Privacy Policy

The short version

• Premise is a college and career guidance mentor for high-school students 13 and up.
• We keep as little as we can: your email, your age group, what you tell the mentor and what you build with it, a record of what you agreed to, and which parts of Premise you use as short event names. We never ask for a GPA number, test scores, transcripts, documents, income, immigration status, or your exact birth date. Setting up does ask roughly how your grades have gone, as a range like “A's and B's”, and you can skip it.
• We don't sell your data, and we run no third-party ads or analytics trackers. Premise records its own first-party events (which feature was used, never what you wrote); the section below lists them.
• Your writing goes to our AI provider to generate your guidance, with provider-side data sharing turned off. Nothing you write is used to train a model.
• If you are under 18, a parent or guardian confirms by email before Premise opens for you, and you give your own agreement too.
• You can download everything we hold and delete your account and its data yourself.
• We are not a crisis or mental-health service. If a message suggests crisis, Premise stops and shows real resources (988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline; Crisis Text Line, text HOME to 741741).

Who can use Premise

Premise is for ages 13 and up. Before any account information, you enter your birth date. It is checked in your browser and never sent to us; we keep only a yes/no that you are 13 or older and your age group (13 to 15, 16 to 17, or 18 and over). If you are under 13, you can't create an account and nothing is stored. The two public forms that take personal details without an account, the waitlist and the Access Program application, ask you to confirm you are 13 or older before any other field; without that confirmation they store and send nothing, and the confirmation itself is not kept.

If you are 13 to 17, Premise needs two things before it opens: your own agreement to this policy and the Terms, and a parent or guardian's yes. You give us a parent or guardian's email address; we send them one message with a link that shows them what Premise keeps and lets them confirm. The link works for 14 days and can confirm once. We store a keyed hash of that address, not the address itself, so we can match a withdrawal to it. Their yes is recorded with the policy version it was given for.

What we collect

• Accountyour email and password (handled by our login provider; we never store your raw password), and the name you choose to give the mentor.
• Agea yes/no that you are 13 or older and your age group. Never the date.
• Onboarding answersa short set of questions, answered once you are signed in and saved to your profile.
• What you write to the mentoryour chat messages, the notes you add, and any essay text you paste into Essay Studio for feedback.
• What the product builds with youyour Living Profile, Direction Snapshots, path options, experiments, reflections, themes, and the mentor's margin notes on your essays.
• Consent recordswhich version of this policy and the Terms you agreed to and when, your research opt-in answer if you gave one, and for students under 18 your own agreement and the guardian confirmation (as a hash of their address and a hash of the one-time link, never the address or the link).
• Product eventsfirst-party records of which feature was used, one row per event, written only after you hold current agreements. The event names are: onboarding complete, snapshot generated, mentor reply, experiment chosen, reflection logged, loop completed, direction-confidence follow-up, mentor gate withheld, mentor proposal withheld, claim proposed, claim resolved, odds request, unassisted attempt, list selectivity snapshot, and session started. Each carries only short labels and numbers (for example which room you opened, or how many days since your previous session began). To tell sessions apart we also keep one timestamp: the time of your last request. Never your words; the code drops any long or multi-line value before it is stored.
• Research measuresonly if you turn on the separate research opt-in: the 1-to-5 direction check-in numbers you give, so we can find out whether the method works. Just those numbers.
• Usage & billingcounts of replies and an estimated cost per request (not the content). If you subscribe, a subscription status and our payment processor's identifiers, never your card number.
• Safetyif the crisis layer fires, a redacted record (a category and a rule id), never the words that triggered it.
• Error reportswhen something breaks, a report goes to our error-monitoring provider with the error and the request it happened in, scrubbed of message content. No session recordings and no tracking of your browsing.
• Waitlist (optional)if you join the waitlist without an account, we store your email, the page you joined from, and the date, for one purpose: to email you when a spot opens. It is not linked to any account and never used for anything else. We remove it when invites close, or sooner if you ask at support@premise.chat.
• Access Program application (optional)if you apply for reduced-cost or free access, the form asks for your name, email, grade, your region if you share it, and a couple of sentences about your situation, with no documents. It is emailed to our team to read, not stored in the product; it stays in our support inbox until we have reviewed it and is deleted on request at support@premise.chat.

What we don't collect

A GPA number, test scores, transcripts, uploaded documents, exact income, immigration status, your exact birth date, a guardian's address in the clear, or any advertising or tracking identifiers.

