Frequently asked questions.

No. Every core feature — local disks, SFTP, S3, virtual staging, the dual-pane explorer, the terminal — runs entirely on your machine with no account and no network round trip to this site. An account only adds two optional things: syncing your remembered-volume list and Vault across your own devices, and sharing credentials with a team.

Nothing. There's no telemetry call, no "phone home" on startup, no background sync. The Adapter (the small local process that talks to your disks/SFTP/S3) only ever talks to the browser tab on the same machine or LAN, and to whatever remote server you explicitly connect it to.

Account metadata only: your remembered-volume list (host, protocol, saved name — never a password or key), and, if you opt in to Vault sync or team credential sharing, an encrypted blob it cannot decrypt. File contents and directory trees never pass through the server at all — the whole point of the Adapter architecture is that file I/O stays directly between your browser and your own machine (or a teammate's), not routed through us.

Every account gets a keypair generated in your browser at signup. Sharing a credential with a team encrypts it with a random key, which is itself encrypted separately for each team member's own public key. The server only ever stores those two layers of ciphertext — it has no way to decrypt either one, the same trust model password managers like Bitwarden or 1Password use for shared vaults.

A small local process you run on a machine you want to browse — your laptop, a build box, a server you SSH into. It's what actually talks to the filesystem, SFTP, or S3, and it's what your browser tab connects to (over a paired, trust-on-first-use connection, the same model SSH uses for host keys). If a remote machine doesn't have one yet, Treacle can offer to install one over an existing SSH connection for a faster connection than raw SFTP.

Running it locally is free, permanently — see the pricing page. An account (for sync and team sharing) is the only thing that could ever be a paid tier, and that's not decided yet.

Your account password derives the key that unlocks your own encrypted key material — there's no server-side copy to reset it from, so losing it means losing access to whatever only you held (your own un-synced Vault entries, for instance). For team-shared credentials specifically, another active team member can restore your access once you've set a new password and generated a fresh keypair, since the team key was encrypted separately for each member. This is a deliberate trade-off of real end-to-end encryption, not an oversight.

Yes — the Adapter and the web app are designed to run entirely on infrastructure you control, with no dependency on this site at all beyond the optional account features.