1. Who we are
Avela is a parenting companion app for households with children aged 0 to 3. This policy covers the Avela mobile app (iOS and Android) and the Avela website. When we say "we", "us", or "Avela", we mean the company operating the Avela app and site.
You can reach us about anything in this policy at hello@withavela.com.
2. What we collect
We collect only what the app needs to work. In V1 that means:
- Account information. Your email address and your name, used to create and secure your account and to send you sign-in codes.
- Child profile data, entered by you. Your child's name, birthdate, and sex, as you type them into the app. We use these to tailor daily tasks, content, and reminders to your child's age and stage. You can edit or remove this at any time.
- Journal entries. The text and photos you choose to save in your family journal.
- Chat messages. Your conversations with the Avela AI coach, kept so the coach remembers your family's context between sessions.
- Task activity. Which daily tasks you complete or skip, used for streaks, rewards, and to make future tasks more relevant.
- Device push tokens. A token issued by your phone's push service (Firebase Cloud Messaging) so we can send the notifications you have turned on.
- Membership status. Whether your Avela Pro membership is in its free trial, on the weekly subscription, or a lifetime purchase, received from Superwall, which displays the paywall and keeps the purchase record for Apple in-app purchases on our behalf. Superwall receives an anonymous app user id and your purchase status, not your name or email. We never see or store your payment card details; Apple handles payment. Where available, Google Play billing terms apply.
3. What we do not collect
V1 is analytics-free
The current version of Avela ships with no third-party analytics SDKs, no advertising trackers, and no behavioral profiling. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. If a future version adds analytics, we will update this policy first and tell you in the app.
4. Children's privacy and COPPA
Avela is an app for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account, and the app is designed to be used by parents and caregivers, not by children.
- We do not knowingly collect any information directly from children. Children are not users of Avela and have no way to create accounts or submit data.
- The child-related data in Avela (name, birthdate, sex, journal entries, task history) is provided by parents, about their own children, and is under the parents' control at all times.
- Parents can view, edit, export, and delete their child's data through the app. Deleting your account deletes your children's profiles with it.
- We do not use child data for advertising of any kind, and we apply data minimization: we ask only for what the app's features need.
If you believe a child has submitted personal information to us directly, contact hello@withavela.com and we will delete it promptly.
5. How AI processing works
The Avela coach is powered by Anthropic's Claude models, accessed through Anthropic's API. When you chat with the coach, or when the app generates your daily tasks, personalized content suggestions, or notification text, relevant context is sent to Anthropic for processing. That context can include your chat message, your child's profile (age and stage), recent journal summaries, and recent task activity.
- No training on your data. Under Anthropic's commercial API terms, Anthropic does not use data submitted through the API to train its models.
- Safety guardrails. Deterministic safety checks run in our own code before and after every model call. For example, messages indicating a crisis are routed to crisis resources immediately, and the coach never provides medication dosing, by code rather than by prompt.
- Not medical advice. The coach offers parenting guidance and general information only. See our Terms of Service for the full medical disclaimer.
6. Who we share data with
We share personal data only with the service providers (subprocessors) that run Avela's infrastructure, each bound by its own data processing terms, and only for the purposes below. We also disclose data where the law requires it, or to protect the safety of our users.
| Provider | Purpose | Data involved | Region |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Application hosting and API serving | All data in transit through the app's API | United States (global edge network) |
| Neon | Postgres database hosting | Accounts, child profiles, journals (text), chats, tasks | United States |
| Cloudflare R2 | Media storage | Journal photos and avatars | United States / global network |
| Anthropic | AI processing for the Avela coach | Chat messages and family context (see section 5) | United States |
| Superwall | Paywall display and purchase record keeping | Anonymous app user id, purchase status | United States |
| Resend | Transactional email (sign-in codes, account notices) | Email address, message content | United States |
| Google Firebase | Push notification delivery (FCM) | Device push tokens, notification content | United States / global network |
We do not sell personal information to anyone, and no subprocessor may use your data for its own purposes.
7. How long we keep data
- While your account is active, we keep your account, child profiles, journals, chats, and task history so the app can work and the coach can remember your family.
- When you delete your account, a 7-day grace period starts during which you can change your mind. After the grace period, your data is deleted from our production systems, and removed from encrypted backups on their normal rotation cycle shortly after.
- Transaction records related to purchases may be retained longer where tax, accounting, or platform rules require it. These records do not include journals, chats, or child data.
- Email logs at our email provider expire on that provider's standard retention schedule.
8. Your rights and controls
You do not need to email us to exercise the basics. The app has them built in:
- Access and export. Settings → Export My Data gives you a copy of your account, child profiles, journals, chats, and task history in a portable format.
- Deletion. Settings → Delete Account starts deletion with a 7-day grace period. Signing back in during the grace period cancels it; after that, deletion is permanent.
- Correction. Edit your profile and your children's profiles directly in the app at any time.
Depending on where you live, you also have legal rights, which we honor for all users regardless of location:
- GDPR (EU) and UK GDPR: the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, and objection; the right to withdraw consent at any time; and the right to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority (in the UK, the ICO).
- CCPA/CPRA (California): the rights to know, access, correct, and delete personal information, the right to opt out of sale or sharing (we do neither), and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising your rights.
- PIPEDA (Canada): the rights to access and correct your personal information, to withdraw consent, and to complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
To exercise any right that the app does not cover directly, email hello@withavela.com. We respond within 30 days, and we may ask you to verify your identity first.
9. Security
We design for security from the start. Measures in place include:
- Encryption in transit (TLS) for all traffic between your device and our servers.
- Encryption at rest for the database and media storage, provided by our hosting providers.
- Short-lived, signed access for media uploads and downloads; no public buckets.
- Role-based access control on every API endpoint, and an audit log entry for every data change.
- Secrets kept in managed environment configuration, never in code.
- One-time sign-in codes instead of passwords, reducing credential theft risk.
No system is perfectly secure. If we learn of a breach affecting your personal data, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as required by law.
10. International transfers
Avela serves users in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Our infrastructure and subprocessors are primarily located in the United States, so if you use Avela from outside the US, your data is transferred to and processed in the US. Where the law of your country requires safeguards for that transfer (for example UK GDPR or GDPR), we rely on our subprocessors' data processing agreements, including standard contractual clauses where applicable.
11. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a meaningful way, we will update the date at the top, and for significant changes we will tell you in the app or by email before the change takes effect. Continuing to use Avela after a change means you accept the updated policy.
12. Contact
Questions, concerns, or requests about your privacy: hello@withavela.com. We are happy to explain anything in this policy in plainer language.