# Privacy and costs

> What is sent where, what costs money and where your files are kept.

## What leaves your machine

Clusters makes no network requests of its own. Every model call goes through Model Hub, to the providers you set up there.

| What is sent | When |
|---|---|
| The text of each passage | Indexing, and previewing or indexing a book that needs a model to find its parts |
| A sample of each document | A survey |
| The text of each card | Embedding, during indexing |
| Your question, and any seeds | Search, finding topics and drafting |
| The cards and passages a draft uses | Drafting |

Which provider receives them is decided in Model Hub. With a local provider there, nothing leaves your computer.

Book files come through Books & Shelves, which talks to your Calibre Content Server.

There is no telemetry and there are no ads.

## What costs money

Keep up to date, when you turn it on for a collection, starts index runs on its own as its source changes. They count against a daily limit in Setup (one dollar by default) and show in Jobs with their cost.

Clusters is free. The providers you set up in Model Hub may bill you for each call.

- **Indexing** is the large cost: one call per passage, plus embedding the cards.
- **A survey**, **naming topics** and **a draft** each make a handful of calls.
- **Search** embeds your question, which costs a tiny fraction of a cent.

Before any of these, Clusters shows a dry run with what it would do, and an estimate for indexing and drafts. A run can stop at a **spend limit** you set. Model Hub's limits and budgets apply too, and its usage view shows what Clusters has spent.

## Where things are kept

| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Indexes: passages, cards, vectors and run logs | `.obsidian/plugins/clusters/corpora/` |
| Collection notes | The folder you choose; `Clusters` by default |
| Topic notes | `Clusters/Topics` by default |
| Drafts | `Clusters/Drafts` by default |
| Your lenses | Model Hub's skills folder |
| Graph view colour groups | `graph.json` in the vault's configuration folder, beside your own groups |

**Uninstalling Clusters deletes every index.** Your notes stay.

## Files outside the vault

Clusters reads nothing outside the vault.