Vol. № 01 · Cross-platform · Android · Linux · Windows

Rigward

A privacy compact, in four parts

Wake, switch, and run
your rigs. We never
see a thing.

Rigward turns your phone into a remote for the PCs you already own. Wake them on LAN, jump between them, and drive a desktop session over SSH and Tailscale — with nothing in the middle that can see what you’re doing.

Built by one. Free tier is fully functional.
The privacy guarantees are the same on every tier.

I. The pact · four things we never do

We never see your commands.

When your phone sends reboot now or code ., the instruction rides an SSH session that is end-to-end between your phone and your PC. Our servers are not in the path. No proxy, no command bus, no relay.

We never see your screens.

Remote desktop is x11vnc bound to localhost on the target, port-forwarded over SSH inside the Tailscale tunnel. Pixels live on your two devices. No pixel relay. No recording server. No “join with code.”

We never see your network.

Transit is Tailscale (WireGuard) with a coordination plane. The data plane is peer-to-peer wherever NAT allows it. Either way it’s not our relay. We don’t run network infrastructure. We have nothing to log.

What we do have.

Email. OAuth token. Payment status. That’s the entire row. It’s the same data Stripe, Google, and Apple already hold. If our servers are rooted tomorrow, the worst an attacker gets is a list of email addresses.

We are not on the call. Your phone talks to your PC, and we sell the app that introduced them.

II. The ledger · what touches our servers, exhaustively

We’re not going to pretend the server is empty. There is exactly one table that holds anything about you, and these are its three columns. We’d publish the schema if it weren’t already visibly the schema.

No telemetry. No usage logs. No device list. No command history. No IP logs beyond what is required to terminate the TLS connection for the sign-in flow itself.

  1. i.

    Email address

    So we can identify your account and contact you about your account. Nothing else.

  2. ii.

    OAuth token

    So you can sign in with Google or Apple without us storing a password. The token authenticates you to us, not to your devices.

  3. iii.

    Payment status

    Active, lapsed, trialing. We need it for entitlements. Stripe holds the card; we hold a bit.

III. The build · the stack, for the people who want to audit it
Transport
Tailscale (WireGuard) between phone and PC. Optional Tailscale SSH if you prefer Tailscale’s ACLs for auth over your own keys.
Authentication
OpenSSH, public-key only. The agent writes a hardened sshd_config: PasswordAuthentication no, PermitRootLogin no, KbdInteractiveAuthentication no, MaxAuthTries 3.
Remote desktop
x11vnc bound to 127.0.0.1, surfaced through an SSH port-forward. No VNC port listens on any reachable interface.
Wake
Magic packets sent from a peer on the same LAN — another Rigward agent, or your router’s WoL feature. Not from our servers.
Updates
GitHub Releases. Signed commits. Reproducible build steps in the repo. No silent auto-update channel we control.

What Rigward is not

  • Not a TeamViewer / AnyDesk replacement. Those host the pixel stream on their infrastructure. We don’t. If your PC is off and not on a reachable LAN, we cannot help you wake it.
  • Not LogMeIn. No admin override, no support tech who can shadow your session, no master key. We don’t have one to lose.
  • Not a botnet C2. Once setup completes, the agent has no command bus to poll. It listens on SSH (over Tailscale) and accepts authenticated peers. We cannot push a command to your machine even if we wanted to.
IV. The price · a free tier that actually works, and what paid unlocks

Free

Fully functional for a single device. Forever. The privacy model is identical to paid.

  • One paired rig
  • Wake-on-LAN, terminal, file actions
  • Built-in VNC viewer over SSH
  • Sign in with Google or Apple
  • Same end-to-end SSH + Tailscale path

Pro

When one rig isn’t enough, or you want scheduled actions to do the boring parts.

  • Unlimited paired rigs
  • Scheduled actions (wake, sleep, run command on a cron)
  • Org / team mode (coming)

We don’t gate the security model. There is no “pro” tier where we suddenly start seeing more. The promise on this page is the same on every plan.

Try it on one rig.

Free tier is the whole product for a single machine. Pair your phone, point it at a PC you own, and see how it feels when the middle isn’t there.