Privacy

alpha. is a personal newsletter service. We try to collect as little about you as we need to write you a good letter, and we don't sell or share your data with advertisers. Ever.

What we collect

When you sign up and use alpha., we store:

• Account basics: your first name, email address, and city.
• Optional personalization: your birthday and gender, if you choose to share them. Both are optional and only tune the letter (which topics unlock, how it's voiced). Your birthday unlocks the daily Zodiac topic. It also shapes tone, but only as a broad generation label like "Millennial" (never the exact date).
• Your interests: the topics you picked (5-25 depending on your plan tier), your chosen theme, and any optional context you shared (what you do, what you're working on, a non-work interest).
• Letters we write you: a copy of each letter is saved to your account so you can re-read past issues.
• Usage signals: basic product analytics (like page views) and error reports when something breaks in your browser, only if we've turned it on for the app. Off by default. Used only to improve the product, never sold. We don't track which individual letters you read or collect device fingerprinting. Error reports carry a technical description of what went wrong (never anything you typed into a form), and any email address that somehow ends up in one is stripped before it's recorded.

How we use it

We use your data only to write and deliver your letters, bill your subscription, and improve alpha. We don't share it with advertisers. Our primary AI provider, Anthropic, runs on a paid tier that doesn't use your data to train their models. Google's free Gemini tier, one of our backups, doesn't carry that same guarantee. See below for what that means in practice.

Third-party processors

We use a handful of outside services:

• Stripe handles all payment information. We never see your card number.
• Stripe receives your email address and payment details at checkout. Current Alpha checkouts do not copy your profile's first name, city, topic choices, or profile answers into Stripe. Alpha sends Stripe an opaque checkout reference so a successful payment can be matched to the right profile. Older Alpha checkout sessions created before this change may still contain a first name and city in Stripe metadata. New checkouts stopped sending those fields at the cutover. Older session metadata may remain under Stripe's own retention rules.
• Anthropic (Claude) writes the short editor's note at the top of your letter. That note is the one part built from your profile: your name, city, topic prefs, gender, a generation label from your birthday (like "Millennial," never the exact date), and any optional job, project, or fun context you shared. That's what makes it feel written for you. Anthropic runs on a paid tier that does not retain that data for training. Anthropic can also write a topic section itself, as the last resort if the writers below all come up short. In that role it never sees your profile, only the topic and that day's research, same as the writers below.
• Google (Gemini), Groq, and DeepSeek write each day's topic sections first, cheapest tier first. Anthropic steps in only if all three come up short. None of the four ever see your profile when writing a topic section. They see only the topic itself and that day's research. Gemini, Groq, and DeepSeek also back up the editor's note if Anthropic is briefly down. In that specific role, whichever one steps in sees the same profile fields Anthropic's own editor's note does. We use Google's free Gemini API tier for this, and Google's own terms for that free tier allow them to use what we send to improve their products. Unlike Anthropic's paid-tier guarantee above, we can't promise Google won't.
• Brave Search, with Google (Gemini) and You.com as backups, finds the sources your letter links to. Your topic picks go out as search queries, and nothing else about you does. The one exception is the Zodiac topic, whose query is built from the sun sign your birthday puts you in (never the date itself). When enabled, Google News RSS and GDELT provide public-source backups. They receive a topic search, including the text of a custom topic or a zodiac sign when selected. We do not attach your account identity or other profile fields. In no-key source mode, Alpha skips Brave, Gemini grounded search, and You.com and uses the public-source path. An optional direct-feed backup reads public NIST, FDA MedWatch and Federal Reserve Board feeds. These fixed feed requests contain no account identity, profile fields or topic text. Alpha matches relevant topics locally and stores only selected source metadata with its saved letters. An optional Crossref backup requests the fixed word "nutrition" and date bounds from its public research metadata API. No account, profile or custom topic is sent. Alpha keeps selected open-license paper titles, publisher links and publication dates. It does not retrieve paper bodies, abstracts or images from this backup. An optional PLOS research backup requests a fixed public query for nutrition, mental health and artificial intelligence with date bounds. No account, profile or custom topic is sent. Alpha matches these topics locally and keeps selected paper titles, author credit, publisher links and publication dates. It requests no paper bodies, abstracts or images. An optional ccMixter backup requests a fixed public hip-hop remix feed. No account, profile or custom topic is sent. Alpha keeps selected upload titles, creator credit, canonical links and upload dates. Upload dates are not original music release dates. It does not fetch music or images, and does not retain or use upload descriptions.
• Resend delivers letters and account emails.
• Supabase stores your account and letter history.
• Cloudflare hosts the web app.

