Privacy
The honest version fits in one sentence: your images never leave your device, and the only thing we measure is how many people visited which page.
Your images
The upscaler runs entirely inside your browser using WebGPU or WebAssembly. When you drop an image, it is opened in your browser's memory, processed by a neural network running on your hardware, and rendered back to you. It is never transmitted, stored, or seen by us — there is no upload endpoint in this application at all. You can verify this with your browser's network inspector: while upscaling, no request carries your image. Better still, load the page once and then use the tool with your connection turned off — it works exactly the same.
What we collect
Aggregate page views, plus an email address if you choose to give us one. Nothing else. We use Plausible Analytics, which is cookieless: it sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device, collects no personal data, and never follows you across sites. It tells us that a page was viewed, roughly where in the world from, and which link led there — the same things a server log would show. It is the one third-party request the site makes, and it is EU-hosted. You can still switch it off: turn Analytics off in the cookie notice and the Plausible script is not loaded, so your visits are not counted.
There are no tracking pixels, no fingerprinting, and no ad networks. From these counts we cannot tell who you are, and nothing about your images — their contents, names, or dimensions — is ever measured or sent anywhere.
Email updates
Giving us your address on the newsletter page is optional and it is the only way this site learns anything about you personally. If you do, we keep the address, when and on which page you entered it, the language you were reading in, and a short one-way signal derived from your connection that lets us stop abuse of the form. We keep them until you unsubscribe, and we use them only to send occasional notes about this tool. Every email carries an unsubscribe link, and you can write to the address below to be removed instead. The list is never sold, shared, or used for anything else.
Signing up leaves two marks so the same browser is not asked again and cannot sign up over and over: a cookie, sk_nl, which holds a one-way scrambled form of the address rather than the address itself along with the answer you were given, and a note in your browser's local storage under sk-nl:done (plus sk-nl:tries, a count of recent attempts). Both last 180 days at most. The cookie is HTTP-only, so nothing on the page can read it, and neither is used to recognise you anywhere else. Clearing site data removes them.
Cookies
The site sets one first-party cookie, ut_consent, which records the choice you make in the cookie notice so we do not ask again. It lasts 180 days, is mirrored in your browser's local storage under ut-consent, and holds nothing about you beyond that choice. If you leave the notice unanswered it closes itself after about twenty seconds and records what is already running: Essential on, Analytics on, and nothing else. Nothing new starts at that moment. Two small local-storage entries help the tool itself: ut-lang, the language you last picked (so a page in another language can offer yours back; we never redirect), and pu-prefer-wasm, which remembers for 14 days that this device should use the CPU engine after a crash. The newsletter's two marks are described above and only exist if you sign up. Nothing else is kept between visits. Your privacy choices in the footer of every page reopens your preferences at any time.
Support payments
Optional support payments are handled by Ko-fi and Stripe on their own websites. We do not see your card details. Ko-fi sends us your display name, email address, message and amount so we can thank you and keep accounting records. Nothing from Ko-fi or Stripe loads on this site; the "Support this tool" link simply opens their page. Tips are voluntary and non-refundable except at our discretion.
Hosting
The site is served as static files from Cloudflare's network. Like any content delivery network, Cloudflare may keep short-lived operational logs (such as IP address and requested URL) for security and abuse prevention; those are governed by Cloudflare's privacy policy. Beyond the page-view counts described above, we add no logging of our own on top.
Questions
Upscale.tools is operated by Elowin Labs LLC. Email hello@elowinlabs.com. We read everything.