Data & Sharing
Why No Accounts
There's no sign-up screen in Ensoul, no password, no "forgot my login" flow. That's not an oversight — it's the point. Here's the reasoning, and the trade-off that comes with it.
What "no account" means in practice
Nothing to register with. You install the app and start.
Nothing to lose, reset, or have stolen in a breach.
No server-side table anywhere mapping a person to their conversations with a companion.
A database that doesn't exist can't be hacked, subpoenaed, or quietly repurposed later.
Where your data actually lives
Conversations, mood, memories, companion designs — all of it is written to local storage on your device and nowhere else by default. When you send a message, it goes directly from your device to the AI provider you configured — your own OpenRouter key, or a local Ollama model on your own machine — never through an Ensoul server in between. We don't sit in the middle of that conversation, so there's nothing for us to log even if we wanted to.
The one different surface is Discord. If you talk to a companion through the Discord bot, that conversation is necessarily stored server-side — Discord is a hosted platform, and the bot needs somewhere to keep mood and memory state between messages. That's the trade you're making by choosing Discord over the local apps, and it's your choice to make.
The honest trade-off
No accounts also means no automatic sync. If you use Ensoul on your phone and your laptop, they don't quietly stay in sync with each other — each device only knows what happened on it. If you lose a device, there's no "reset password and get your history back," because there was never a server copy to recover from.
You are the backup. Use Full Backup (Settings → Data → Backup) if your conversations matter to you, and Connection Transfer (SOUL:v1:) when you want to carry a specific companion to another device. See Transfer & Backup for the full guide.
Why we chose this over convenience
Companion conversations get personal — more personal, often, than people expect going in. An account system means somewhere holds a permanent record of who said what, tied to a real identity, sitting on a server that can be breached, subpoenaed, or repurposed later by whoever owns it. We didn't want to be the company holding that. Removing the account removes the target — there's no central list of Ensoul users and what they talked about for anyone, including us, to be compelled to hand over.
The bring-your-own-key model reinforces this: your API key and model choice are yours, stored in your operating system's own secure keychain, not a shared pool tied to an Ensoul account. See the API key section in the Quick Start guide.
What we do collect
We're not claiming zero server contact anywhere in the product — that would be overselling it. What we collect is narrow and opt-in: publishing a companion to the Companion Library sends its design (not your conversations) to our server; reporting content or emailing support does what you'd expect; the ensoul.so website itself — not the app — runs standard analytics. None of it includes conversation content. The full breakdown, including retention periods, is in the Privacy Policy.