Build Log · OffgridStem & OffgridScribe
We Ran Our Own Network Audit. Here's What We Found.
August 2026
Every app on our site carries the same line: your data never leaves your device. That's a claim about how the apps are built — no networking code for your content, by design. But a claim about design intent isn't the same as proof. So instead of just repeating it, we decided to check it.
We're not a company that can afford a $20k–$80k formal audit yet. What we can do is point a traffic inspection tool at our own apps and show you exactly what we saw — no editing, no cherry-picking.
How we tested
We used Proxyman, a network traffic inspection tool, connected to a physical iPhone over Wi-Fi. With the proxy active, we ran each app through its full core workflow while watching every outbound connection in real time.
Full workflow: select a track, separate stems, export, review history. Result — no connections originating from OffgridStem. The only traffic captured was one background connection to Apple's own App Store API, blocked by Apple's own certificate pinning before it went anywhere.
This one was more interesting. On first launch, we saw a batch of connections to huggingface.co — enough to make us stop and look closely before writing anything.
OffgridScribe transcribes using WhisperKit, an open-source engine that runs OpenAI's Whisper model on-device via Apple's Neural Engine. Those huggingface.co requests turned out to be a one-time download of the model files themselves (openai_whisper-small.en — encoder, decoder, config) — the AI model, not your audio. After that download, every request we captured during actual transcription stayed local. Nothing containing your recordings or transcripts left the device.
Why we're telling you this instead of just the good part
It would've been easy to only publish the OffgridStem result and quietly skip the part where OffgridScribe reaches out to the internet at all. But "reaches out to download an AI model once" and "uploads your data" are very different things, and pretending the connection doesn't exist would undermine the exact honesty we're trying to build a reputation on.
What this is, and isn't
This was a self-conducted test, not an independent third-party audit — we're one person, not an accredited lab. We're sharing the raw findings in the interest of transparency, and plan to pursue a proper independent audit as the studio grows. Full details are on our privacy page.
More from Offgrid Studio
Also read: What Popular Transcription Apps Actually Do With Your Recordings and Why Most Album Leaks Start in the Cloud, Not the Studio.