Cost & Privacy

Cost

Evolve is local-only. The only outbound calls are the occasional mutation prompts to your configured LLM. At the default cadence (roughly one challenger per project per week), using Haiku:

• Per call: ~500 input + 200 output tokens ≈ $0.000375
• Per project / month: ~$0.002

Use Ollama instead of Haiku and the cost is $0. The proxy (Cursor fallback) forwards to your existing OpenAI/Anthropic key — it adds no additional cost.

Privacy

• Storage: a single local SQLite file. No cloud, no telemetry.
• Signals DB: only metadata + numeric scores are persisted. No source code in the signals.payload_json column; the storage layer rejects payloads that look code-like (fn , def , class , SQL statements, etc.).
• Prompts: not logged unless you pass --include-prompts on evolve init.
• Outbound HTTP: only to the LLM provider you configure (for mutation generation). No analytics, no pings.

Opting out

• evolve forget <project-id> removes all Evolve rows and restores the unmanaged versions of your config files.
• evolve forget --all wipes everything.
• Deleting ~/.evolve/ is always safe.