Privacy Policy

DandyTale is operated for use by adults — a parent or legal guardian — on behalf of their children. Before creating a story, the adult account holder must confirm they are 18 years of age or older and agree to these terms. Children do not create their own accounts, sign in, provide their own email address, or enter payment information; only the adult account holder does that.

We do not collect personal information from or about a specific, identifiable child. When building a character, the adult account holder selects from fixed, preset options — species, color, features, personality traits, favorite thing, and a name drawn from a generated list — none of which is free-text entry. We do not ask for, and the character-creation process does not accept, a real child's actual name, photograph, birthdate, address, or any other identifying detail. The illustrated character portrait is AI-generated artwork based on those preset selections, not a photo of any real person.

The only personal information DandyTale collects is the adult account holder's own name, email address, and payment information (see below) — never a child's. The reading tiers (Little Listener, Early Reader, Confident Reader) are broad age ranges selected by the adult for story-length and reading-level purposes; we do not collect or store a child's specific birthdate.

If you believe a child has provided us with personal information directly, or that this policy doesn't match how the site actually works, please contact us at support.dandytale@gmail.com so we can review and correct it.

• Account information: your name and email address, collected through our authentication provider, Clerk, when you sign up (including via "Continue with Google" if you choose it).
• Character and story details: the character names, traits, favorite things, goals, appearance, and story choices (setting, topic, reading tier, vibe) you enter to generate a book.
• Payment information: handled entirely by Stripe. We receive confirmation of your plan and payment status, but never your full card number.
• Usage information: which stories and characters are associated with your account, and how many books you've generated against your plan's allowance.
• Email list: if you sign up for our holiday email list, your email address. No account is needed for this, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

• To create and maintain your account;
• To generate your stories and illustrations using the third-party AI providers described below;
• To process payments and manage your subscription;
• To enforce the book allowance included in your plan;
• To respond to you if you contact us for support;
• If you joined our email list, to send you the printables you asked for, holiday story ideas, and occasional DandyTaleoffers. Every list email has an unsubscribe link.

We don't use your information for advertising, and we don't sell it to anyone.

Each of the following processes a specific slice of your information in order to make DandyTale work:

• Clerk — stores your account credentials, name, and email, and manages sign-in.
• Stripe — processes payments and stores your payment method and billing history; we don't store your card details ourselves.
• Anthropic — receives your character and story details to write the story text.
• Google (Gemini) — receives your character details and story text to generate the page illustrations.
• Neon — hosts our database, where your account, characters, and stories are stored.
• Vercel — hosts the site and stores the generated illustration images.
• Resend — sends our emails, and stores the email addresses of people who join our email list.
• Google Analytics — tells us how visitors use the site (for example, which pages they read and how far they get in making a book). It doesn't receive your name, email address, or story content.
• Pinterest — the Pinterest tag tells us whether visits from our Pinterest ads lead to reading an example book, starting a story, or buying one, so we can measure and improve those ads. It doesn't receive your name, email address, or story content.
• Microsoft Clarity — records how visitors move through the site (clicks, scrolling, and which parts of a page they look at) and shows it to us as anonymous session replays and heatmaps, so we can find and fix confusing spots. Text you type, such as your email address, is masked and never recorded.

We use a functional cookie, set by Clerk, to keep you signed in. We also use analytics and advertising cookies from Google Analytics, Microsoft Clarity and Pinterest, described above, to understand how the site is used and whether our ads work. We don't sell your information.

You can opt out of Google Analytics with Google's opt-out browser add-on, and limit Pinterest's ad personalization in your Pinterest privacy settings. Blocking cookies in your browser also works, though it will sign you out.

We keep your account, characters, and stories for as long as your account is active. If you'd like your account and its data deleted, contact us at support.dandytale@gmail.com — deletion requests are currently handled by our team by hand rather than an automated process, so please allow a few days.

We rely on our service providers' security practices (Clerk, Stripe, Neon, and Vercel all maintain their own security programs) and take reasonable steps to protect your information. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, so we can't guarantee absolute security.

You can review and update your account details, or cancel your plan, from your Account page at any time. For anything else — correcting information, or requesting a copy or deletion of your data — contact us at support.dandytale@gmail.com.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We'll update the "Last updated" date above when we do.

Questions about this Privacy Policy? Reach us at support.dandytale@gmail.com.