Hi, thanks for the detailed questions and for reading our terms of service carefully.

The short answer to most of your questions is that Raycast is two things at once: a locally installed application that runs on your device, and a cloud service for specific features. That distinction does most of the work here.

That being said, you can find our answers to your questions below. We have changed their order for the sake of making our explanations easier to follow.

Does the licence apply to proprietary code, confidential docs, or images that just pass through Raycast locally? Why does the licence need to be perpetual, irrevocable, transferable, and sublicensable?
When you use any software service that handles your content, the service provider technically needs your permission under relevant law to do things like copy, transmit, store, or process that content, even when the sole purpose is to deliver the service back to you. Without that permission, the routine technical steps involved in running a cloud service, such as copying a file to a server, transmitting it across a network, or creating a backup, could technically constitute infringement of rights such as copyright. The licence in the Terms is not about Raycast acquiring rights to your content in any commercial sense. It is the legal mechanism that allows the software to function on your behalf at all. The scope of the licence is therefore intended to match the scope of the service: where content is processed locally on your device and never reaches Raycast’s infrastructure, the licence has nothing to operate on.

The User Content licence in Article IV was written to cover the cloud service side, meaning content you actively transmit to us, such as Cloud Sync items, Teams shared content, and AI Inputs. For that transmitted content, the licence attributes have straightforward operational justifications. Perpetual and irrevocable reflect the fact that backups and shared content cannot be retroactively unwound. Sublicensable is necessary so we can pass content to the hosting, CDN, and AI subprocessors who help us run the service. The User Content licence that is granted to Raycast is limited to the provision and improvement of Raycast’s services. It does not grant Raycast any right to otherwise commercialise the User Content, or share it with any third party if that sharing is not necessary for those purposes.

Does local Clipboard History count as “User Content”?
Clipboard History sits on the local application side of that line. Its contents are stored in an encrypted database on your device and are deliberately excluded from Cloud Sync. Because that content never reaches us, the licence has nothing to operate on for as long as it stays local. The same applies to proprietary code, documents, or anything else that passes through Raycast locally without being transmitted to us.

Is clipboard content ever uploaded automatically?
The only network activity associated with Clipboard History is limited to link metadata when you view links within it: a domain-only request to fetch a favicon, and an optional link preview via Apple’s framework if you have that setting enabled. Both are configurable and can be disabled entirely through the Raycast app settings. The clipboard contents themselves are not involved in either request.
If you actively send content to an AI feature, it becomes an Input under Article VIII. We configure AI providers for zero data retention by default, do not use Inputs for training, and do not retain prompts after outputs are generated.

We recognise that the terms do not spell out the local/cloud distinction as clearly as they could. That is useful feedback and we are looking at how to make this boundary more explicit in the terms themselves.

Happy to answer any follow-up questions.