Privacy
What we collect, why, and what you can do.
startwith stores the work you do so the coach can be useful to you. We do not sell it, we do not advertise, and you can have a copy of it or have it deleted by asking. Below: exactly what we hold, who else can see it, how long we keep it, and how to get it back or get rid of it.
Last updated: September 23, 2026
What we collect
When you sign in we receive your email address, and if you signed in with Google, your name and profile photo. We use your email to identify your account and to send the sign-in link when you ask for one.
While you use startwith we store the work you do: the goals you create, the sessions you run — when they start, how long they last, what you said the session was for, whether you finished or paused — the reflections you write, and the answers you give when you set up your profile. When you talk to the coach, your messages and its replies are stored, so that the next conversation can follow on from the last.
When you create an account, you can optionally tell us how you heard about startwith, add source details, and identify a campaign. Please do not put personal or sensitive information in the source-details box. We use these fields with signup, session-start, and reflection milestones to produce aggregated signup and activation counts for the small team that runs startwith; they are not used for advertising.
If you connect a calendar we store what that needs. Section 5 says exactly what.
We also record how the service is behaving: when you signed in and out, roughly how much text each coach conversation used, and whether a request failed. This is how we keep startwith running and affordable. We do not use it to build a profile of you or to decide anything about you.
What we never collect
- No advertising identifiers, and no third-party trackers.
- No clipboard, contacts, camera or location — the app never asks for those permissions. The microphone is asked for only if you tap the microphone button yourself, and only for as long as you leave it on. Section 4.
- No keystroke logging, no screen recording, no tracking of what you do outside startwith.
- We have never sold personal data and we will not. If that ever changes, this page changes first and we email you before it takes effect.
Why we use it
To give you a coach that knows what you have already done. Your goals, sessions and reflections are what let it ask a better question this week than it could last week.
We do not use your work to advertise to you, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to train anybody's model.
Who else can see it
We do not sell or trade your data. We do use a small number of companies to run startwith, and each of them handles one specific part of it. They may only use what we send them to do that job.
- Supabase stores the database and runs sign-in. Servers are in Singapore.
- Vercel runs the app itself, also in Singapore.
- A large-language-model provider writes the coach's replies. It receives your message and the relevant earlier conversation, and nothing else — not your email address, not your name, nothing from your calendar. Your message may be processed outside your own country.
- Resend sends sign-in emails. It sees your email address and the link, nothing else.
- Google, only if you connect a calendar. Section 5.
- Your own browser's voice typing, only if you tap the microphone next to a message box. We do not record you and we do not run a transcriber — we ask the one already built into your browser. On Chrome and Edge that sends the audio to Google and returns the words. On Safari it happens on your device. Either way, all that reaches startwith is the text, exactly as if you had typed it. If you would rather not, do not tap the microphone.
Inside startwith, a small number of people can reach the database in order to run and fix the service. Nobody reads your sessions or your coach conversations for any other reason.
Your calendar
Putting your sessions in a calendar is optional, and the two ways to do it differ in what they can reach.
A subscription link. We can give you a secret link to a calendar file listing your sessions. Anyone holding that link can read your session titles and times without signing in — that is how calendar apps fetch it, which is why the link is long and random, and why you can reset it at any time. Resetting it cuts off every calendar already using it.
Connecting your Google account. startwith creates a new calendar of its own in your account, called startwith sessions, and puts your sessions in it. The permission we ask for is the narrowest one Google offers: see, create, change and delete events on calendars startwith itself created. We cannot see, change or delete anything else in your Google Calendar — not your meetings, not your other calendars. Google enforces that itself.
Because that calendar is ours, we also read changes you make to it, so that moving or renaming a session in Google updates it in startwith. We read no other calendar. We store only what keeps this working: an access credential, the id of the calendar we created, and an id for each event we made, so we update events instead of duplicating them.
