Privacy & Trust

Prefex runs entirely on your machine. Your prompts go directly from Prefex to the upstream API (Anthropic or OpenAI), nobody else sees them.

What Prefex logs

Every request writes one row to a local SQLite database at ~/.prefex/data/prefex.db. The row contains:

FieldLoggedExample
TimestampYes2026-03-27T14:23:01Z
ChannelYesclaude_code
ModeYeslive
Model usedYesclaude-haiku-4-5-20251001
Input tokensYes1024
Output tokensYes312
Cost (USD)Yes0.0003
Router decisionYesweak
Cache hitYestrue
Latency (ms)Yes72
Prompt textOpt-inOff by default. Stored locally if store_system_prompt_text: true.
Response textNever-
System prompt textOpt-inOff by default. Local only, for cache analysis.
API keysNever-

Data never leaves your machine

Prefex has no telemetry, no analytics endpoint, no phone-home. The SQLite database is local. The dashboard reads from that database.

The only outbound connections Prefex makes are the ones your application already makes, to api.anthropic.com or api.openai.com.

One opt-in exception: the leaderboard. If you choose to submit to the public savings leaderboard, Prefex sends aggregate numbers only, your chosen username, total dollars saved, and days running. No prompts, no request content, no identifiers. The submission is a deliberate action you take in the dashboard; nothing is sent automatically.

Verify with tcpdump

Run this while Prefex is active (without a leaderboard submission):

# Capture all TCP traffic from the Prefex process
sudo tcpdump -i any -n "port 8019 or host api.anthropic.com" 2>/dev/null

# You should see connections to api.anthropic.com only.
# Leaderboard submissions additionally reach promptforce.ai, opt-in only.

Binary verification

Prefex is a single ~20MB standalone binary with zero external dependencies.

# Check the binary
ls -lh $(which prefex)
# Output: ~20MB binary

License

Prefex includes a 30-day free license, renewable at prefex.dev/renew. No credit card. No call-home. We don't run servers, renewal is a manual step you do in your browser.

What you get

Prefex ships as a pre-compiled Go binary. The proxy is proprietary. The embedded rules-based router runs entirely in-process, no external ML services needed.

Questions

Open an issue or discussion at github.com/PromptForcePrime/prefex for anything privacy, data, or security related.