Helpike Terms of Use

Revision 1 · in effect since 25 August 2026. Helpike is free software maintained by one person. These terms are short and written to be read, not skimmed. Using the app means accepting them, and the app presents this same text at first launch.

The short version. Helpike is free, runs on your machine, and never sends your searches or your files anywhere. It does send generic usage statistics once a day so the project knows what to work on — every field of that is listed in section 5 and in what we collect.

1. What Helpike is

Helpike installs a local documentation server on your machine, plus the documentation packs you choose to download. Your assistant queries that server there, over MCP, and the search runs entirely offline: the query text, the documents and your project files are never sent anywhere.

2. Your licence to use it

You may use Helpike free of charge, for personal or commercial work, on as many machines as you like. There is no account, no seat count and no quota, and no part of the product is unlocked by paying for it.

The source licences of the app and of the components it bundles are the ones published in the repository, and nothing here narrows them.

3. The documentation inside the packs

A DocPack is an indexed copy of documentation published by somebody else. That content stays theirs, under the licence they chose, and Helpike transfers no right over it to you. Packs carrying an attribution requirement declare it in the app, and that attribution has to travel with any excerpt you reproduce.

Packs are mirrored from public sources, at a fixed polite rate and within each site's robots.txt. They may be incomplete or out of date, and they do not replace the official documentation.

4. What never leaves your machine

The text of your searches, the file and directory names of your projects, the pages a search returned, the machine name and your system user name are never transmitted — not truncated, not hashed. There is no login, session or cookie anywhere in the product.

What the assistants did is written to ~/.helpike/activity.jsonl on your own disk, with the full text of every query. It is never sent, and "Clear history" on the Home screen erases it.

5. Usage statistics

By using Helpike you agree that the app sends generic usage statistics, in the background, so the service can be improved. It carries no personal data.

This is one HTTPS request a day, with the previous day's totals. What goes out is: a random installation identifier generated on your machine; the app version, operating system and processor architecture; how old the installation is; how many packs are installed and how many MB they occupy; whether the embedding model is installed; how many times the app was opened and for how many minutes; how many assistant sessions ran; how many searches were made, how many returned nothing and how many other tool calls happened; the median and 95th-percentile search latency; which MCP clients connected; and up to eight names — taken from the published catalog — of packs that answered searches.

The installation identifier is 16 random bytes. It is not derived from your hardware, your hostname or your user name, it is tied to no account, and deleting ~/.helpike/install.json replaces it with a new one that cannot be linked to the old one.

The complete payload is published field by field on the telemetry page, it is frozen by a test in the source so a new field cannot ship unnoticed, and the app shows you the literal URL it would send, on the usage-data panel of the Home screen.

Setting DO_NOT_TRACK=1 or HELPIKE_NO_TELEMETRY=1 in your environment stops the sending; it is re-read before every request. To have statistics already received deleted, send the installation identifier the app shows to support@helpike.com.

6. Downloads and network traffic

The app fetches the catalog, the packs and the embedding model over HTTPS from the project's CDN, reloads the catalog every 30 minutes while open, and asks hourly whether a newer version exists.

Like every server on the internet, that CDN records one log line per request: date, path, status, bytes, IP and user agent. Those lines are aggregated per day, the IP is never stored in a database, and the raw log expires after 45 days.

7. What you must not do

Do not use Helpike to evade rate limits or access controls on documentation sources, to redistribute pack content in breach of its original licence, or to do anything unlawful where you are. Do not present pack content as the official documentation of whoever published it.

8. No warranty

Helpike is provided "as is", with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

Documentation retrieved through Helpike may be wrong, incomplete or superseded, and what you decide on the strength of it is your own decision. To the extent the law allows, the maintainer is not liable for any damage arising from using, or being unable to use, the software.

9. Changes to these terms

When these terms change materially, the app presents the new revision at launch and asks for acceptance again. The current text is always on this page.

10. Contact

support@helpike.com handles support, bug reports, security disclosures, statistics deletion requests and anything about these terms. There is no ticket system and no account to create.

Your acceptance is recorded in ~/.helpike/install.json, on your machine, and nowhere else.