Privacy Policy

Who this is for

Steady Study is a service for parents and guardians. You create the account, you pick the plan, and you're the only one who logs in. Your child never gets a login or a password, and we never ask your child for information about themselves. The one way your child touches Steady Study is doing their worksheet — answering questions on screen, or on paper if you print. That's on purpose: it's the simplest way to keep a kid's footprint small.

What we collect about your child, and why

Here's the whole list. If it's not here, we don't collect it.

Worksheets never ask your child for personal information — no names, addresses, school, or anything of the kind. Answers exist to practice the skill, nothing else.

• A first name or nickname — So worksheets and your dashboard can say whose they are. A nickname is fine — we don't need their real or full name.
• What grade they're in — To pick the right reading level and keep the tone age-appropriate. Grade is all we need for that — we don't ask for a birthday, or any part of one.
• How they're doing in each subject — Their level and recent worksheet scores, so tomorrow's worksheet meets them where they are instead of repeating what they've got.
• Their worksheet answers and on-screen work — When your child answers on screen — typed answers, or writing done with a finger or stylus — we save it so the worksheet can be scored and you can see their work. It's used for nothing else, and it's deleted with everything else when you close the account.

What we collect about you (the parent)

Your email address, so you can sign in (we email you a sign-in link — there's no password to store) and so we can send you the account emails described below. Your payment details go straight to Stripe, our payment processor — we never see or store your card number.

Sign-in is by email only today. If we ever add another sign-in option (like Google), we'll update this policy first to say exactly what that option shares with us.

COPPA and your consent

The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) says we need a parent's verifiable consent before collecting anything about a child under 13. Here's how we do that: before you add your first child, we show you exactly what we keep (the list above) and you check a box agreeing to it. And at signup we verify you're an adult the way the COPPA Rule recognizes — with your card: we make a $1 verification charge and refund it immediately (it shows up on your statement and disappears in a few days), and if you stay past your free trial, your plan's own charge confirms it again.

You can withdraw that consent anytime by closing your account, which deletes your child's information. You can also ask us to show you what we have about your child, correct it, delete it, or stop collecting it going forward — email us anytime, and we'll verify it's you before we act on it.

The companies that help us run Steady Study

No small service runs on its own servers alone, and we'd rather name names than hide behind 'trusted partners.' These companies process data for us, only to run the service, and none of them may use it for their own purposes:

• Vercel — hosts the website and its infrastructure.
• Neon — the database where account and child data lives, encrypted at rest.
• Stripe — payments. Your card details go to Stripe directly; we never hold them.
• Resend — sends our emails (sign-in links, worksheet-ready notes, billing notices).
• Anthropic — generates worksheet content. We built this to work without your child's information: the prompts carry a subject, difficulty level, age band, and topic — never your child's name, birth date, answers, or anything else about anyone in your family.
• OpenAI — automated safety check on worksheet content before it reaches your child. Sees worksheet text only — same rule, no personal information.

We don't sell or share your child's data

We don't sell your child's information, we don't use it for advertising, and we don't give it to anyone for their own purposes. The service providers above act on our instructions to run Steady Study — that's it.

If we ever wanted to share your child's data with an outside company beyond that — for any new purpose — that would be a separate choice you make on your account page. It's off until you turn it on, turning it off stops it, and it's never bundled into agreeing to use Steady Study.

How long we keep it

We don't keep your child's data forever. When you close your account, we delete it — child profiles, schedules, progress, worksheets, answers, and your own login. If an account has no active plan and shows no activity for 24 months, we close it and delete the child's data for you, automatically.

The one thing we hold onto is a billing record — the account and plan identifiers our payment processor is legally required to keep for tax and audit. That record carries no information about your child and no parent name or email; it's just the pointers Stripe needs.

How worksheets are made

Worksheets are generated with AI (Anthropic's Claude), from templates and standards we wrote, and every generated worksheet passes through an automated safety pipeline — a word-level filter, a moderation check, and validation — before it reaches your child. If a worksheet fails those checks it's rejected and regenerated, and a reviewed evergreen worksheet stands in if needed. AI isn't perfect and neither is the pipeline, so every worksheet also carries a quiet 'report this worksheet' link that comes straight to us.

No voice, face, or other biometric data

Steady Study has no voice recording and no camera or face features, and we have no plans to add them lightly. The COPPA Rule treats things like voiceprints and facial templates as personal information. If we ever build a feature that would collect any of that, it would get its own clear consent step before it collected anything — we wouldn't fold it into your existing agreement.

The emails we send

Everything we email you is about your account: sign-in links, the worksheet-ready notes you scheduled, and billing notices (your signup confirmation, a reminder before your trial converts, and an annual reminder if you're on a yearly plan). We don't have a marketing list. If we ever start one, it'll be a separate opt-in with an unsubscribe link in every message.

Security

Data moves over encrypted connections and sits in an encrypted database. Sign-in links replace stored passwords, card numbers live only at Stripe, and access to production data is limited to the operator. We maintain a written security program for children's data — what we hold, where it lives, who can touch it, and what happens if something goes wrong. If a breach ever affects your family's data, we'll tell you what happened and what we're doing about it.

State privacy laws

Some states have student-privacy laws written for products that schools adopt — California's SOPIPA, Illinois' SOPPA, New York's Ed Law 2-d. Steady Study is sold to families, not schools, so those laws don't squarely apply to us today. We hold ourselves to their core commitments anyway, because they're the right defaults for a kids' product:

• We don't build advertising profiles of children, target ads at them, or sell their information.
• We collect the minimum, protect it, and delete it on request.
• If we ever sell into schools, we'll take on those laws' full obligations and update this policy first.

FERPA

FERPA is a school-records law. It doesn't apply to Steady Study as we sell it today, because we sell directly to families, not to schools or districts. If we ever change that and sell into schools, FERPA obligations would kick in and this policy would be updated before we did.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll email you before the change takes effect. If a change would expand what we collect about your child or how we use it, we'll ask for your consent again — the old yes doesn't stretch to cover new things.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or a request to see or delete your child's data: email us at hello@steadystudy.org, or reach us from your account page. We read every message a real person sends here.

[Operator legal name, mailing address, and phone number will be added here when our business entity is formed — before we take a first payment. COPPA requires an identifiable operator, and we'd rather add the real entity once than a placeholder twice.]