Fair questions, straight answers

Keycito is a menu-bar app for macOS that quietly notices which keyboard shortcuts you use — and which ones you miss — then teaches you a few new ones each week, chosen from your own behavior, and reinforces them with streaks and spaced repetition until they're muscle memory.

There are no lessons, decks, or flashcards. You just work; the shortcuts show up.

It is designed to be the opposite of one, and to be checkable. Keycito listens for one thing: whether a keystroke matches a known shortcut in the app you're using. That match happens in memory, on your Mac. What gets written to disk is a count — "⌘D in Finder, 3 times today" — in a local database you can open yourself.

No text you type is ever stored, sent, or even assembled: the app matches modifier combinations (like ⌘, ⇧, ⌥ plus a key) and immediately discards everything else. No key logs, no window titles, no document names, no screenshots.

Passwords are physically untrackable. When you type in a password field, macOS turns on Secure Input, which blocks keystroke observation for every app at the operating-system level — before Keycito (or any similar app) could see anything. This is an OS guarantee, not a policy we ask you to trust.

Keycito honors it fully and never attempts to work around it. If another app leaves Secure Input stuck on, Keycito simply pauses and tells you which app is responsible.

One permission on most Macs: Accessibility. It powers everything — counting shortcut combos as tallies, reading app menus to discover which shortcuts exist, and noticing when you click a menu item that had a shortcut you skipped.

Some macOS versions additionally require Input Monitoring for the same listen-only tap; if yours does, the app walks you through both toggles and explains each one before asking. Keycito never asks for Full Disk Access, Screen Recording, or network permissions it doesn't need.

Starting with macOS 15 (Sequoia), Apple removed the clickable Accessibility prompt: instead of an "Allow" button, you have to open System Settings and flip the toggle yourself. This is an OS-wide change that affects every app requesting Accessibility, not something Keycito controls.

Keycito's onboarding is built around it — it takes you straight to the right pane in System Settings, detects the moment you flip the toggle, and picks up where you left off. One quirk to know about: after a macOS update, the toggle can show as granted while the permission has silently stopped working. If Keycito ever tells you it can't see shortcuts despite the toggle being on, toggling it off and on (or relaunching the app) fixes it.

No. Keycito uses a listen-only event tap: it observes keyboard events but never intercepts, delays, or modifies them, so your keystrokes reach your apps exactly as they would without it. The shortcut match is a small in-memory lookup.

The app is a native Swift menu-bar utility, not an Electron shell — it is built to be invisible in Activity Monitor as well as on screen.

By default: nothing. Keycito works fully offline and needs no account.

If you opt into a league, your daily score syncs — five numeric components (usage, diversity, learning, mastery, streak) plus the day, your client version, a nonce, and a signature. The complete payload is printed on our homepage and published as a schema our releases are tested against.

Joining also registers you: a device record (a public key, your client and macOS version, and a per-install device ID), and — to stop one person farming accounts and prizes — two keyed HMAC hashes of the IP address you sign up from. The raw IP is never stored; it's hashed in memory and discarded. If you follow an invite link, the connection between your account and the one that referred you is stored too.

What still never leaves your Mac: your keystrokes and typed text, and every per-shortcut and per-app detail. Note that the exact time you submit a score is recorded on our server for fraud prevention — it's only on your own machine that nothing finer than a daily per-app total is kept.

Yes — that's the default. Onboarding requires no sign-up, no email, and no network. Accounts exist only for the optional league features, and you can use Keycito forever without one.

Local data: it's a single local database on your Mac. Delete the app and its data folder and everything is gone — there is no server copy of your shortcut activity, because it never leaves the machine.

Account data (if you joined a league): request deletion in-app or email jkdev222@gmail.com — we delete your account and everything attached to it (scores, league membership, device records, referral links, and fraud-check records) within 30 days, and you can export a copy first. See the privacy policy for details.

Keycito is completely free during early access — every feature, no card, no trial countdown. The free period runs until well after 1.0 (our published plan: until 5,000 devices or six months after launch, whichever comes first).

After that, a Pro tier is planned at $29/year for power features, and early-access users get a discount for their first year. The core stays free forever: tracking (up to 12 apps), teaching, streaks — including free streak freezes — and leagues.

Because the App Store sandbox prohibits the two things that make Keycito work: reading app menus to auto-discover shortcuts, and noticing when a click had a shortcut alternative. That's a hard technical block, not a choice we could pay or engineer our way around.

So Keycito ships the way most serious Mac utilities do: direct download, signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate, notarized by Apple (Gatekeeper checks every build), with secure automatic updates.

Weekly draws are planned, and the structure is designed to the strictest reading of US sweepstakes law: no purchase is ever necessary, money can never buy entries or increase your odds — directly or indirectly — and a free web entry route with equal odds will exist for people who don't even use the app.

No draw will run before its official rules have been reviewed by a sweepstakes attorney, and draws will initially be US-only, 18+, void where prohibited. Nothing about the draws is pay-to-play: paying for Pro will never grant entries, multipliers, or any earning advantage.

Yes. Shortcuts triggered through well-known remappers and launchers (Karabiner-Elements, Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Alfred, Raycast, espanso) count as real usage — power users are exactly who this app is for.

Events synthesized by unknown scripts are ignored for scoring, and the app shows you transparently when and why anything was ignored.

macOS 14 (Sonoma) and later, on Apple silicon and Intel. Keycito is a native Swift app.

The capture layer — the part that touches keyboard events and aggregates them into counts — is planned to be published as open source, so the privacy claims can be verified by reading the code rather than trusting the marketing.

Private beta invites go out in small waves from the waitlist, followed by a public beta anyone can download without an account. Join the waitlist and you'll get exactly one email when your invite is ready, plus a short build update every few weeks.