Privacy Policy
Last updated October 8, 2026
EssayRoast gives students feedback on college application essays. This policy explains what we collect, why, who else handles it, and how to delete it. The short version:
- We collect your email address to sign you in, and the essays you choose to submit.
- Unless you save an essay, we delete it as soon as its review is done, and we delete the review 24 hours later.
- If you buy reviews, Stripe processes the payment. We keep purchase records, never your card number.
- We don’t sell your information, show ads, or use your essays to train AI models.
- You can delete any review, all of your reviews, or your whole account at any time.
What we collect
- Account: your email address, and the sign-in records our sign-in provider keeps, such as session cookies and sign-in times. If you sign in with Google, Google also shares the name and profile photo on your Google account.
- Essays: the text you paste, the prompt you chose, any optional context you add (activities, academics, school, circumstances), and an optional draft name.
- Reviews: the feedback generated for each essay. Reviews quote short passages from your essay.
- Revision activity: your note plans, dismissals, and progress are stored with the review. When you run it again, earlier notes and plans help the model check what changed.
- Usage: how many reviews you run each day and what each cost us.
- Purchases: the packs you buy, amounts, dates and refunds, and your review balance and which reviews used it. For a saved payment method, its type, brand and last four digits (Stripe keeps the card itself). Your confirmation that you’re 18 or older when you buy, and, if you turn on auto-reload, the exact terms you agreed to and when.
- Billing emails: copies of the auto-reload emails we send you, as a record of what we told you.
- Visits: when you arrive, the page you landed on, the name of the site that linked you (such as reddit.com), and any campaign tag in the link (such as “utm_source=reddit”). If you create an account within 30 days, we link that visit to it. We look at visits only in totals, to see which places are worth our time, and never share them with ad platforms. Your browser remembers the visit for 30 days in local storage, not a cookie. We don’t record your IP address or device with it, and deleting your account removes the link.
- Technical logs: our hosting provider records standard request information, such as IP address and browser type, to keep the service running and secure. Our own logs never include essay text.
How we use it
We use your information to produce your reviews, show them to you, keep your review balance, process payments and refunds, send billing emails, prevent abuse and fraud, fix problems, and see which links bring people to EssayRoast. We don’t read your essays unless we need to investigate a problem you report or the law requires it. We don’t sell or rent your information, use it for advertising, or use your essays to train AI models.
Who else handles your information
- Anthropic provides the AI model that writes each review. Your essay and any context you add are sent to Anthropic’s API to generate it, along with earlier feedback and revision activity when you re-review a draft. Anthropic’s commercial terms don’t allow it to train models on this data.
- Neon hosts our database, including your account and sign-in records.
- Railway hosts the EssayRoast application.
- Stripe processes payments. It receives your email address, payment details and billing address; we never see or store your card number. To prevent fraud, Stripe also collects information about your device and browser on its checkout page, and on EssayRoast when you confirm a payment with your bank, and uses it under its own privacy policy.
- Metronome keeps our billing records: your review balance, purchases, and a count of the reviews you use, keyed by an account ID. It never receives your essays or reviews.
- Resend sends our sign-in codes and billing emails. It receives your email address and the message, never your essays or reviews.
- Google confirms who you are if you choose to sign in with Google. Its sign-in button loads from Google on our sign-in page, so Google sees that page load. Google’s own privacy policy covers what it records.
- Meta confirms who you are if you choose to sign in with Facebook. We receive the name and email address on your Facebook account, nothing from your profile or Instagram. Meta’s own privacy policy covers what it records.
These providers process data in the United States. We share nothing with anyone else unless the law requires it.
How long we keep it
- Essays you don’t save: the essay text and context are deleted as soon as the review finishes. The review is deleted 24 hours after that.
- Keeping a review: if you choose “Keep this review” on an unsaved review, we keep the review. The essay was already deleted.
- Essays you save: kept with their reviews until you delete them or your account.
- Deleting your account removes your essays, reviews, usage records and sign-in account. Purchase, payment and review-balance records are kept, without your essays, as long as tax and accounting law requires (generally up to seven years), so we can still answer refund requests. Auto-reload consent records and billing emails are kept for at least three years, or one year after you turn auto-reload off if that’s later, as California law requires.
Deleted data can remain in our database’s backups for up to 24 hours before it’s gone for good.
Your browser also holds your working draft and a copy of your plans so you can return to editing. These device copies are separate from server retention. Deleting a review from its page clears that review’s device copies; you can clear other device copies through your browser’s site-data settings.
Your choices
You can delete a single review from its page, and delete all your reviews or your whole account from the Account page. To get a copy of your data, correct it, or ask anything about this policy, contact us at hello@neuraoptima.com. If you live in California, you have the right to know what we collect, to delete it, and to correct it. We don’t sell or share personal information for advertising.
Students and age
EssayRoast is for students 13 and older, and it isn’t directed to children under 13. If we learn we have information from a child under 13, we delete it. If you’re under 18, we suggest reading this policy with a parent or guardian. Buying reviews is for adults 18 and older; a parent or guardian has to make any purchase for a student under 18.
Emails
We email you sign-in codes when you ask for them. If you turn on auto-reload, we also email a confirmation with its terms, a notice after each charge or failed charge, and a yearly reminder. These are part of the service, so they don’t have an unsubscribe link; turning off auto-reload stops them. We don’t send marketing email.
Cookies
We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in. We don’t use analytics or advertising cookies; the visit note described above lives in your browser’s local storage and is sent only to EssayRoast. When you pay, Stripe sets its own cookies to prevent fraud: on its checkout page, and on EssayRoast only when you confirm a payment with your bank.
Do Not Track
Some browsers send a Do Not Track signal. We don’t track you across other websites or let advertisers do so, so EssayRoast works the same whether or not the signal is on. When you pay, Stripe’s fraud-prevention tools may recognize your device across the websites that use Stripe; Stripe’s privacy policy covers that.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit, and our providers encrypt it at rest. Access to the database is limited to the people who run EssayRoast.
Changes
If we change this policy, we’ll update the date above and post a notice on the site for significant changes.
Contact
Questions or requests: hello@neuraoptima.com.