Calendar data is never used for advertising, never sold, and never used to train a model. It does one job: keeping your sessions and your calendar in step.
startwith's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
You can disconnect at any time in the same panel you connected in, which hands the access back to Google. You can also revoke it yourself at myaccount.google.com/permissions, which is also where you can check what startwith is allowed to reach. Disconnecting leaves the calendar and its events in your Google account — we do not delete your record of what you did. You can delete that calendar yourself in Google.
Cookies and local storage
We use a few first-party cookies and local-storage entries: one to keep you signed in, one to remember whether you chose light or dark, one to remember that you have been here before, and one that holds a short-lived code used during the Google sign-in handshake. None of them track you, and none are shared with anyone. Clearing them signs you out.
How long we keep it
Your goals, sessions, reflections and coach conversations stay for as long as your account exists. We do not delete them on a schedule, because the coach's usefulness comes from remembering what you have already done.
Signup attribution — how you heard about us, source details, and the campaign label — stays while your account exists. A pending attribution record used only to carry those optional fields through sign-in expires after 24 hours and is then deleted.
When you ask us to delete your account we remove your personal data within 30 days. Counts that cannot be traced back to you — how many sessions ran in a week, for instance — may remain.
Server logs, which can include your IP address, are held by our hosting providers for a short period and then discarded.
How we protect it
Traffic between your browser and startwith is encrypted with HTTPS, and the database is encrypted where it is stored. Access to production data is limited to the people who run the service and is protected by two-factor sign-in.
No service can promise it will never be breached. If your data is ever exposed we will tell you what happened, what was affected, and what to do about it — by email, and on this page.
When we would have to hand it over
We will disclose your data if the law genuinely requires it — a valid court order or an equivalent legal demand — or where we must to protect someone from serious harm. Where we are allowed to tell you that it happened, we will.
We do not hand over user data on informal request, and we have never been asked to.
Your rights
You can ask us to:
- send you a copy of everything we hold about you
- correct anything that is wrong
- delete your account and the data attached to it
- stop using your data for something, or restrict what we do with it
Deleting your account you can do yourself, at the bottom of your profile page. It removes your account and everything attached to it straight away — your goals, your sessions, your reflections and what the coach remembers. There is no undo.
For anything else on that list, email app.startwith@gmail.com and we will do it within 30 days. There is no charge and you do not have to give a reason.
Depending on where you live you may also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority. You do not have to raise it with us first, though we would rather you did, so we can fix it.
Age and Family accounts
Independent signup is for people aged 16 or older. Family supports guardian-managed accounts for ages 0 to 17 through an approved private pilot. Younger learners cannot create their own independent account.
Before creating a child account, the guardian reads the Family notice and confirms responsibility for that child. Each child uses a separate sign-in. We store the child's name, email, age band, time zone, learning records and the guardian's consent record. We do not ask for a full birth date in Family setup.
Guardians can publish plans and see shared goals, session progress, submitted work, images and Family messages. Private coaching and notes are not shown in everyday Family views. Startwith and its service providers still process the information needed to run the account. AI features send the submitted message and relevant learning context to our AI provider, currently DeepSeek. Do not include sensitive personal details in prompts or work samples.
The primary guardian can resend access, manage another guardian's permissions, withdraw consent or request deletion. Withdrawing consent pauses the child's access; it does not erase saved learning. Downloaded copies cannot be recalled. Account data is retained and deleted as described in section 7. Contact app.startwith@gmail.com for access, correction, deletion or recovery help.
Pilot approval records the guardian arrangement and notice version. It is not a claim that one verification process meets every country's requirements. Broader availability depends on the applicable requirements.
Changes to this page
We update this page whenever something material changes, and the date at the top moves with it. If a change would weaken anything promised here — a new company handling your data, or a new use for it — we email active users before it takes effect, rather than after.
Who is responsible, and how to reach them
startwith is not yet an incorporated company — it is run directly by the people building it. That means there is no company name to write to, and no support desk between you and them.
Questions, complaints and requests about your data go to app.startwith@gmail.com, which reaches the person responsible for it. If that changes — if startwith becomes a company — this section will name it.