Privacy Policy

Overview

Tender Years (“we,” “us,” or “our”) is an app for parents of young children. We take your privacy seriously and designed the app to collect only what’s needed to make it work. This policy explains what data we collect, why, and how we protect it.

Throughout this policy, “household” means the shared workspace you create inside Tender Years when you sign up — the account-level data container that holds your routines, tasks, and notes, and that you can invite a partner into. It refers to a Tender Years account, not the physical people who live with you.

Data we collect

When you use Tender Years, we collect the following:

Account information. Your email address and display name, provided when you sign up. We use passwordless magic-link authentication—we never store a password for your account.

App data. The routines, schedules, events, and notes you create inside your household. This is the core content you and your partner build together in the app.

Partner connection. When you invite a partner to your household, we store the link between your two accounts so you can share the same view.

Text you ask us to organize. When you paste a list of things on your mind into Tender Years, we process that text to organize it into tasks, open questions, and upcoming events, and we save the resulting items to your household. We do not retain the original paste server-side. See “AI and how we use it” below for details on how the processing works.

Trying the app without an account

You can paste a brain dump and see it organized before creating an account. When you do this, the text and the organized result are stored only in your own browser (in localStorage) until you complete email sign-up, at which point the items are saved into your new household. If you don’t complete sign-up, this browser-side draft is dropped automatically after one hour, and never reaches our servers in identified form. The paste itself does briefly travel through our classifier (see below) to do the organizing.

AI and how we use it

AI is opt-in by feature. The only places Tender Years sends your text to a large language model are the features that take a paste or a one-line capture and organize it for you (Smart Sort and Smart Capture). The rest of the app — your daily and weekly views, your routines, your tasks and notes, the planning ritual, partner sync — runs without any LLM in the loop. If you’d rather Tender Years not send your text to a language model, you can simply not use those features and the rest of the app still works.

When you do use one of those features:

What we send. The text you paste, together with general context like the current date and (for signed-in users) the names of your routine containers and partner’s first name. We do not send your full account data, contact list, or location.

Where it goes. Anthropic, the maker of Claude. Anthropic acts as a data processor for us. Per Anthropic’s API terms, requests sent through their API are not used to train their models. For full processor details see Anthropic’s privacy and trust documentation.

What we keep. Only the sorted result — the tasks, open questions, and upcoming events — written into your household. We do not retain the original paste server-side once the sort is complete.

Why we use AI. The whole point is to take something messy off your head and turn it into something organized. The model only does the sorting; the items always remain yours to edit, dismiss, or delete.

How we use your data

We use your data to run the app: showing you and your partner the same weekly view, syncing changes in real time, and enabling features like the weekly planning ritual. We use your email address for the things the app actually needs to send you — the code that signs you in, an invite you sent to your partner, a welcome note when you first sign up, and at most one quiet check-in if you haven’t been back in a couple of days. When you create an account, we also add you to our newsletter for occasional product updates; every newsletter email includes an unsubscribe link, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Third-party services

We use a small number of trusted services to run Tender Years:

Supabase hosts our database and handles authentication. Your data is stored in a Postgres database with row-level security policies that ensure you can only access your own household’s data. Supabase’s infrastructure runs on AWS.

Plausible Analytics provides privacy-friendly, cookieless website analytics. Plausible does not use cookies, does not collect personal data, and is compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and PECR. We use it to understand aggregate usage patterns (page views, feature adoption) without tracking individual users.

Anthropic processes the text you ask us to organize, classifying it into tasks, open questions, and upcoming events. Anthropic acts as a data processor; under their API terms, requests are not used to train their models. See “AI and how we use it” above for what we send and what we keep.

Cloudflare Turnstile protects the entry point you can use without an account from automated abuse. Cloudflare receives signals from your browser (IP address, browser environment, behavioral timing) to decide whether you’re a person; we do not receive these signals. Turnstile only runs on the surface that’s usable without an account.

Sentry captures error reports so we can find and fix bugs. Error reports include technical context (browser type, page URL) and basic metadata about what broke (e.g., the length of the text you were sorting, never the content). We never send the actual text you typed or pasted to Sentry.

Resend delivers the emails the app needs to send you — your sign-in code, partner invites, a one-time welcome, and at most one quiet re-engagement check-in if you haven’t been back. Resend processes your email address to deliver these messages.

Buttondown manages our newsletter for product updates. When you create a Tender Years account, we share your email address with Buttondown so we can send you occasional updates about new features and what we’re working on. Every email includes an unsubscribe link, and you can unsubscribe at any time without affecting your Tender Years account.

Cookies and browser storage

Tender Years uses only essential cookies required for authentication (keeping you logged in). We do not use advertising cookies, tracking cookies, or any third-party cookies. Plausible Analytics is fully cookieless.

When you try the app without an account, your draft items are stored in your browser’s localStorage so they can be carried into your new household if you sign up. This draft is dropped automatically after one hour, or when you complete sign-up.

Cloudflare Turnstile (active on the surface you can use without an account) may set a short-lived clearance cookie on your browser as part of its bot-detection process.

Abuse prevention

Because AI-backed features cost real money for every request, we apply rate limits and bot checks on the endpoints that use them. This is to protect the service (and the price of running it for everyone), not to track you. We do not build profiles of users for advertising or any other purpose.

Data security

All data is transmitted over HTTPS. Our database uses row-level security to ensure users can only access their own household’s data. Authentication uses secure, time-limited magic links—no passwords are stored.

Data retention

We retain your data for as long as your account is active. To delete your account and all associated data, email us at hello@thetenderyears.com and we’ll take care of it. Anonymized, aggregate analytics data (via Plausible) may be retained indefinitely as it cannot be linked back to you.

Children’s privacy

Tender Years is designed for parents and caregivers, not for children. We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children. Parents may include their child’s name in routine names, events, or notes—this information is stored securely, visible only to members of the household, and can be removed at any time by editing or deleting the content, or by contacting us.

Your rights

You can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data at any time by emailing us. If you’re on the waitlist mailing list, every email includes an unsubscribe link.

We don’t sell your data

We do not sell, rent, or share your personal information with third parties for marketing purposes. The third-party services listed above are used solely to operate and improve Tender Years.

Changes to this policy

If we make meaningful changes to this policy, we’ll update the date at the top and, where appropriate, notify you by email. Continued use of Tender Years after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data? Reach us at hello@thetenderyears.com.