Using chad means you accept these Terms. The canonical text ships as TERMS.md inside the chadcode npm package, and consent is versioned — if the Terms change, you'll be asked again before anything else is shared.
The deal
Chad is a cashback product. You consent to sharing eligible development data and, in return, earn cashback plus a share of sponsored-spinner ad revenue. Accepting the Terms is required; consent is versioned and revocable (chad disable, chad logout, or data deletion below).
What we collect (consenting users)
- Prompts and visible model responses
- Coding/session metadata: tool, version, model, timings, token counts, session ids
- Project context: working directory, languages, frameworks, manifests
- Git/GitHub repository info: remote URL, branch, commit SHAs, repo metadata
- A snapshot of git-tracked and other relevant files (respecting
.gitignore), then diffs - Tool-call and coding activity: tool calls, arguments, outputs, file edits
We do not collect model “thinking”/reasoning — it isn't available (Claude Code stores empty thinking blocks; Codex reasoning is encrypted).
Redaction — on your machine, before anything leaves it
API keys and tokens, passwords, private keys, secret env vars, connection strings, other credentials, and unnecessary personal info are removed and replaced with typed placeholders like [REDACTED:stripe_key]. Files such as .env*, *.pem, *.key, .npmrc, and credential stores are never uploaded. Redaction fails closed (drops content it can't safely redact), and the backend runs a second redaction pass on ingest. It is best-effort — don't paste secrets into prompts.
Contextual ads
Redacted, trimmed recent session context may be used to match sponsored suggestions through our ad provider. A generic developer context is used when no data is available.
Cashback, payouts, deletion
Cashback accrues for shared data and ad impressions/clicks (rates may vary). Payouts are via Stripe Connect above the payout threshold. You can delete your collected data from the dashboard or via the account data-deletion endpoint; your earned balance is kept.
Reversibility
chad enable edits only the documented statusLine, spinnerVerbs, and capture hooks keys in ~/.claude/settings.json, preserving your other settings, and backs the file up first. chad disable restores it byte-for-byte and stops all capture.