Our promises
What Tengu will never do
Tengu tracks the work, not the people doing it. These are the lines we don’t cross, and several of them are checked by tests that run on every change to the code.
Never: Take screenshots of anyone's screen
Not as a default, not as an option, not for the one client who asks. A timer records when it started, when it stopped and which quest it was on.
Never: Watch your computer, or what you do outside Tengu
Nothing from Tengu runs on your computer to watch it: not your screen, your keyboard or mouse outside Tengu's pages, nor the other apps you use. Inside Tengu, Prizmstack records visits to its pages with PostHog, typing and mouse movement included, to see how Tengu is used and make it better. Passwords, sign-in codes, keys, Google Drive files and calendar events are left out. Only Prizmstack's staff watch those recordings: your workspace's owners and admins can't, and nothing in them scores anyone's work. Tengu Timer, the desktop app, runs your timer and opens Tengu in a window of its own: that window records no screen, camera or microphone (recordings are made in your browser), and Prizmstack records no visits there.
Never: Score activity or idle time
There is no activity percentage and no idle detection. A forgotten timer is caught by asking at the evening sweep, not by watching.
Never: Show who is online
No online, away or idle dots, for anyone. Teammates can see what someone is working on, never whether they are at their desk. In a meeting, its people see who has watched its kickoff and how far, and who was on its call: that meeting's own read receipts, never a score and never a status.
Never: Show everyone your days off
Members ask for days off, with a note if they like, and someone in Operations or an admin approves or declines them. The member sees their own. Operations, admins and owners see everyone's, and a project's PMs see days off for the people on their projects. Other members don't see anyone else's. A day off is a date, never an away status.
Never: Give XP for hours
XP comes only from finished quests, so overtime earns nothing. The game code never reads time or pay.
Never: Show members each other's hours or pay
Members never see anyone else's rate or pay, nor anyone else's hours, and no member-facing screen compares people's time. The one exception is a meeting's host, who sees how long each person in it tracked on that meeting and nothing more. Owners and admins see each person's tracked and billable hours against their expected hours on the Capacity Hub, to plan who has room for work next week.
Never: Put rates, pay or margins in Slack or email
Budget alerts and the Monday brief go to owners and admins as Slack DMs, never to a channel, with percentages, dates, counts and the names of projects and clients; the brief also names who has days off that week. No Slack message or email Tengu sends about your time, budgets, pay or Finances carries a dollar amount: no rate, pay, cost, margin, billable total or budget in dollars. One that reaches the wrong person gives no money away, and its link opens the page, which checks who is reading.
Never: Change or delete your own calendar events
When you connect Google Calendar, Tengu's access to your own calendars is read-only: it reads your day, and puts your planned blocks on a calendar of its own for each workspace, named for it ("Tengu · Acme"). It changes and deletes only those blocks, never an event on your own calendars, and disconnecting deletes that calendar, with everything on it. Nothing Tengu reads from your calendar for your day goes to an AI model or to Tengu's recordings of its pages.
Never: Post in Slack as you without your Send
If you let Tengu reply as you, it posts only the reply you wrote, in the thread you're answering, when you press Send. The one permission it asks your Slack account for is to post, so it can't read anything as you, and it never searches Slack. Nothing Tengu gets from Slack is used to train AI models.
Never: Sell your data
Your tasks, comments, time and pay records are yours. We don't sell them, rent them or hand them to advertisers.
Never: Put Prizmstack staff in your workspace uninvited
Tengu is made by Prizmstack, which also runs a software agency. Its people are in your workspace only if you set it up with us or invite us, and Admin › Members marks each of them as Tengu staff. If we set it up, we stay an admin after handing it to you, until we leave or you remove us there. When you ask for help, we look at what you ask us to, and nothing else. The one exception is Tengu's own recordings of its pages (above): our staff can watch them, and they show what was on screen, your workspace's work included.
Never: Hold your Claude login
Run in Claude Code uses a routine you create in your own Claude account. Tengu keeps only that routine's trigger token, encrypted, never your Claude login or password.
How the data is kept safe is on the security page. Questions about any of these: hello@tengu.work.