Telemetry is easy to justify when you're building a product. Action counts sound harmless. Model-selection stats sound useful. Error reports sound responsible.
Vehla is the kind of app people use on sensitive text, so we chose a simpler rule: no product analytics, no crash-report upload, no prompt logging, no output logging.
What we did
We removed it. All of it. Not made-it-opt-in, not "you can disable it" — gone. In v1.3.0 the only network calls Vehla makes are the daily update check and whatever provider call you yourself initiated.
What happened
- We no longer know which actions are most popular unless users tell us.
- We debug issues from support emails, screenshots, and reproducible steps instead of background telemetry.
- License, trial, and update requests stay separate from prompts and outputs.
The honest cost
We can no longer answer the question "which model is most used" with a number. We have to ask. The answers we get back are better than the data we used to have, because they come with context. A power user who runs Generate Tests 40 times a day will tell you why. A bar chart can't.
What we'd tell the next founder
If you can ship the product without telemetry, do. Make the harder choice. The customers who notice will be your best customers, and they'll tell others. The cost is real but the cost was already there — you just used to call it "data" instead of "doubt".