What leaves your machine
Last verified: 30 September 2026
Most vendors answer "where does my data go?" with a slogan. This page answers it per feature, so you can check it rather than trust it.
Two commitments hold across every row below:
- FlowLeap does not use your inputs or outputs to train models, and our agreements with the providers listed here prohibit them from doing so either. For the trial models, FlowLeap's OpenRouter account settings exclude providers that train on prompts.
- Your workspace stays local. Matters, drafts, figures, and generated reports live in a folder on your own machine. FlowLeap has no copy.
Per feature
| Feature | What leaves your machine | Who processes it | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agent inference — the desktop app, the CLI, or your own harness | your prompts, and whatever you attach to them | your model provider, on your key and your account | your provider's terms, not ours |
| Trial models — the desktop app, during the 7-day trial only, until you add your own key | your prompts, and whatever you attach to them, sent directly from the app | OpenRouter, on a key FlowLeap creates on its own OpenRouter account and pays for, with a hard daily spending limit; OpenRouter routes each request to a provider of the trial model you use — USA (OpenRouter); the model provider's infrastructure | FlowLeap's OpenRouter account is set to providers that do not train on or retain prompts; FlowLeap's servers never receive the content; the key is revoked when the trial ends |
| FlowLeap connector in ChatGPT, Claude, or another MCP client | the tool calls that client sends to FlowLeap; FlowLeap returns the results (patent data, PATSTAT figures) to that client, and your prompts stay between you and its vendor | the client's vendor, on your account with it; you sign in to FlowLeap through Clerk | the vendor's terms, not ours; FlowLeap runs no model for the connector |
| Document OCR | the whole document you submit | Mistral AI (mistral-ocr-latest), on FlowLeap's account — EU (France) | processed and returned; not kept as a document |
| Analyst narration on this site's patent-analytics pages | the patent or applicant you asked about, plus the PATSTAT figures already shown on that page | Anthropic, on FlowLeap's account — USA | the generated memo is cached so the same request re-serves it; the step log keeps tool names and publication numbers, never results |
| Public Try Agent on this site's home page | the question you submit and the PATSTAT tool results needed to answer it | DeepSeek V4 Pro through Vercel AI Gateway, on FlowLeap's account; PATSTAT queries run on FlowLeap's backend | the browser stores only a versioned question count and prepared-question ids; the live agent session has a one-hour lifetime |
| Legal reference search (EPC, EPO Guidelines, MPEP) | your search text | FlowLeap's own server — the embedding model runs locally, so no third-party model sees it | not retained |
| Patent data lookups (search, claims, family, legal status, citations) | the query and the publication numbers | EPO OPS and USPTO ODP; PATSTAT analytics run on FlowLeap's own snapshot, hosted by Hetzner in Germany | provider-side, under their terms |
| Your patent-data keys, sent with each request (EPO, USPTO) — the CLI, the VS Code extension, or an MCP client with a header field | forwarded on each request to authenticate you | the relevant patent office | never stored, never logged |
| Your stored patent-data keys (EPO, USPTO) — only if you choose to store them, on the "Patent-data keys" page of your dashboard | the key, once, when you save it | FlowLeap's own backend, which checks the key with the office, then keeps it encrypted (AES-256-GCM, with the encryption key held in the server environment, never in the database) and uses it only for your own requests to that office; a key sent with a request wins over it | until you delete it on that page or your account is deleted; never shown again, never logged; a replaced value stays encrypted until you delete the key for that office, and a deletion keeps only the dates, the office, and the surface used, never the key |
| Your model provider key | nothing — it stays in your machine's secret storage and is used to call your provider directly | — | — |
| Workspace files, matters, drafts, outputs | nothing | — | local only |
| Account and billing | name, email, subscription and payment details | Clerk (accounts), Stripe (payments) | for the life of the account; invoices as French law requires |
| Activation counters (opt-in) — the desktop app | four counters, and nothing else — app launched; skill run completed, carrying the skill's name only and only when the skill is one FlowLeap ships (a skill of your own is counted as custom); report saved, carrying the template kind only; patent-data keys added, as yes/no per office. Never a file, a query, a matter, or model output. Off unless you turn it on | FlowLeap's own backend — no third-party analytics service, and no model | 13 months, deleted with the account |
| Trial email sequence — five emails across the 7-day trial | nothing from your machine: your email address and name from your account, and your trial dates | Resend, EU sending region | kept with your account; every email has an opt-out link, and the emails also stop when you subscribe or delete your account |
| Website visits | page views, cookieless | Vercel Web Analytics | only with your consent, and only on this website |
For the public Try Agent, Vercel supplies the network address used for abuse control. The website immediately HMAC-signs it into an opaque visitor key. The raw address is not sent to the demo agent or stored by the demo-control service; the opaque daily counter expires after its UTC rate-limit window. The demo is limited to PATSTAT and refuses requests that ask it to handle confidential or unfiled inventions.
FlowLeap's own backend, the API server and the PATSTAT snapshot, runs on Hetzner Cloud in Falkenstein, Germany. Its database, which holds account, subscription and activity records and any stored patent-data keys (encrypted), is hosted by Supabase. This website and the dashboard are hosted by Vercel.
The exceptions, named
FlowLeap's posture is that you bring your own model key and your provider bills you directly. There are three exceptions — features that run on a model FlowLeap pays for rather than yours:
- Document OCR, on Mistral.
- Analyst narration, on Anthropic — the written commentary on the patent-analytics pages of this website. The charts themselves are computed from PATSTAT and involve no model at all.
- The public Try Agent, on DeepSeek V4 Pro through Vercel AI Gateway — the deliberately limited PATSTAT demonstration on the home page.
That is the complete list. If another ever appears, it appears here in the same change that ships it.
The trial is the one time FlowLeap also pays for your agent's model. During the 7-day trial, until you add your own key, the desktop app uses trial models on an OpenRouter key that FlowLeap pays for (the "Trial models" row above). This is not a fourth feature: it runs on the same path as your own key, from the app straight to OpenRouter, and FlowLeap's servers never receive the content. The key is revoked when the trial ends, and you can add your own key at any time, including on the first day.
Legal reference search is worth separating out: it is processed by FlowLeap rather than by you, but its embedding model runs on our own server, so no third-party model receives your search text.
What used to be here
Until August 2026, query building and claim analysis also ran on FlowLeap's model accounts. They no longer exist server-side — the endpoints are withdrawn, and both now run on your own model, on your own key. Earlier versions of this site and its privacy policy described them as FlowLeap-processed; that is no longer true.
Client telemetry that carried message content was removed entirely rather than switched off, and there is still no endpoint that ingests message content. A separate, later, opt-in path exists now — the Activation counters row above — and it is content-free by design: four counters, never a prompt, a file, or a model output.
Where this fits
This page is a factual annex, not a legal document. The binding text is the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Service; this page is the per-feature detail behind them. Where the two ever disagree, the discrepancy is a bug — please tell us at contact@flowleap.co.