Telemetry

Buoy sends one anonymous ping per day. This page is the complete description of it — there is nothing else, and no other network call Buoy makes on its own behalf.

The SDK sends it in development only. Buoy Desktop sends it on launch — see When it fires for why those differ.

Turn it off

In the SDK:

import { Buoy } from '@buoy-gg/core';

Buoy.init({
  licenseKey: process.env.BUOY_KEY,
  telemetry: false,
});

import { Buoy } from '@buoy-gg/core';

Buoy.init({
  licenseKey: process.env.BUOY_KEY,
  telemetry: false,
});

In Buoy Desktop, set BUOY_TELEMETRY=0 in the environment it launches with.

That's the whole opt-out. When it's off, nothing is sent and nothing is written to disk — opting out really is opting out, not "collected but not transmitted".

What it sends

Five fields. That's the entire payload:

surface exists because platform cannot tell the two apart: macos is a legal value both for a React Native macOS app running the SDK and for Buoy Desktop running on a Mac. It carries no information about you — only about which of our own programs sent the ping.

What it never sends

• Nothing from your tools. Network requests, console output, storage values, Redux/Zustand/Jotai state, performance reports, screenshots — none of it. That data never leaves your machine, which is the entire reason Buoy is safe to run against production APIs and inside enterprises.
• Nothing that identifies you. No email, no license key, no account id.
• Nothing that identifies your work. No app name, bundle id, repo, package names, route names, or environment variables.
• No device fingerprint. installId is randomly generated, not built from hardware or account properties. It cannot be correlated with anything else we store, and reinstalling produces a brand-new one. The SDK's and Desktop's ids are minted separately and cannot be linked to each other.

When it fires

The SDK: development only. It is compiled out of release builds entirely. Your users' devices never contact us — a shipped app phoning home about a tool you chose to install would not be a defensible trade.

Buoy Desktop: on launch. There is no equivalent guard, and it would mean nothing if there were: Desktop is not embedded in anybody else's product, so the only person it can report is the one who chose to open it.

Both, in every case:

• At most once every 24 hours, per install.
• Never blocking. It's fire-and-forget: if you're offline, behind a proxy, or the endpoint is down, Buoy carries on without a warning in your console.

The first time it runs on a new install, Buoy prints one line saying it's on and how to disable it. Once — not on every launch.

Why it exists

Buoy's licensing data can tell us how many people have a free or pro key. It structurally cannot tell us how many people are running Buoy without one, because there's no record of an install that never asked for anything.

That missing number is the denominator for the only question that matters when deciding what to build next: of everyone who tries Buoy, how many find it worth keeping? Without it we're guessing from npm download counts, which are heavily inflated by CI — and, for Desktop, from GitHub release downloads, which cannot tell a new user apart from an automatic update.

Blocked networks

The ping goes to https://buoy.gg/api/t. If your network blocks it, Buoy is unaffected — the request fails silently and everything works normally.

If you need to allowlist Buoy's traffic in a corporate environment, the domain that actually matters is api.keygen.sh (license validation). buoy.gg is optional; blocking it costs you nothing.