Privacy

What you write here is private, and this page says exactly what that means: what I keep, who else touches it, and how to have it deleted.

What I keep

• Your email address, to sign you in and, if you want them, to tell you a reply is waiting.
• Your letters and mine.
• The settings you choose, like your notification address and tab title.
• Your subscription status and payment history from Stripe. I never see your full card number.
• If you joined the waiting list, just your email address.

My notes

I keep private notes on what you tell me, so I don’t ask you the same thing twice and so I actually remember. They’re encrypted, and nobody else sees them.

The AI tool I use

To help me keep up, I use an AI tool, Claude, made by Anthropic. It reads a thread alongside me and suggests what to pay attention to and how I might reply. I read every letter myself, and every reply you get is mine and sent by me. Anthropic’s terms don’t allow them to train their models on what passes through it, and I don’t use your letters to train anything either.

Who else touches it

A few services do the plumbing. Each one sees only what it needs:

• Stripe takes your payment and emails your receipts, refunds and cancellation confirmation to the address you paid with, under the name The Small Hours. Those emails don’t follow your notification settings, so pay with the address you want them at.
• Resend sends the sign-in and reply-waiting emails. Those emails never contain your letters.
• Vercel hosts the site, and Cloudflare carries traffic between the site and the database.
• Anthropic, as above.
• Google Analytics counts visits to the public pages of this site. It is never loaded on your inbox, your settings or anything you write.

Your letters are never sold, never used for advertising, and never shown to anyone. I don’t look you up elsewhere, and nothing goes into my notes that you didn’t say here.

Cookies

Signing in sets a cookie that keeps you signed in, for as long as you choose in your settings. The public pages also use Google Analytics cookies. There is no advertising tracking anywhere on the site.

How long it’s kept, and deleting it

While you’re subscribed, I keep everything, because that’s what lets a reply months in feel like it comes from someone who remembers. If you cancel, your letters and my notes are deleted 90 days later. That’s long enough that you can come back without starting over.

Ask me to delete everything and I will, within a week, no questions. Write to hello@thesmallhours.net from the address you signed up with. You can also ask for a copy of what I hold about you. Stripe keeps its own payment records, which the law requires.

Waiting-list addresses are removed whenever you ask, and 90 days after I tell you there’s room if you don’t join.

Things only you control

Private browsing and your phone’s lock-screen preview setting are both outside what I control, and both matter. Your settings let you turn off emails, send them to a different address, change the sender name and the tab title, add a PIN, and leave quickly.

Questions

Write to hello@thesmallhours.net. The Small Hours is for adults; I don’t knowingly hold anything from anyone under 18.