Privacy Policy

01The short version

The detail is below, and the whole of it fits in a few lines:

• Your work is stored in Australia.
• Pastorly does not sell your information.
• Pastorly has no AI model of its own, and trains no model on your work.
• To produce your material, the content a task needs is sent to outside services. They are separate companies, working under their own terms.
• Your Notepad text and your conversations with Aide are never written into Pastorly's AI records.
• You can close your account whenever you like, with 30 days to change your mind.

02What we collect

Your account: your name, your email address, and a profile picture if you add one.

Your church: its name, its website if you give one, the tradition you choose, and the mission, vision, values and discipleship focus you enter.

Your preferences: the Bible translation you preach from, your theme, your time zone, and the settings you choose. Your time zone is learned quietly when you sign in, because a ministry week has to end at the right hour in the place you actually live.

Your work: notes, sermons, outlines, manuscripts, slides, images, lessons, studies, series, and your conversations with Aide.

The descriptions you write of a class or a group so that a lesson fits it.

Operational information: sign in records, error and support records, and information about how the service performed for you.

03What we do with it

To run the service: to read your notes and produce the outline, slides, lessons and studies you asked for, shaped by your tradition and your church.

To let Aide help you. Aide keeps small notes about your ministry preferences, such as the translation you preach from, so that you are not repeating yourself. Everything Aide keeps is visible, editable and removable in Settings, and you can turn that memory off there.

To keep your account secure, to answer you when you need support, and to keep the service running.

To improve Pastorly, according to the choice you hold in Settings under Data Controls. That choice is described in full below.

To meet obligations the law places on us.

We may also look at how Pastorly is used in aggregate, counted across accounts and stripped of anything that identifies a person or a church, so that we can see what is working and describe how the product performs.

04Where it is kept

Pastorly's database, its file storage and the application itself run in Australia.

Some processing happens elsewhere, and the next section explains that.

05The outside services Pastorly runs on

Pastorly has no AI model of its own. It builds no models, and it trains no model on your work.

Pastorly is built on services run by other companies. They cover AI generation, web search, image generation, text recognition, Scripture text, email, payment and hosting.

To do what you ask, the content a task needs is sent to those services and the result comes back.

Those services are separate companies. What they may do with what they receive is governed by their own terms rather than by ours, and they process information in other countries. We choose established providers, send only what a task needs, and never send more than the work requires.

06What Pastorly does not do

• It does not sell your information, to anyone, at any price.
• It does not train an AI model on your work.

07Helping Pastorly improve

Pastorly gets better by learning from real use. When you create your account and accept this policy, Help improve Pastorly for everyone is on.

While it is on, Pastorly may review your conversations with Aide and the work you save, such as sermons and lessons, in order to fix problems, check quality, and improve how Pastorly works. Access is limited to the people who need it for that work, and reviews made through the admin console are recorded in an access log. Your choice is recorded together with the version of this policy you accepted.

Your private Notepad text is not part of it.

This is Pastorly's own review of how the product is performing. It is not model training, and it could not be: Pastorly has no model of its own.

You can turn it off at any time in Settings, under Data Controls. Turning it off ends that access and deletes the copies it created, leaving only account-linked usage and reliability records.

Feedback you deliberately send is separate. If you rate an answer and then choose to send it, you are knowingly sharing that answer and its conversation with us so we can look at what went wrong or right.

08Your Notepad and your conversations with Aide

Pastorly keeps a short-lived record of AI requests so that a failure can be diagnosed and a cost can be accounted for.

Work in your Notepad, and your conversations with Aide about it, are excluded from that record at the moment it is written. They are not removed afterwards by a clean-up that might be missed. They are never stored there in the first place.

09How long things are kept

• Your work: for as long as your account is open, or until you delete it.
• Anything you move to the Bin: 30 days, then it is gone for good.
• Operational records of AI requests, which exist so a failure can be diagnosed and a cost accounted for: their content is removed once it is no longer needed for that, and what is left is timing, cost and status.
• Copies made for product improvement: no longer than they are useful for it, and sooner if you switch that off or delete the item they came from.
• Feedback you deliberately send: while we are still learning from it.
• Notepad version history: it thins as it ages, so older revisions are kept less densely than recent ones.
• Exports: short-lived by design, because they are a delivery and not an archive.

Records we have to keep for a legal, billing or security reason are kept for that purpose and no longer.

10Closing your account

You can schedule deletion in Settings, under Data Controls. That starts a 30 day grace period which you can cancel. After it passes, your stored files are removed first, and then your account and everything in it is deleted.

What remains afterwards is a small number of operational and security records that are no longer connected to you. Their content has already been removed and they age out on the schedule above.

If you joined the waiting list with the same address, that is a separate record and closing your account does not remove it. Write to us and we will.

11Your choices, and how to reach them

You can see and change your profile, your church details and your email address in Settings at any time.

Settings, under Data Controls, holds the Help improve Pastorly choice and the option to schedule deletion. Aide's memory is listed there too, where you can read it, edit it, remove any part of it, or turn it off.

Depending on where you live, a law that applies to us may give you further rights over your information. Tell us what you need and we will honour what that law requires.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us so we can put it right.

12Cookies and browser storage

Pastorly uses cookies to keep you signed in and to remember preferences you set.

We count visits to our public pages so that we know whether anyone is finding Pastorly.

Our public pages also carry advertising measurement, which uses cookies to tell us whether an advertisement brought you here. It does not run on the pages you see once you are signed in, and it never sees your sermons or your notes.

If we begin using cookies for anything beyond this, we will say so here, and where the law asks for your consent we will ask for it.

Your browser also stores your preferences, such as your theme and your paper. Your sermons and your notes are never stored in your browser.

13Children

Pastorly is for adults preparing ministry material, and you must be 18 or over to hold an account. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Pastorly prepares material for children's and youth ministry. It has no features for keeping records about a child, and a lesson never needs one: describe the class by its shape and its needs and Pastorly has what it takes to prepare it. If you do keep information about a child in your account, it is yours to be responsible for, and our Terms of Service set out what that means.

14Security

Access to your work is restricted to your account. Traffic is encrypted in transit, and stored data is encrypted at rest by the providers that host it. Administrative access to a pastor's content is limited, and access through the admin console is written to a log.

No service can promise perfect security and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What we can say is that we do not hold what we do not need.

15Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as Pastorly changes. When we do, the updated version and its date appear on this page, unless the law requires us to tell you another way.

16Getting in touch

Write to privacy@pastorly.ai with anything about your privacy or your information.

Pastorly is operated from Australia, and that address reaches us wherever you are writing from.