Checkout matching

Alpha saves the validated profile you submit directly to your confirmed account before Stripe checkout starts. The separate service-only checkout reservation does not contain your name, city, topics, or profile answers. It keeps a keyed one-way email binding, a random browser binding, and exact Stripe references so Alpha can match the payment and stop duplicate subscriptions. During an interrupted Session creation, the exact checkout email is held in authenticated encryption so the same Stripe request can be replayed safely. Alpha clears that encrypted email as soon as the Session is bound or reaches a proven terminal result. After a checkout reaches a proven terminal state, Alpha keeps its exact Customer and Subscription references for up to 180 days for billing disputes and checkout support. It then removes the account, email, browser, Customer, and Subscription bindings. A random internal marker and the Checkout Session ID remain only to stop that same payment link from being used twice.

Your rights

You can, at any time:

• Download a copy of everything we have about you from Settings → Account.
• Delete your Alpha account, profile, and letters (irreversible) from the same place. The limited retention rules below still apply.
• Email us to revoke any consent or ask what we have.

After a live deletion finishes, Alpha keeps a service-only deletion marker for up to seven days so a delayed retry cannot bring the account back. It contains only the random account ID and deletion times. It has no email, profile text, letters, or Stripe references. Alpha then removes that marker automatically.

Account deletion stops Alpha delivery. It does not remove an existing do-not-email block held by Resend for a bounced address or spam complaint. We keep that protection in place to prevent unwanted mail. If you return, delivery may need a separate review before it resumes. Resend separately retains email and log data for 30 days on its standard plans and backups for seven days, under its retention policy. You can contact us about a request involving provider-held data. Removing a delivery block alone does not erase those records.

Delivery events linked to your account are removed with it. An event that arrives before we can match its message ID may temporarily keep the message ID, event times, and one-way recipient hashes in a restricted recovery queue. Unmatched records expire seven days after the earlier of the original event time and first receipt. Replays do not restart that window. Expired records are removed by the next successful scheduled cleanup. Cleanup failures are flagged for review. These records cannot restore your account or grant access to someone who later signs up with the same email.

Account deletion does not erase payment records that Stripe keeps for billing, fraud prevention, tax, or legal duties. Stripe may retain the billing customer record and email tied to those records under its own retention rules. Alpha removes the profile, letters, access, and live subscription links it controls.

One caveat on that: we keep an encrypted daily backup of the database for up to 30 days, as a safety net against our own mistakes, not yours. If you delete your account, your data can still exist in a backup taken before you deleted it until that backup ages out on its own. Nobody looks at these day to day, and we don't use them to bring back an account you chose to delete.

Cookies

We use the cookies needed to keep you logged in. Your theme choice is remembered in your browser's local storage instead (and in your account, once you're signed in), not a cookie. No advertising cookies. If we've turned on product analytics for the app, that tool sets its own first-party cookie too, just to tell your visits apart from someone else's. Same rules as the analytics itself: never sold, off by default. Source links in your letters show a small site icon loaded from Google's public favicon service, which sees the domain of the article but nothing else about you.

Children

alpha. is for adults. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13.

Changes to this policy

If we materially change how we handle your data, we'll email you before the change takes effect.

Contact

Privacy questions or requests: youngalgy@gmail.com.

This policy is a plain-English description of how alpha. handles your information. It is not legal advice. The full agreement is in the Terms of Service.