We do ask, optionally, roughly how your grades have gone, as a range like “A's and B's”, and how demanding your classes are. Both are skippable, both carry a “Prefer not to say”, and neither is a number or a transcript.

How we use it

To run the service: read your words back, build and update your profile, generate snapshots, experiments, reflections and essay feedback; keep the record of what you agreed to; enforce free and paid limits; process payments; route a crisis to real resources; fix what breaks; and keep the service secure. We don't use your data to advertise to you.

Product events tell us which parts of Premise get used and whether students come back for a real task. We read them as counts across students, never as a profile of one student, and we never build a streak, a score, or a nudge from them. We may describe Premise's use in aggregate (for example “used by 40 students in September”), never in a way that identifies you, and never with your words unless you give a separate written yes.

Improving the mentor

The quality of Premise comes from its method, not from reading your private writing. We build and improve the mentor with our own material: practice examples we write, examples distilled from a teacher model, and published education and psychology research. We do not train any model on your chats, profile, essays, or reflections.

The one research use is separate and off by default: if you turn on the research opt-in, we keep the 1-to-5 numbers from your direction check-ins to measure whether the method works. It is never pre-ticked, it is never bundled with agreeing to this policy, you can turn it off in Account at any time, and turning it off never changes the guidance you get. A new version of this policy asks you again before any more numbers are counted.

Who we share it with

We don't sell your data. To run Premise we rely on a few providers, each handling only what its job needs:

• OpenAI, the AI model provider, receives the text of your messages per request to produce a reply. Data sharing with the provider is turned off on our account, so your text is not used to improve their models; their standard abuse-monitoring retention may still apply.
• Supabase keeps your account, login and everything you build with the mentor (database and authentication).
• Vercel hosts the site and processes ordinary request logs needed to operate it.
• Resend delivers our email: the guardian confirmation message and Access Program applications. It never receives your mentor conversations.
• Sentry receives error reports (the error and the request it happened in, scrubbed of message content). It runs no session replay and no tracking of your browsing.
• Stripe handles billing if you subscribe. Billing is in test mode during the tester phase, so nobody is charged today. We never see your card number.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it or to protect someone's safety.

No ads, no third-party tracking

Premise runs no advertising networks, no marketing pixels, and no third-party analytics trackers. We don't use cookies for advertising. The only usage record is the first-party product events listed above, kept in our own database, written only while you hold current agreements, and deleted with your account. There is no separate switch for them today.

How long we keep it

We keep your data while your account exists. When you delete your account, everything tied to it, including your consent records and product events, is removed from the live product at once. Encrypted nightly backups may hold a copy for up to 30 days before they expire. Payment records held by our processor may be kept as required by law. Access Program applications you email us stay in our support inbox until we have reviewed them, and are deleted on request. Waitlist rows are removed when invites close, or on request.

Your rights

• See and correct what the mentor recorded. The Living Profile is built to be corrected.
• Download your data as JSON: your profile, chats, essays, experiments, reflections, snapshots, consent records and product events.
• Delete your account and everything tied to it.
• Turn the research opt-in off at any time in Account.
• A parent or guardian can withdraw their yes from the link in their email, or by writing to support@premise.chat. Withdrawing closes Premise for the student until a guardian says yes again; the student can still download or delete their data.

Download and delete are in Account, or email support@premise.chat and we will do it for you. We won't treat you differently for exercising your rights.

How we protect it

Your connection is encrypted (HTTPS), access is restricted so one account can't reach another's data, our keys stay on the server and never reach your browser, and we don't write your message content into our logs. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to keep these protections current.

Children's privacy

Premise is for ages 13 and up. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 13; if we learn that we have, we delete it. For students 13 to 17 the parent-or-guardian confirmation above applies before Premise opens.

If a school gives you Premise

Today Premise is used directly by students. If your school or district ever provides Premise to you, a separate written agreement with that school would govern how your data is handled, and that agreement (along with any rights it gives your parent or guardian) would take precedence over this policy for that use. We are not offering that arrangement yet; this note is here so the answer is honest if it changes.

Changes

Each version of this policy carries the date it took effect. When it changes, you are asked to read and agree to the new version before you continue, and for students under 18 a guardian is asked again too.

Contact

Questions about your privacy or your data: support@premise.chat.