How it works

Most services show you rich data in their web dashboard but give you no clean way to get it out. Many have no API, or hide it behind a paid tier. Butin's approach: it reads those dashboards the same way your browser does, using the session you already logged in with.

Capture → replay → keep

1. Capture the session. You log in by hand once. Butin captures the resulting session — cookies and tokens — and stores it, encrypted, on your machine.
2. Replay headless. While that session is valid, Butin fetches the service's data straight from Node, with no browser window open. It runs directly on demand.
3. Keep your data. Each fetch is normalized and saved locally, with history. It stays yours even after the session is gone.

Sessions expire — that's expected

A captured session lasts exactly as long as the service keeps it alive, and that varies enormously — roughly 20 minutes for a bank, ~30 minutes for some portals, ~1 hour for others, up to a few days for the long-lived ones. Butin does not — and cannot — extend it.

So the honest model is: sign in, let Butin do the reading and refreshing while the session holds, and sign in again when it lapses to pull fresh data. What's permanent is the data already on your disk, not the access.

Why it works without an API

Butin replays the same authenticated requests your browser makes, so it doesn't need a vendor API. If a browser can render it, a plugin can fetch it. Under the hood it carries two fetch engines:

• a standard Node path for most services, and
• an Electron path that presents a real browser identity for services that need it — matching the window you logged in with.

How each service is parsed (JSON, GraphQL, HTML parsing, and so on) lives inside its plugin. The app normalizes every result into one shape and renders it through a single generic dashboard.

Private by design

The trust story is the architecture, not a privacy policy:

• Your session, your machine. It replays the requests your own browser makes — no middleman, no shared credentials.
• No custody. There's no account, no sync, and no server that could read your numbers. Captured data lives under ~/butin, encrypted with your OS keychain.
• Open source. Read the code, fork it, write your own plugins. The app is Apache-2.0 and the SDK is MIT. Trust the architecture, not a promise.

Butin only ever reads data that is already yours — in your own authenticated session, on your own hardware. It's a personal data-portability tool: nothing leaves your machine, and no server takes custody of your credentials.