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About

Why we built macup.

A short version: we lost a hard drive full of work, and the tools we had didn't save us. The long version is below — a note, a manifesto, and the people doing the work.

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Founder note

The hard drive.

A photographer I'd worked with for years called me in 2019 to say a drive had clicked and then gone silent mid-export. Nine months of shoots. Three weddings. The full assist folder for a brand campaign about to deliver. They'd been meaning to "set up backups properly." They had not.

I spent the next six months shopping for a backup tool I'd actually install on a Mac. Time Machine was fine until it wasn't. The enterprise tools looked like they were built in 1998 and priced like it's 2028. The consumer tools were either slow or made promises about encryption they quietly broke. Every one of them was built for a different kind of user than the people calling me about lost drives.

macup is what I wanted to hand them. Mac-first. Cryptographically honest. Restores you can practice. A menubar that tells you the truth. The product is what the five-years-ago version of that photographer would have called a fair trade for the work they'd lost.

The macup Manifesto

Eight principles. Not negotiable.

Every product decision — big, small, funded, deferred — runs through this list. If a decision contradicts one of these, we rewrite the decision.

  1. Trust is structural.

    We cannot read your backups. The cryptography precedes the company — our servers see ciphertext, not files, and the key that would decrypt them never leaves your Mac. This is by design, not by policy. Policies change. Math doesn't.

  2. Mac first.

    Every decision starts with the platform. Vibrancy, SF Symbols, native menubar behaviour, FileVault awareness, iCloud Keychain as a first-class citizen. We are not a cross-platform product with a Mac skin. We are a Mac product.

  3. Open where we can.

    macup is built on an open-source backup engine with a public CLI. If we disappear tomorrow, your data is still readable without our servers — you point the CLI at your storage, you get your files. That escape hatch is part of the product, not a footnote.

  4. Respect the reader.

    Our customers are working photographers, videographers, designers, musicians, writers, and developers. They know what a snapshot is. We don't dumb down, we don't over-explain, and we don't hide the specs. AES-256 is a feature, not an intimidation.

  5. Show the work.

    Every backup, every failure, every byte. The menubar tells you exactly what's happening. The history is browsable. The encryption is documented. Backup software that hides what it's doing is backup software you can't trust.

  6. No App Store.

    The Mac App Store means accepting sandbox limits that break what a backup product has to do — read across the whole disk, watch the file system, run a subprocess engine. We chose the product over the distribution channel. Notarised DMG, directly downloaded, is how the best Mac software ships.

  7. Don't make promises we can't keep.

    Our SOC 2 status is honest: in progress, targeted Q1 2027. Our roadmap is honest — dates are targets, not commitments. Our pricing is honest — no surprise overage, no per-seat gotcha. "Enterprise-grade" is not a marketing word we use on a startup-grade codebase.

  8. Backup is the product, not the platform.

    We will not grow into a "platform." We won't bundle five tools you didn't want to sell the one you did. macup stays a backup tool, and macup stays focused on getting that one thing unambiguously right.
Trust is structural. The cryptography precedes the company.
— Principle 1
The team

Small on purpose.

We're intentionally small — a tight team that ships carefully. Real photos and real bios arrive with our first funding-round disclosures. Until then, the team is reachable by email; every inbox at macup.app is read by a person, not a funnel.

Full team profiles launch alongside our first public press cycle. Write to press@macup.app or the general contact page if you need to reach someone specific before then.

Talk to us

Every inbox reaches a person.

Support, sales, security, press — four channels, four teams, same company. Pick the one that fits.

See the contact page →

The manifesto is the promise. The product is the proof.

14-day trial. No card. Run macup on the Mac you care about most and see if the principles show up.

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