Privacy Policy
Effective October 11, 2026 · 한국어
Preaching Lab keeps sermons for you. Sermons routinely carry the names and circumstances of real people in a congregation. So this page is specific about what we take, where we put it, and when it goes away.
1. What we collect
| Category | What | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Sign-in | The unique identifier Google, Apple, or Kakao gives us; your display name; your email if you consented to share it | So your reports are yours alone. We never receive or store a password. |
| Profile | Your name, church, church YouTube channel, the kind of preacher you want to become, your tradition, and a description of your congregation | To carry a thread across sermons and to judge a sermon inside your own tradition rather than someone else's. Only the name matters; the rest is optional. |
| Language and place | Your app language, your time zone, your country | To write the report in your language, and to send notifications at a reasonable hour where you are rather than where our servers are. |
| Sermons | The video or recording link you send, the transcript made from its audio, and the report | This is the service itself. |
| Microphone | Audio you record inside the app | The microphone turns on only when you press Record. At no other time do we listen. The recording is deleted once the report is made (see 5). |
| Notifications | A device push token | To tell you when a report is ready. Decline notifications and the app still works. |
| Email notices (only if you opt in) |
The address to send to — your sign-in email, or one you type when you opt in | When app notifications cannot reach you, to email how to make your first report and what comes after the trial. Only if you opt in, never more than two a month, and you can stop them any time with the one-click link in every email or from the Account screen. The service works the same without it. |
We do not collect location, contacts, photos, or advertising identifiers. We do
not use your activity for advertising and we hand nothing to advertisers.
We use no third-party analytics — our own server counts page views with no IP
address and no cookie. The one exception: if you arrive through a link we shared (with
?ref=) or from a search engine, a cookie keeps that link's short tag or the search
engine's name (e.g. Google) for 30 days and records it once on your account when you first sign up —
never the address or what you searched for.
A sermon is sensitive information, and not only about you. Preaching often names a member who is ill, a family in difficulty, a request made in confidence. Under California law your religious beliefs are sensitive personal information; the same is true of what your sermon reveals about others. We use it for one thing — making your report — and for nothing else. It is never used to infer anything about you, never sold, never shared for advertising, and never shown to another user.
2. Where it goes
Turning speech into text and reading it takes outside services. Here is what goes where.
| Who | What they get | What for |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | The audio of the sermon portion | Turning speech into text |
| Anthropic | The transcript | Writing the report |
| Railway | Account, reports, transcripts | Server and database |
| Google · Apple · Kakao | Sign-in verification | Confirming it is you |
| Apple · Google | Device push token and notification text | Sending app notifications — Apple (APNs) on iPhone, Google (FCM) on Android. Older versions of the app go through Expo |
| Cloudflare | Audio you recorded in the app | Holding the file while the report is made |
| Cloudflare · Resend | The email address on a sign-up form, and the address of anyone who opted in to email notices | The website, its reply mail, and email notices |
| Polar Software Inc. | Your user id in our system and the IP address of your connection | When you pay on the web — to open the checkout, charge you, and issue the receipt (see 3) |
| Apple · Google | Your user id in our system, attached to the purchase | When you pay inside the app — the App Store or Google Play charges you, and we match the purchase to your account (see 3) |
What we send to OpenAI and Anthropic is processed under terms that forbid using it to train their models. We do not hand anything to anyone outside this list. We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We disclose it otherwise only where the law lawfully requires it.
3. Payment — what Polar knows and what we know
Who takes your payment depends on where you pay.
- Inside the iPhone app, Apple charges you; inside the Android app, Google does, through the App Store or Google Play. Your card and other payment details stay with that store account; we never receive them. What we send the store is your user id in our system — so we know whose account to open — and what comes back is the product, the subscription status, the amount and currency, and when you paid. Apple Inc. and Google LLC are US companies and handle that payment data under their own privacy policies.
- On the web, Polar Software Inc. is the merchant of record and charges you. The rest of this section is about that case:
- What we send Polar is your user id in our system and the IP address of your connection — the first so we know whose account to open when the payment clears, the second so the price and the tax match your country.
- Your email and card details are asked for by Polar on its own screen. They do not pass through us and we do not keep them.
- What comes back is the subscription status, the plan, the amount charged, and the currency. Nothing else.
- Polar handles that data under its own privacy policy, as the party responsible for the charge and the taxes.
Polar Software Inc. is a US company, so this data leaves your country: the user id and IP address we send, and the email and card details you type on Polar's screen. It moves over an encrypted connection when you open the checkout, is used for charging, receipts and tax, and is kept for as long as Polar's own privacy policy keeps transaction records. If you do not want that, you can keep using the free part of the service without paying.
4. International transfer
Preaching Lab is operated from the Republic of Korea, and your account, transcripts, and reports are stored there. The services in the table above are located in the United States and elsewhere, so your sermon crosses borders in the course of being transcribed and read. By using the service you understand that this is where your data lives. It is protected the same way wherever it sits — see Section 8.
5. How long we keep it
- Account, reports, transcripts — until you delete your account. Showing you how your preaching has changed over time is the point of this service, so we do not quietly discard the record it rests on.
- Audio we downloaded — kept on the processing machine only while the report is being made, then deleted. Never stored on our server.
- Audio you recorded in the app — deleted as soon as the report is ready. Anything that failed part-way is deleted automatically after 7 days. We never keep it permanently; the transcript and the report remain, so there is no reason to hold the original.
- If you delete your account — everything above goes with it, reports and transcripts included. This cannot be undone.
6. How to delete
In the app: tap Account in the bar at the bottom of the screen. At the very bottom of that screen, just below Sign out, you will find Delete account. In a browser: the Account screen, then Delete your account?. Either way it happens immediately. You do not have to ask anyone or wait. You can also write to hello@preachinglab.cloud.
7. Your rights
You may ask at any time to see, correct, or delete what we hold, or to stop us processing it. Write to the address below and we will do it.
If you live in California, you have the right to know what we collect and why, to get a copy, to correct it, to delete it, and to limit our use of sensitive personal information — and we will not treat you differently for exercising any of them. As stated above, we do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of. We use the sensitive information in your sermons solely to provide the service you asked for, which is the use California law permits without a separate opt-out. Use the same address; you may designate an authorized agent to ask on your behalf.
This service is not for children. We do not direct it at anyone under 13 and do not knowingly accept their sign-up. If we learn we have taken a child's information, we delete it.
8. How we protect it
- Everything in transit is encrypted with HTTPS.
- The database is not exposed to the internet; we connect through an encrypted tunnel only when processing requires it.
- A report opens only under the account that owns it. Ask for someone else's and we will not even tell you whether it exists.
9. When this changes
We revise this page and update the date at the top. Significant changes are announced in the app or by email.
10. Contact
Privacy contact — Preaching Lab
hello@preachinglab.cloud