Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 18, 2026 · Hearth & Pencil is a product of Foundry Operations, LLC.

The short version

Parents create accounts; children under 13 never do. We collect the minimum needed to make worksheets work: your account email, the student names, grades, and optional details you choose to enter, the worksheets we generate, and the photos of completed work you upload for grading. We do not sell data, we do not show ads, and we do not use your family's data to train AI models.

Children's privacy (COPPA)

Hearth & Pencil is designed for parents. Accounts belong to a parent, guardian or teacher; information about a child is provided by that adult, under their account, and used solely to deliver the service to that family. We rely on consent given at account creation. Parents can see everything stored about a student and can delete a student at any time from the student's page, which permanently removes their data after a 30-day recovery window.

One exception, which is always the account owner's choice: a student in grades 9–12 who is 13 or older can be given their own sign-in. In that case we also store that student's email address and sign-in identity. Their access is limited to their own work — printing, submitting, and seeing their own progress. It never includes billing, settings, other students, or the owner's notes, and the owner can revoke it at any time.

What we collect

• Account: your email and sign-in identity (via Clerk, our authentication provider).
• Students: name, grade, and optional birthday, gender, interests, and notes you add.
• Work: generated worksheets, uploaded photos or scans of completed work, grading results, and per-skill mastery records.
• What a child writes: when we grade a page we transcribe the answers, and we keep anything the child wrote in their own words — a question they asked on the sheet, a reply or drawing in their story. We also keep a per-letter handwriting record (which letters are coming out clearly) so later sheets can offer the right practice.
• Coaching notes: short notes generated for the parent when a skill looks stuck.
• Billing: handled entirely by Stripe — we never see or store card numbers. Sales tax is calculated by Stripe from the billing address you enter.
• How you found us: a first-touch cookie recording the referrer or campaign, kept for 30 days, and privacy-friendly aggregate analytics from Vercel. Neither identifies a child.
• Gift links and fraud checks: if you arrive through a friend's gift link, a cookie remembers it for 60 days. A random first-party device id cookie (kept a year) and a one-way hash of your card's fingerprint from Stripe are used only to keep the referral program honest (one trial per household). We never tell the friend who invited you anything about you beyond that a family started.

How AI is used

Worksheet text, stories and grading run on Anthropic's Claude models, and worksheet illustrations on Google's Gemini models, under API terms that do not permit those providers to train on the content. Uploaded work images are sent to the AI solely to grade that submission. We keep a log of these requests, including the model's response, so we can diagnose a bad sheet or a wrong grade; those logs are deleted with your account.

AI makes mistakes. A grade can be wrong, and a generated sheet can contain an error. Nothing here is a substitute for your own judgement about your child's learning.

Storage & security

Data is stored with Supabase (Postgres and file storage). Photos of completed work live in private storage and are reachable only through short-lived links issued to your account. Emails are sent via Resend. We keep data for as long as your account exists; deleted students, worksheets and accounts are permanently erased — files included — after their 30-day recovery window.

Your choices

In Settings you can download everything we hold about your family as a single file, close your account, and turn off email. Closing your account cancels your subscription immediately, removes every student, worksheet and photo from the service, and permanently deletes it all after 30 days — tell us inside that window if it was a mistake and we can put it back. Questions: hello@hearthandpencil.com.