What we collect
We collect the minimum a bookmaker needs, and nothing that a bookmaker doesn’t:
- Your account: an email address. That’s the whole account — we use six-digit sign-in codes, so there is no password to store.
- Your child’s profile: an age, an optional first name, and an optional short description in your own words (“curly hair, obsessed with excavators”). No last name, no birthday, no address.
- Your commission: the lesson or story idea you type when you ask for a book, and any edits you make to the manuscript afterward.
We never ask for — or accept — photos of your child. There is nowhere in the product to put one. This is not a setting you have to find; our database has no column for a child’s photo, so the promise is kept by construction. Characters are drawn from your written description, never from an image of a real child.
What we generate and store
Making your book produces work product, and we keep it:
- Manuscripts — storyline pitches, page text, titles, dedications, and refrains, including your edits.
- Illustrations — character sheets, covers, and page art, including earlier versions you re-rolled past.
- Review verdicts — every manuscript is checked by an independent editorial model before a child sees it; we store the pass/fail result and the critique.
- An event log — a running record of each book’s progress (state changes, review verdicts, moderation flags, what each step cost us). It powers the progress screen you watch while your book is being made, and it is our audit trail if something goes wrong.
Which providers see what
We don’t run giant AI models in our own basement; a small number of providers help us make your book. Each one sees only what its job requires:
- The writing and reviewing models (Anthropic and OpenAI): story text — which can include your child’s first name, age, and the description you wrote — goes to the model that writes the manuscript and to a second, independent model that reviews it.
- The illustration model (OpenAI): receives written illustration prompts describing invented characters and scenes. Never photos — we don’t have any.
- Email delivery (Resend): your email address, to send sign-in codes and “your book is ready” notes.
- Payments (Stripe, via VibeMonetize): handles your card when you buy. We never see or store card numbers — only a record that a purchase happened.
Our infrastructure (application hosting and database) is provided by Vercel and Neon, which store the data described on this page on our behalf. We do not sell your data, share it with advertisers, or use it to train models.
How long we keep things
- Your books — manuscripts, art, audio, PDFs — are kept until you delete them. They’re yours; we don’t expire them.
- Moderation and abuse records — declined commissions, moderation flags, review failures — are kept for 90 days so we can investigate misuse, then purged down to anonymous aggregate counts.
Deleting your data
Deleting a book, a child profile, or your whole account is a real deletion, and it happens immediately: the database rows and the stored files (images, audio, PDFs) are hard-deleted, not hidden behind a flag. We have built and verified this flow — when you delete your account, your session stops working in the same moment, and the underlying records and files are gone. There is no “30–90 day deletion window” here.
Shipping addresses
Ordering a printed copy of your book is a planned future feature. When it arrives, we will ask for a shipping address at order time only — it is never collected earlier, and it is never part of your child’s profile. Until that feature exists, we hold no addresses at all.
Cookies and tracking
One cookie: the session cookie that keeps you signed in. No advertising trackers, no third-party analytics scripts, no pixels. The only usage measurement we do is our own event log (described above) — which books reach which step — so we can tell whether the product works.
Children’s privacy
Fable Designer is a service for adults. Accounts are held by parents and guardians (18+) who commission books on behalf of a child; we never collect information from a child directly, and children have no way to create accounts or enter data. The small amount of child-related information we hold (age, optional first name, optional description) comes from the guardian, is used only to make their books, and is deleted on request as described above.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a way that matters — new data collected, a new provider, a different retention period — we’ll update the date at the top and tell accountholders by email before the change takes effect. We won’t weaken the no-photos promise; it is the foundation the product is built on.
How to reach us
Questions, deletion requests we can help with, or anything that worries you: andrew.m.archer@gmail.com. A person reads it.
See also our Terms of Service.