Privateer documentation — desktop app, CLI & API

The three surfaces

🖥️ Desktop app

The full Privateer workspace on your own computer: chat, media generation, projects, and a coding agent you can point at any folder. The agent runs inside the app on your machine.

Download

privateer.pro/download/mac
privateer.pro/download/windows

Desktop guide

⌨️ CLI

A private AI coding agent for your terminal. Provider-agnostic — bring your own model or sign in and bill your Privateer account. Open source, MIT.

Install

curl -fsSL https://privateer.pro/install.sh | sh

CLI guide

🔌 Developer API

OpenAI-compatible inference billed to your account — chat, vision, images, video, and audio. Point any OpenAI SDK at it; no new client library.

Base URL

https://api.privateer.pro/v1

API reference

There is also a mobile and web app and a browser extension. Those are covered in-app and on the marketing site rather than here.

Which one do I want?

If you want to…	Use
Chat, generate media, and organise work in a window	Desktop app
Have an agent read, write, and run code in a project folder	Either — CLI in a terminal, or the desktop app's Spawn Privateer at…
Drive the agent from an editor like Zed, or from Buzz	CLI over the Agent Client Protocol
Run scheduled or unattended jobs that survive closing the terminal	Local Harbor (CLI or desktop app)
Call models from your own program or backend	Developer API
Give the agent tools — GitHub, Linear, Postgres, your own server	Connectors (MCP), in the CLI or the desktop app

💡

The desktop app and the CLI are not alternatives you have to choose between — they read the same ~/.privateer home on one machine. Sign in once, and your account, model choice and connectors are there in both. The desktop app can even install the privateer command for you.

What they share

One account

Signing in on any surface bills the same balance and unlocks the same plan. In the CLI that's /login; in the desktop app it's Account → Sign In; for the API it's a key you mint in the app under Settings → API keys. You can also skip the account entirely on the CLI and bring your own provider key — see first run.

One model catalogue

The same models are available everywhere, with the same privacy shields beside them. The full rate card is at privateer.pro/api-pricing and the catalogue at privateer.pro/models.

One set of connectors

Connectors are Model Context Protocol servers that give the agent tools. They're configured per machine, in the shared home, so the terminal, the desktop app and the phone all see one coherent list. The API has no connectors — it is inference only.

One always-on agent

The Local Harbor is the resident agent on your own computer — it runs scheduled routines and chat bridges, comes back at login, and outlives the terminal that started it. Start it with privateer harbor install, or from the desktop app's Harbor screen.

Privacy, honestly

Privateer encrypts your content on your device or in our cloud, with inference on hardware-attested enclaves. The three surfaces have genuinely different postures, and it is worth knowing which one you're in:

Surface	Where your content lives
Desktop app & CLI	Files and history stay on your own disk under `~/.privateer/`. Running a model sends that turn's prompt to the provider you chose.
The app's synced chats	Encrypted on your device; the server stores ciphertext. Generating a reply processes the request transiently through the server and provider under zero-data-retention terms.
Developer API	Not encrypted, by nature. You send prompts to our server, which forwards them to the provider. What we guarantee is retention, not secrecy in transit — a stateless pass-through that persists only billing metadata, never your prompts or the responses.

Where a model runs inside a Trusted Execution Environment, the app can verify the attestation itself and marks it Verified. Routing we assert but your client did not check never earns that badge — the shield legend spells out the evidence behind each rung.

Full policies: Privacy · Terms.

Getting help

Each guide ends with a troubleshooting section for that surface. Beyond those:

privateer.pro/support — contact form and the help chat.
The CLI is open source (MIT): github.com/privateer-agent/privateer-agent. The app server is not open source; what we publish is a transparency layer you can inspect.
In the desktop app, Help → Report a Bug… and Help → Open Logs Folder.