reply if you asked something	2 years, then deleted
The country a download or a first open came from	To know where Akastroid is used, and where to translate and advertise next	With the row it belongs to

The country, and what it is not. A download or a first open records the two-letter country it came from, and for a download the region within it: “US”, “California”. Cloudflare works that out at the edge from the connection; we neither read nor store the IP address itself, and nothing finer than a region is kept. It tells us which countries to translate and advertise for, and it cannot tell us who you are.

Uninstalling. Nothing in Akastroid reports that you removed it, and nothing could; the software is gone. On Windows the uninstaller opens a page asking why, which you are free to close; on macOS there is no uninstall hook at all, and that page exists only as a link in the Help menu.

When that page opens it records that an uninstall happened: the platform, the version and the country, and nothing else. No identifier, no address, and nothing that links it to you or to any other row. If you then answer the form, your reason and anything you write are added to that same record; if you close the tab, that is where it ends. You can stop even the first record by closing the page before it loads, or by declining to open it at all. The uninstall itself is already finished by then and nothing depends on it.

The download address is not a mailing list. We do not sell it, share it, or add it to marketing without asking you first. You can have it deleted at any time by writing to hello@akastroid.com, and doing so costs you nothing. The software does not check it and never did.

Payment card details never reach us. Payment is handled by our payment processor, Lemon Squeezy (our merchant of record; earlier orders went through Razorpay), under its own privacy policy. We receive confirmation of payment and your email address, not your card number.

6. Diagnostic reports

Akastroid can produce a diagnostic report (the processing log, the app version, your operating system and CPU core count) through Help → Diagnostics.

This report is never sent automatically. It is copied to your clipboard or saved to a file, and nothing happens to it unless you choose to paste it into an email to us.

Before it is shown to you, file paths in the report are shortened so that your username and folder structure are replaced with ~. Read it before you send it. If you would rather not send it, describe the problem in words instead; we will still help.

Nobody, except:

our payment processor, to take payment;
our email provider, to reply to you;
an authority, where the law requires it.

We do not sell data. We do not share data for advertising. We do not run advertising.

8. The website uses Google Analytics

This applies to akastroid.com, not to the application. The two are separate, and the distinction is the whole point: the software you install sends nothing to Google Analytics, and no analytics code exists in it.

The website loads Google Analytics 4, which sets cookies and records the pages you visit, roughly where you are (country or city level, from your IP), and which site or search sent you. Google is the processor; its own privacy terms apply to what it does with that.

It is there to answer one question, which guides bring people who go on to download, and nothing about your photographs is involved.

To opt out: use a browser that blocks trackers, an extension that blocks Google Analytics, or Google’s own opt-out add-on. None of that affects the software, which does not consult it either way.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live you have rights to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of the personal data we hold about you, and to object to our processing of it. Write to hello@akastroid.com and we will act within 30 days.

Because we hold so little, most of these requests resolve to “your email address, your licence key, and your purchase record”.

If you are in the UK or the EU and are unhappy with our response, you may complain to your national data protection authority.

10. Children

Akastroid is not directed at children under 13, and we knowingly collect nothing from them.

11. Changes

If this policy changes we will publish the new version at akastroid.com with a new effective date. If a change ever meant the application started collecting something, we would say so prominently and ask first, but the design intent is that it never will.

Adiavi Labs · 45F, DB Block, Hari Nagar, New Delhi 110064, India hello@akastroid.com · akastroid.com

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