Privacy Policy

Effective date: May 1, 2026

Nexus is a free PC hardware control app: RGB lighting, cooling, monitoring, and panel displays. It is built to run locally on your machine. You can use the full app without creating an account and without sending us anything.

This policy explains what data we do collect when you choose to use the optional online features, why we collect it, and what control you have over it.

"We" means Hello Nexus, a company registered in the State of California, United States. For anything in this policy, contact us at [email protected].

The short version

The app works fully offline. No account is required.
If you create an account, we store your email, a password hash, your username, your avatar, and records of the machines you sign in from.
Device records (your PC's hardware specs) appear on your public profile page unless you set your account to private.
Anonymous usage telemetry is separate from accounts and can be turned off in settings.
We do not run ads, we do not use third-party ad trackers, and we do not sell your data.
Deleting your account in the app hard-deletes your data.

Data we collect

1. Account data (optional)

Accounts are optional and off by default. If you create one, we store:

Your email address.
A hash of your password (argon2id). We never store the password itself.
Your username. Usernames can be changed once every 24 hours.
Your avatar image, if you upload one. Avatars are re-encoded to webp and stored on Cloudflare R2 at usercontent.hellonexus.com. Avatar URLs are publicly addressable: anyone with the link can view the image, even if your account is private.
Your account creation date and whether your account is set to private.

2. Device records (when signed in)

When you sign in to Nexus on a machine, the app registers that machine with your account and refreshes the record every 30 minutes while the app is running. Each record contains:

The machine's hostname and PC name.
Hardware description strings: CPU, motherboard, RAM, storage, GPU, monitors, sound, and network card.
The app version, operating system and OS build, and a last-seen timestamp.
A stable per-install identifier for that installation.

These device records are shown on your public profile page unless you set your account to private. If you do not want your hardware specs visible to others, enable the private setting or use the app without an account.

Deleting your account hard-deletes these records and removes the link between them and you.

3. Profile library sync (when signed in)

If you use profile sync, we store your lighting, cooling, theme, and dashboard settings payloads so they follow you across machines. Limits: up to 5 profiles, 512 KB each.

Sync deliberately excludes secrets. The following are never uploaded: authentication tokens, smart-light tokens and LAN host addresses, and Home Assistant, OBS, Steam, and Discord credentials. Those stay on your machine.

To keep you signed in we use refresh tokens that rotate on use and expire after 60 days of inactivity (a sliding window). Tokens are stored hashed on our servers.

If you sign in by magic link, the emailed link token is single-use and expires after 15 minutes. Sign-in emails are sent through Resend from [email protected].

5. Anonymous telemetry (separate from accounts)

The app can send an anonymous heartbeat every 5 minutes containing: an install ID, device type, app version, operating system, and CPU architecture. Coarse location is derived from the Cloudflare edge that receives the request; we do not collect your IP-based location beyond that, and this telemetry is not linked to any account.

Under the same opt-out, the app also sends product analytics through PostHog describing how it is used: a coarse hardware profile (CPU, GPU, RAM and storage size, motherboard, and the model names of recognised connected devices), counts of what is configured (how many lighting devices, fan channels, panels and widgets, and which widget types are placed), and which settings are in effect (simple or advanced page density, and which feature areas are switched off). This is counts and fixed values only. Text you write yourself never leaves your machine: widget titles, devices you have renamed, panel names, and file paths are all excluded.

You control all of this in the app's settings.

One thing to be clear about: when you sign in to an account, the install ID of that machine is stored with your account as part of the device record described above, even if you have anonymous telemetry turned off. Signing in is its own consent to that account-linked device record. The telemetry opt-out governs the anonymous stream, not the account features you actively use.

6. Website and infrastructure

hellonexus.com and its APIs are hosted on Railway behind Cloudflare. Like almost every website, our servers keep standard request logs. Public profile pages are cached in memory for up to 60 seconds to serve social-media link previews.

We measure website traffic with PostHog: which pages are visited, referrer, approximate location, and coarse browser and device type. This runs in cookieless mode, so it sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device.

These requests are routed through hellonexus.com rather than a PostHog domain. That hides the vendor's hostname from your browser, but the data still goes to PostHog, and your IP address is forwarded to them so they can derive the approximate location above.

We also record when a download link is followed, along with the platform chosen. A download is a redirect rather than a page, so this one is sent by our server directly, not through that route and not from your browser: your IP address is not forwarded, and the event is identified only by a hash of your address and user-agent that changes daily and cannot be traced back to you. We skip it entirely if your browser sends Do Not Track.

Website analytics uses a separate PostHog project from the app's anonymous telemetry, and the two are never joined: a website visit cannot be linked to an install, and neither can be linked to your account. The in-app telemetry opt-out described in section 5 governs the app, not this website measurement. We honour the browser Do Not Track signal for this measurement, though most browsers no longer send it, so the reliable way to opt out is any content blocker.

We do not use ad networks or third-party advertising trackers on the site.

Why we process this data (lawful bases)

Performing our contract with you: account data, device records, profile sync, and sessions exist to provide the account features you signed up for (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)).
Consent: anonymous telemetry and product analytics run under your in-app choice, which you can withdraw at any time in settings (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a)).
Legitimate interests: server logs, basic abuse prevention, and cookieless website analytics, to keep the service running and secure and to understand which pages are useful (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).

We share data only with the service providers that run our infrastructure, and only to the extent needed to operate:

Cloudflare: edge network, caching, and R2 storage for avatars.
Railway: application hosting.
Resend: transactional email (sign-in and account emails).
PostHog: in-app product analytics, under the same opt-out as telemetry, and cookieless website analytics in a separate project.

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Retention

Account data, device records, and synced profiles are kept while your account exists and are hard-deleted when you delete your account.
Refresh tokens expire after 60 days of inactivity; magic-link tokens after 15 minutes.
The public-profile preview cache lives at most 60 seconds.
Server logs and anonymous telemetry are kept only as long as needed for operations and troubleshooting.

International transfers

Our infrastructure is hosted in the United States. If you use the online features from outside the US, your data is transferred to and processed on US-hosted infrastructure. Where the GDPR or similar laws apply, we rely on appropriate safeguards for these transfers.

Your rights

Access and deletion: you can delete your account from inside the app at any time. Deletion is immediate and hard: account data, device records, and synced profiles are removed, and nothing remains attributed to you.
Everything else (a copy of your data, correction, objection, restriction, or a complaint): email [email protected] and we will handle it.
If you are in the EU/EEA or UK, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your data protection authority. If you are a California resident, the CCPA gives you rights to know, delete, and opt out of sale; we do not sell personal data.

Children

Nexus's online features are not directed at children. Do not create an account if you are under 13 (or under 16 where local law sets that age for consenting to data processing). If we learn we hold an account for a child below the applicable age, we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will update the effective date above and announce the change on hellonexus.com. Continued use of the online features after a change means the updated policy applies.

Contact

Hello Nexus
State of California, United States
[email protected]