No accounts.
No tracking. Genuinely.
PoRaBar runs entirely on your Mac. No PoRaBar server logs you, watches you, or remembers you.
The Mac app
PoRaBar stores everything locally in ~/Library/Application Support/PoRaBar. That includes your favourites, listening history, liked songs, and settings. Nothing leaves your Mac to a PoRaBar server — because there isn't one.
The app does talk directly to a few public services so it can do useful things:
- Apple iTunes Search & Lookup — to find podcast artwork and episode lists.
- Apple Marketing RSS — to load the per-country "Top podcasts" lists.
- radio-browser.info — to search the global directory of 50,000+ stations.
- The radio streams themselves — when you press play, your Mac connects directly to the broadcaster (1LIVE, KEXP, BBC, etc.).
These calls go from your Mac to those services directly; PoRaBar isn't a proxy. What those services log is governed by their own privacy policies.
This website
porabar.com is a static page with an interactive demo. It runs in your browser and talks to the same public services listed above. There is:
- No analytics (no GA, no Plausible, no Fathom).
- No cookies set by us.
- No third-party trackers.
- No newsletter signup, no contact form, no signup of any kind.
Server-side, the only thing logged is standard nginx access logs (IP, URL, user-agent), kept short for operational debugging. That's it.
Mac App Store purchases
The 60-day trial and the one-time $2.99 purchase are handled by Apple via StoreKit. Apple sees that you bought the app — PoRaBar gets a yes/no answer back via the receipt. We never see your name, email, payment details, or country.
Changes
If this ever changes — for example if PoRaBar gains a feature that requires a server — this page is updated and the version note at the bottom changes too.