Flookup Data Wrangler for Desktop

Your data is the most private it will ever be, because it never leaves your machine. We never receive your file or a single value from it.
The app reads your files, works on them locally and writes the result back.
The same six modules are available as a Google Sheets add-on, and one licence covers both.

We Never Have Your Data

Your data is the most private it will ever be, because it never leaves your machine. We have never held a copy of it, so there is nothing on our side that can be lost, stolen, sold or handed over under pressure. That is a different position from the usual one. Most tools can only promise they will treat your data properly. This one has none of it to treat.

The desktop app has no account system, no telemetry, no analytics and no crash reporting. There is no code in it that reports an error to us, because there is no error reporting service to report it to. The files you open, the columns you select and the results you produce are written to a workbook in your own user profile, and the app reads nothing outside the files you give it.

This is privacy by architecture rather than by policy. A policy can be weakened quietly by a well-meaning change, and you would have no way of noticing. Here there is no code path that could carry your data anywhere, so there is nothing to weaken.

It is also different from the web tools, which run in your browser and have their own privacy policy, and from a hosted tool where a browser tab uploads your rows to a server that processes them for someone else. Nothing is uploaded, so there is nothing to breach on our side.

You do not have to take our word for it. The installer carries a code signing certificate that your computer checks before anything runs, and if a single byte of the file had been altered the signature would stop verifying. The only network activity the app performs is the two calls below, and both appear in the status bar as they happen.

One distinction worth being exact about, because it is the honest version. Everything above is a claim about the app. This website does use Google Analytics to see which pages get read, under the privacy policy linked in the footer, and it carries nothing from the app.

The Two Network Calls, In Full

There are exactly two, and you can watch both happen in the status bar:

• A licence check, which sends your licence id, a fingerprint derived from this machine and the app version. The fingerprint is a hash, not an inventory: it is built from the machine GUID, the disk volume serial, the processor id, your Windows account name and your profile path, and none of those values is sent in readable form. The app cannot tell them apart, so it cannot report which one is which. This one also happens on its own about once a day, so a licence cannot lapse silently while the app sits open. It sends the same three things, and Account shows when the last one succeeded.
• An update check, which asks www.getflookup.com for a signed manifest listing the current release. It sends no identifier of any kind.

Neither call sends the contents of a file, a column name, a cell value or a row count. There is no third call in this release.

What Stays on Your Machine

• Your workbook, in your user profile, readable and deletable by you at any time without asking us
• Your licence, which is signed by us and verified on your machine, so nothing about it depends on a server answering
• A log file capped at 1 MB, used for troubleshooting, which records what the app did and never what your data contained

Verified locally, a licence in date keeps working with the network switched off. It also needs to hear from us once every seven days, and the app checks by itself about once a day, so that happens without you doing anything. If the app cannot reach us for seven days running, the paid features pause and your work stays exactly where it is until it can check again. My Account shows the days remaining, so the pause never arrives as a surprise. Nothing you have done is ever deleted, and no file of yours is held hostage to a server being reachable.

Links Are Links

Every other address in the app, including the buttons that open the checkout and the customer portal, is handed to your browser and does nothing itself. The app will not open a link to any host other than www.getflookup.com and pay.getflookup.com, and it does not use wildcards, so a subdomain we have not audited cannot open silently.

Pricing Plans

Both plans contain the same six modules: Profiling, Cleaning, Matching, Verification, Automation and device release. The difference is how you are billed. Payment is handled by Lemon Squeezy and the licence reaches you by email within a minute. One licence covers one seat on one computer. The Starter, Pro, Teams and Week Pass plans are the Google Sheets add-on, cannot be bought here, and are listed on the add-on pricing page .

Post Purchase Steps

The licence id arrives in the purchase email. Open the app and enter that id together with the email address you bought with, and the tools unlock on that computer. The same two values let you look the licence up again at any time.

My Account inside the app shows the plan, the current status, the date the term ends and how many of your seats are in use. It also lists the computers the licence is active on, and lets you release one. Releasing a computer frees its seat so the licence can be activated on a replacement machine, which is what you want after rebuilding Windows or replacing a disk.

My Account does not take payments and does not cancel anything. Billing, plan changes and cancellation live in the Lemon Squeezy customer portal, which you reach from My Account inside the app.

The Installer Is Digitally Signed

The installer carries an Authenticode signature. A signature is not a claim from us, it is arithmetic: if any byte of the file has been altered since it was signed, the signature stops verifying. You do not have to take our word for it, and you do not have to trust us to check it.

Here is the certificate the installer is signed with, so you can inspect it before you install anything:

You can download the certificate itself and look at it in the certificate manager that ships with Windows. It is a public certificate, so there is nothing secret in it. Download the signing certificate .

What to Expect the First Time You Run It

Windows shows a publisher warning the first time it runs an installer it has not seen before, and it shows that warning for software that carries a signature from its own author. The warning is about the certificate not being issued by a commercial authority. It is not a report that anything is wrong with the file, and the signature is still checked the same way.

To clear the warning on your own machine, trust the certificate once:

1. Open the certificate file you downloaded above.
2. Choose Install Certificate, then choose Current User as the location.
3. Run the installer. The publisher now reads CN=Flookup rather than Unknown publisher.

That is a setting on your machine rather than a change to the certificate. It takes a few seconds, it affects only the computer you do it on, and you can reverse it at any time by removing the certificate from Trusted Root Certification Authorities.

Check the Installer Yourself

On any Windows machine, with no extra software:

1. Right click the downloaded file and choose Properties, then the Digital Signatures tab.
2. Select the signature and choose Details. Confirm the signer subject is CN=Flookup, O=Flookup, C=GB and that the thumbprint matches the one above.
3. Windows will also state that the certificate is not from a trusted source. That is expected for a certificate issued by the software author rather than by a commercial authority.

To go further, compare the hash of the file with the one in the release manifest that the app itself uses. The manifest is signed with a separate key held on the activation service, and the app refuses to install any download whose hash does not match it.

Licences Are Bound to Your Device

A desktop licence is tied to this machine rather than to your account, which means a licence id that leaks cannot be used on somebody else's computer. The binding combines hardware identifiers with your Windows account name and profile path, so a second Windows account on the same machine does not inherit the licence.

The cost of that choice is that a licence stops matching if you reinstall Windows or rename your account. You enter the licence id again in My Account, and your other devices are unaffected. We would rather you know the trade-off now than discover it the week you rebuild a machine.

Updates Are Checked Rather Than Pushed

The app checks for a newer release at most once a day and tells you in the top bar when one exists. It does not install anything on its own and it does not run a download in the background. When you choose to install, the file is verified against the signed manifest and the hash of the manifest is checked before the installer starts.

Reporting a Problem

If a signature check fails, a hash does not match, or something in the app behaves in a way you cannot account for, tell us. Include the version from My Account and, if you are able, the output of the integrity check in the same panel. Contact us .