Verified purchaser
Insightful but no local data storage option
Rize is well-designed and intuitive to use. After using it for a week I've learned a few things about my work habits and some ways I can improve productivity. If you are goal and performance oriented, then you definitely want to make Rize a part of your life.
However, it tracks everything... and your data is uploaded to Amazon's cloud where it is encrypted. There is no option for local storage, at least none that I can see. In a post-Snowden world, this is rather shocking. I cannot see myself using this app long term until a local storage and encryption feature is available. I've already stopped using Evernote in favour of Joplin because it offers end-to-end encryption and self storage option. I would like to do the same with Rize. Otherwise, sadly, I may be refunding this purchase.
Macgill_Rize
May 9, 2024Thanks so much for your review. We completely understand your concern for data privacy and security. We take data privacy and security extremely seriously.
Rize never captures any data within the content of your in-focus window, just the metadata of your window (title, app id, URL, timestamps).
Your data in Rize is hosted on Amazon Web Services, protected both physically and electronically. Your data is only accessible through your personal password-protected account, and any data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Our database generates backups of our data at least twice a day for redundancy.
Our team has engineering experience from top technology companies like Twitter and Periscope. Security is not an afterthought for us; we design, develop, and ship code with security as a top consideration. We achieved a SOC2 Type 2 certification at our last company and plan on getting the same certification once we reach a bit higher revenue at Rize (it's an expensive process).
There are a few reasons why we can't store your data locally right now. We do a lot of asynchronous processing of your data to determine insights such as determining focus time, work hours, smart categorization and more. Right now, it's just not tenable to do that locally. Many of our users want and expect to access their data across multiple computers. Additionally, Rize generates a lot of data that could take up a fair amount of space on your local computer.
Long-term we'd love to add local storage functionality but right now we want to stay hyper-focused on delivering the best productivity insights. I'm really sorry about that.
Again, I'm sorry we can't offer this functionality right now. Let me know if you have any additional questions or if there's anything else I can help out with.