Flookup Data Wrangler for Desktop

The Windows version runs on your machine rather than in a browser tab. It reads your files, works on them locally and saves the result back. The same six modules are available as a Google Sheets add-on, and the same licence covers both.

Pricing Plans

Both plans contain the same six modules: Profiling, Cleaning, Matching, Verification, Automation and device release. The difference is how you are billed. Payment is handled by Lemon Squeezy and the licence reaches you by email within a minute. One licence covers one seat on one computer. The Starter, Pro, Teams and Week Pass plans are the Google Sheets add-on and cannot be bought here.

Post Purchase Steps

The licence id arrives in the purchase email. Open the app and enter that id together with the email address you bought with, and the tools unlock on that computer. The same two values let you look the licence up again at any time.

My Account inside the app shows the plan, the current status, the date the term ends and how many of your seats are in use. It also lists the computers the licence is active on, and lets you release one. Releasing a computer frees its seat so the licence can be activated on a replacement machine, which is what you want after rebuilding Windows or replacing a disk.

My Account does not take payments and does not cancel anything. Billing, plan changes and cancellation live in the Lemon Squeezy customer portal, which you reach from My Account inside the app.

The desktop app documentation is the reference for every module: profiling, cleaning, matching and deduplication, verification, scheduled automation, licence activation and moving a licence to a new computer.

Your Data Does Not Leave Your Machine

The desktop app has no account system, no telemetry, no analytics and no crash reporting. There is no code in it that reports an error to us, because there is no error reporting service to report it to. The files you open, the columns you select and the results you produce are written to a workbook in your own user profile, and the app reads nothing outside the files you give it.

This is different from the web tools, which run in your browser and have their own privacy policy. It is also different from a hosted tool, where a browser tab uploads your rows to a server that processes them for someone else. Nothing here is uploaded, so there is nothing to breach on our side and nothing for us to sell.

You can check that rather than take our word for it. The installer is a zip archive, so you can open it and read the source before you install anything. The network calls are all in two files, and the only hosts they can reach are the ones listed below.

The Two Network Calls, In Full

There are exactly two, and you can watch both happen in the status bar:

• A licence check, which sends your licence id, a fingerprint derived from this machine and the app version. The fingerprint is a hash, not an inventory: it is built from the machine GUID, the disk volume serial, the processor id, your Windows account name and your profile path, and none of those values is sent in readable form. The app cannot tell them apart, so it cannot report which one is which.
• An update check, which asks www.getflookup.com for a signed manifest listing the current release. It sends no identifier of any kind.

Neither call sends the contents of a file, a column name, a cell value or a row count. There is no third call, and adding one would mean changing code you can read.

What Stays on Your Machine

• Your workbook, in your user profile, readable and deletable by you at any time without asking us
• Your licence, which is signed by us and verified on your machine, so it works with the network switched off
• A log file capped at 1 MB, used for troubleshooting, which records what the app did and never what your data contained

Because the licence is verified locally, the app keeps working for seven days with no network at all, then returns to a reduced state until it can check again. Your work is never held hostage to a server being reachable.

Links Are Links

Every other address in the app, including the buttons that open the checkout and the customer portal, is handed to your browser and does nothing itself. The app will not open a link to any host other than www.getflookup.com and pay.getflookup.com, and it does not use wildcards, so a subdomain we have not audited cannot open silently.

The Installer Is Digitally Signed

The installer carries an Authenticode signature. A signature is not a claim from us, it is arithmetic: if any byte of the file has been altered since it was signed, the signature stops verifying. You do not have to take our word for it, and you do not have to trust us to check it.

Here is the certificate the installer is signed with, so you can inspect it before you install anything:

You can download the certificate itself and look at it in the certificate manager that ships with Windows. It is a public certificate, so there is nothing secret in it. Download the signing certificate .

What to Expect the First Time You Run It

Windows shows a publisher warning the first time it runs an installer it has not seen before, and it shows that warning for software that carries a signature from its own author. The warning is about the certificate not being issued by a commercial authority. It is not a report that anything is wrong with the file, and the signature is still checked the same way.

To clear the warning on your own machine, trust the certificate once:

1. Open the certificate file you downloaded above.
2. Choose Install Certificate, then choose Current User as the location.
3. Run the installer. The publisher now reads CN=Flookup rather than Unknown publisher.

That is a setting on your machine rather than a change to the certificate. It takes a few seconds, it affects only the computer you do it on, and you can reverse it at any time by removing the certificate from Trusted Root Certification Authorities.

Check the Installer Yourself

On any Windows machine, with no extra software:

1. Right click the downloaded file and choose Properties, then the Digital Signatures tab.
2. Select the signature and choose Details. Confirm the signer subject is CN=Flookup, O=Flookup, C=GB and that the thumbprint matches the one above.
3. Windows will also state that the certificate is not from a trusted source. That is expected for a certificate issued by the software author rather than by a commercial authority.

To go further, compare the hash of the file with the one in the release manifest that the app itself uses. The manifest is signed with a separate key held on the activation service, and the app refuses to install any download whose hash does not match it.

Licences Are Bound to Your Device

A desktop licence is tied to this machine rather than to your account, which means a licence id that leaks cannot be used on somebody else's computer. The binding combines hardware identifiers with your Windows account name and profile path, so a second Windows account on the same machine does not inherit the licence.

The cost of that choice is that a licence stops matching if you reinstall Windows or rename your account. You enter the licence id again in My Account, and your other devices are unaffected. We would rather you know the trade-off now than discover it the week you rebuild a machine.

Updates Are Checked Rather Than Pushed

The app checks for a newer release at most once a day and tells you in the top bar when one exists. It does not install anything on its own and it does not run a download in the background. When you choose to install, the file is verified against the signed manifest and the hash of the manifest is checked before the installer starts.

Reporting a Problem

If a signature check fails, a hash does not match, or something in the app behaves in a way you cannot account for, tell us. Include the version from My Account and, if you are able, the output of the integrity check in the same panel. Contact us .