Privacy
The short version. Helios runs on your own machine. There is no Helios account, no Helios server, and no telemetry anywhere in the product. We cannot read your sessions, your code, or your prompts — not because we promise not to look, but because they never reach us.
Two things can leave your machine, and only if you switch them on: calls to the model provider you chose, and phone approvals over Telegram. Both are listed in full below.
Who this is
Helios is built by H-Town Systems. Questions about this notice go to zaid@htownsystems.com.
This website
These are static pages. They set no cookies, run no analytics, carry no tracking pixels, and make no third-party requests — the typefaces are served from this domain rather than from a font CDN, precisely so that visiting this page does not disclose your address to anyone else.
The site is hosted on Vercel, which keeps ordinary server logs (IP address, user agent, requested URL) the way any web host does. That layer is Vercel's, and Vercel's own privacy terms apply to it. We do not build profiles from it.
If you email us, we have your email and whatever you put in it, for as long as it takes to answer you.
The app on your machine
Helios keeps its own state under ~/.helios in your home folder —
your configured engines, your sessions, your receipts. It reads the coding-agent
session directories that already exist on your disk (Claude Code, Codex and Gemini
CLI) in order to tell you what those agents are doing.
None of that is uploaded. There is no sync, no backup service, and no account to attach it to. Deleting the folder deletes the data.
What can leave your machine
This is the complete list.
| Where | When | What goes | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| The model provider you chose — Anthropic or Google | Only when you ask for a model-written answer, and only if you have configured that provider with your own API key. | Your prompt, and the session context that the answer is about. | You choose it. With no key configured, no call is made. |
| A local model via Ollama | When you use the local path instead of a cloud provider. | Nothing. The request never leaves your machine. | Available; the airtight option. |
api.telegram.org |
Only if you pair the phone-approvals lane with your own bot token. | The approval prompts Helios sends you, and the replies you send back. Voice notes you record travel over Telegram as audio — but they are transcribed on your machine, not by a cloud speech service. | Off. With no token, the lane is a permanent, silent no-op — Helios boots identically with or without a phone. |
| Anyone else | Never. | — | — |
When you use a cloud model provider or Telegram, you are that company's user for that exchange, under their terms and their privacy policy. We are not in the middle of it, and we do not receive a copy.
What we never do
- No analytics or telemetry in the product — not anonymised, not aggregated, not "just crash reports". None.
- No selling or sharing of personal data. We hold none to sell.
- No advertising networks, no data brokers, no third-party SDKs.
- No silent execution: Helios asks before it acts, which is the whole point of it.
Helios is open source under Apache-2.0, so none of the above has to be taken on trust. Read the source and check.
Your choices
- Delete
~/.heliosto erase everything Helios has stored. - Remove the Telegram token to shut the phone lane permanently.
- Run a local model to keep every request on the machine.
- Since we hold no personal data about you, there is nothing for us to hand over or delete on request — but if you think that is wrong in your case, write to us and we will look.
Changes
If this notice changes, the date at the top changes with it. Material changes to what leaves your machine will be called out in the release notes, not buried here.