Privacy policy

What you type into this product is more personal than anything else you are likely to put in a form this year: how you met someone, what you love about them, and what you are about to promise them in front of everyone you know. So we hold as little of it as possible, for as short a time as possible.

Personal Vows is operated by Archelaus LLC, and Archelaus LLC is the controller of the information described here.

• Your answersThe questionnaire: how you met, the story you always end up telling, what you are promising, the tone and length you want, and the name you use for the person you are marrying.
• Your emailAsked for at the end of the questionnaire, so we can send you a link back to your drafts, and again at checkout. If you do not buy, it also receives up to three emails over the following days bringing you back to your drafts, each with a discount, and none once your wedding date has passed. Each carries an unsubscribe link, which stops these emails for every questionnaire already started with that address. Once you buy, it receives your access link, your delivery email, any link you ask us to send again, and an attempted warning before your access window closes — plus, only if you told us you are changing your name, one note about that. On the purchase for both of you, the address you give for your partner receives their own link and their own warning. It is not added to any other list.
• Your paymentHandled entirely by Stripe. We receive a confirmation and a reference; we never receive or store your card number.
• Server logsRequests to the site — IP address, browser, timestamp — kept briefly for security and abuse prevention. What you wrote is not in them.

The questionnaire is typed, and it no longer accepts recordings. An earlier version of it offered to take a spoken answer. Where a session recorded one, the audio was uploaded to our storage and to our transcription provider, fal.ai, and came back as text. Our copy was meant to be deleted the moment transcription finished, but a deletion that failed could go unnoticed, so a recording may have stayed in our storage after its transcript was saved. If you recorded one and want to be sure it is gone, write to support@personalvows.com and we will delete it and confirm. The copy sent to fal.ai was held under fal.ai’s own retention terms; we did not delete it there.

Where a transcript from one of those recordings is still attached to a session, it is treated as everything else on this page is: encrypted, never logged, and deleted with the rest of that session.

Your questionnaire answers, any transcript held with them, and your drafts are never logged. They are not in our application logs, not in our error reports, and not in anything we measure — the measurement described under “Cookies and measurement” below counts pages and purchases and never sees a word you wrote. Where an error has to be reported, it is reported without the content that caused it.

Nobody at Archelaus LLC reads your vows as a matter of course. If you write to us about a problem and we need to look at your session to fix it, we ask you first.

Encrypted in transit and encrypted at rest. Every read is scoped to a single session by row-level rules in the database, and the only way into a session is the signed link issued by your purchase. There are no user accounts, so there are no passwords to steal and no login to break.

• SupabaseStores your session, your answers and your rendered files.
• StripeTakes the payment.
• AnthropicWrites the drafts from your answers. Your answers are sent for that purpose and no other.
• fal.aiTurned a spoken answer into text, where a session recorded one. Recording is closed, so nothing new is sent there.
• PostmarkSends every email described above.
• SentryReceives an error report when something on the site breaks, so we can fix it: what failed, where, and in which browser. Reports are stripped of your answers, your drafts, your email address and your cookies before they leave.
• VercelServes the site, and counts the pages that are visited. It sets no cookie and is never given anything you wrote.
• GoogleMeasures the site — which pages are visited, and, where a purchase happens, an order number and an amount. Never anything you wrote. “Cookies and measurement” below says exactly what it is given.

Each of these sees only what it needs to do its job. We do not sell your information, nothing you write is shared with anyone for advertising, and we do not use any of it to train a model of our own.

12 months from the date of your purchase, which is the same window your access link works for. About a month before it closes we try to email you a warning. If our email provider refuses it, we try again each day; if we cannot tell whether it went, we look into it rather than send it twice. The deletion happens on schedule either way, whether or not a warning reached you.

At the end of it, your questionnaire, your transcript, your drafts and your rendered files are deleted on a scheduled purge. If you ask us to delete them sooner, we do, and we confirm when it is done. A questionnaire that is never bought is deleted after 45 days with no activity on it. A record that a purchase happened is kept for longer where tax and accounting law requires it — that record contains no part of what you wrote.

One first-party cookie keeps your questionnaire attached to the right answers while you are filling it in.

We also run the standard Google tag — Google Analytics and Google Ads — because we advertise on Google and could not otherwise tell which of our ads pay for themselves. It sets Google’s usual measurement cookies, counts the pages you visit, and, if you buy, reports the purchase to Google as an order number and an amount. It is never given your name, your email address, or anything you typed into the questionnaire, and pages whose addresses carry anything private report a cleaned address instead. An ad blocker stops all of it, and nothing on this site minds.

We honor Global Privacy Control when your browser sends it, as a request not to have your visit used for advertising. For that browser, the Google tag is not loaded at all: neither Google Ads nor Google Analytics receives anything from the visit, and no purchase is reported to Google. Vercel’s page count, which sets no cookie, carries on as below. You do not have to do anything else, and nothing on the site looks different.

Vercel, which serves the site, counts the pages that are visited as well. That count sets no cookie at all and cannot tell that somebody visiting today is somebody who visited yesterday. It is held to the same rule as everything above: the page whose address is an unsubscribe link is not counted at all, the pages whose addresses carry anything private report a cleaned address, and nothing you wrote is ever sent.

• A copy of everything we hold about you.
• A correction to any of it.
• Deletion, immediately, without waiting for the window to close.

Write to support@personalvows.com and we respond within 30 days. If you live somewhere with statutory data rights — California and the EEA among them — those rights apply in full and nothing in this policy reduces them.

This service is for adults. It is not directed at anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

If a breach affects your private information and you live in New York, we will notify you as New York General Business Law § 899-aa (the SHIELD Act) requires — in the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay, and no later than 30 days after the breach is discovered, unless a law-enforcement agency determines that notice would impede a criminal investigation. Wherever you live, we will also notify you as other state and federal breach-notification law requires.

If this policy changes in a way that affects information we already hold, we email you. The date at the head of this page is when it last changed. The terms of service cover the rest of the agreement.

Archelaus LLC, operating as Personal Vows — support@personalvows.com.

348 4th Avenue #1040, Brooklyn, NY 11215, United States