Privacy and storage
Splice runs on your PC. Your clips stay on your PC, unless you publish to Explore.
Local-first, always
Splice is a desktop app, not a cloud service. Everything it knows about you — your settings, your queue, your stats — lives in a folder on your own PC. There’s no Splice account for the core app, no sync service, and no server that holds your data.
If you uninstall Splice, the uninstaller asks whether you also want to remove your application data. If you say no (the default), %APPDATA%\com.splice.app\ stays behind untouched and your settings, queue, and stats are exactly where you left them. If you say yes, that folder is wiped — but your OpenRouter API key (stored at %APPDATA%\Splice\credentials.json) and Explore sign-in session live outside that scope and survive either way.
Your clips never leave your machine unless you do one of two things: run AI analysis (which sends the clip — or frames of it — to OpenRouter) or post a clip to Explore. Both are explained below.
What does leave your PC
Outbound traffic from the Splice desktop app falls into a few categories:
- AI analysis — sent to OpenRouter when you run analysis. Either the raw clip (default) or sampled JPEG frames (fallback). No metadata about the filename or path.
- Explore — publishing — when you click Publish, the trimmed clip and a poster image upload to Splice’s storage (Cloudflare R2 via a Splice Worker) and metadata is written to Supabase. Completely optional.
- Explore — browsing — opening the Explore tab fetches the public feed from Supabase and streams media from
media.spliceai.net. Read-only, but it does require an authenticated request once you sign in. - Sign-in (optional) — Discord OAuth via a
splice://deep link, handled through Supabase Auth, only if you choose to sign in for Explore. - Auto-update checks — a request to
cdn.spliceai.net/releases/latest.json. No usage data is included.
The public website (spliceai.net) uses Vercel Web Analytics for aggregate page traffic. That’s entirely separate from the desktop app, which has no analytics SDK at all.
Where your data lives
Most of Splice’s local state lives at %APPDATA%\com.splice.app\ on Windows (paste that into the Explorer address bar to open it).
| File / folder | What’s in it |
|---|---|
settings.json | Your Splice preferences (parallel jobs, default output dir, archive policy, etc.) |
folders.json | The capture folders you’ve pointed Splice at |
stats.json | Your per-game clip counts and analysis totals |
clip_tags.json | Any tags you’ve added to highlights |
duration_cache.json | FFmpeg duration probe cache so the dashboard doesn’t re-probe every clip |
archive_log.json | History of what the optional archive policy has moved / compressed / deleted |
editor_projects/ | Your saved NLE timelines, one JSON per project |
custom-games/ | Per-game art and metadata for games you added yourself |
queue/ | Jobs that are pending or in-progress |
temp/thumbnails/ | Cached thumbnail images |
temp/explore_uploads/ | Encoded clips waiting to upload to Explore |
highlights/ | Default output location, if you kept the default during onboarding |
daemon.log | A rolling log of what Splice has been doing (rotates at 1 MB; keeps the current log plus three rotated backups) |
Kept outside that folder on purpose
Two files live in %APPDATA%\Splice\ instead of %APPDATA%\com.splice.app\ so they survive the uninstaller’s “Remove application data” wipe:
credentials.json— your OpenRouter API key.explore_session.json— your Supabase refresh token (only if you signed in for Explore).
The web UI also never persists your API key into browser storage — it’s loaded into memory from credentials.json each time Splice starts.
What Splice does to your originals
Splice never modifies or moves your original recordings by default — it only reads them. The single exception: if you opt in to the archive policy under Storage settings, Splice can move, compress, or delete source files older than the retention window you choose. That policy is off out of the box and you control its rules.
Your highlight clips live in a Splice Highlights folder at the output directory you picked during onboarding. If you skipped that step, the default is %APPDATA%\com.splice.app\highlights\Splice Highlights\. The onboarding picker suggests a folder near your capture folder, but you can put it anywhere.