Privacy at Bowerstead
Bowerstead is a private place for one parent to plan and keep the records of their family’s homeschool. This page explains, plainly, what we store, how we use it, and the control you have.
The short version
- Only you have an account. Your children never log in, and we never contact them.
- We keep the least we can about your children: a first name, a grade level, and (only if you add it) a legal name used on transcripts you issue.
- We don’t sell or rent your family’s data, and we don’t use it to train anything.
- You’re in control. Export a complete copy, or delete everything, anytime, from Settings.
Who has an account
Bowerstead is parent-only. You enter information about your own children. No child signs in, is contacted, or interacts with Bowerstead, so children never provide information to us directly.
What we store
About you: your email, your homeschool’s name, the country you homeschool in and, if that’s the United States, your state, and (if you add it for transcripts) a mailing address for the letterhead.
About each child: a first name and grade level; and, only if you choose to issue a transcript, that child’s legal full name, used only on the transcript.
What you record: the notes, photos, and grades you capture; your subjects, plans, terms, and exams; and the attendance those add up to.
What we deliberately don’t collect: a child’s email, phone, date of birth, location, or health data, nothing beyond the above.
Your photos and files
Files you upload are stored privately, scoped to your account, reachable only through short-lived links we generate for you, never a public URL.
How we use your data
Only to run Bowerstead for you: store your records, generate the transcripts and bundles you ask for, and show your progress back to you. We don’t profile your family or train models on your data.
Who else touches your data
We keep this list short and current:
- Supabase stores your data and files for us, in the United States, under a data-processing agreement.
- Vercelruns and serves the app. Requests pass through it, and two of its measurement services receive data about visits: Speed Insights takes page addresses and timings such as loading and interaction speed, and Web Analytics counts page views along with where you arrived from, your approximate location, and your browser and device. Page addresses are stripped of your children’s record identifiers and of every search term before either measurement is sent. Neither one receives your homeschool record content, and neither sets a cookie. Our cookies and tracking page has the full accounting.
- Sentry helps us fix errors, with your family’s personal details (names, notes, grades, addresses, email) scrubbed out before anything is sent. It’s off until we turn it on, and even then never receives your child’s information.
- Loops sends our email: the welcome note, occasional product news, and the waiting-list updates. It receives your name and email, your homeschool’s name, your state, your plan and its dates, and whether you’ve finished setup and started using the main features, so what we send matches where you actually are. That last part is dates and yes-or-no answers: that you saved something, never what you saved. No child’s name, no records, no grades, no photos. Your address went to Loops if you joined the waiting list before we opened, goes there again when you create an account, and goes there if you download a transcript from our free transcript tool. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing never affects your account.
- Stripe takes the payment when you buy a plan on our website. It handles billing only, and never your homeschool records.
- Apple, Google and RevenueCattake over when you buy a plan inside the app instead. Apple takes the payment on an iPhone and Google Play takes it on an Android phone, and RevenueCat tells us whether your plan is active. The only thing we send RevenueCat is your account’s ID number, which is a random string: not your name, not your email, and nothing at all about your children. Everything else it holds comes from whichever store you bought through, and it is all about the subscription rather than about you.
No advertisers. No analytics that can see your child’s information.
If you joined the waiting list
If you signed up before we opened, there was no account yet, so the only thing we held was what you typed into the form: your first name, your email, and whether you said yes to hearing from us. If you arrived from a link we shared, we also keep which campaign sent you, which says nothing about you personally. It goes to Loops so we can email you, and nowhere else. Ask us at contact@bowerstead.com and we’ll delete it.
If you used the free transcript tool
Our free transcript generator asks for an email address before it gives you the PDF. We keep that address, the grade level you selected, and the date, so we know which advice is worth sending you. That’s the whole record.
What you typed into the transcript itself is not stored. Your student’s name, their course names, grades and credits are used to render your PDF and then discarded. The file is never saved on our servers, never uploaded anywhere, and no account is created. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and you can ask us at contact@bowerstead.com to delete your address entirely.
Where your data lives
Your data stays in the United States (US East), and so do our backups. We take one every day and keep the last seven. We build with data-protection-by-design as our standing posture, wherever you are.
Your control
Export: download a complete copy of everything, in one archive, from Settings. Delete: delete your account from Settings. This permanently removes everything, yours and your children’s, including files. It can’t be undone.
How we protect it
Encrypted in transit, stored in private buckets, isolated at the row level so only your account can reach it. Sign-in is passwordless, a one-time email code, so there’s no password to leak.
Cookies
We use the cookies that sign-in needs and nothing else. No advertising cookies and no tracking pixels. We do count page views, with a cookieless measurement that stores nothing on your device and cannot follow you to another website. That’s why you’ve never seen a cookie banner here. The detail is on our cookies and tracking page.
Children’s privacy
Bowerstead is designed so we never collect personal information directly from a child; only a parent holds an account. If you believe that has somehow happened, contact us and we’ll remove it.
A note on claims
We won’t wave badges we can’t stand behind: no “certified” for any law, no “compliant in all 50 states.” What’s true: parent-only accounts, minimal child data, no data sales, and full export and deletion in your hands. Transcripts you make are parent-issued, the kind colleges accept.
Changes
If we change how we handle your data, we’ll update this page and the date above.
Contact
Questions about your privacy? Email contact@bowerstead.com.