GutenForge / Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Effective Date: April 3, 2026 | Last Updated: April 3, 2026

GutenForge ("we," "us," "our") is operated by Forgeborn. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and your choices regarding your data.

1. Information We Collect

1.1 Account Information

When you create an account, we collect:

Name (optional) — your display name
Email address — used for authentication and account communications
Password — stored as a one-way cryptographic hash (bcrypt, 12 rounds); we never store or can access your plaintext password
Profile picture — if you sign in with Google, your Google profile image URL

1.2 Business and Brand Information

To provide our newsletter generation service, we collect:

Business name and workspace settings
Website URL — you provide this for brand analysis; we scrape it to extract colors, tone, and style (see Section 3)
Brand voice profile — tone descriptors, vocabulary, writing style, personality, color palette, fonts, target audience, industry context
Social media profile URLs — if you choose to link them for enriched brand analysis
Logo URL — if detected during website analysis

1.3 Newsletter Content

Newsletter text — titles, subject lines, section headings, body copy, and calls to action
Images — uploaded images or AI-generated images (including the prompts used to generate them)
Templates — MJML email templates and compiled HTML

1.4 Payment Information

We use Stripe as our payment processor. We do not store credit card numbers, bank account details, or other sensitive payment data on our servers. Stripe processes and stores this information under their own privacy policy. We store only:

Stripe customer ID and subscription ID (internal reference numbers)
Subscription tier, status, and trial expiration date

1.5 Usage and Security Data

IP address — collected for rate limiting and abuse prevention; logged for certain administrative actions
Audit logs — records of significant account actions (newsletter creation, brand changes, team member invitations) for security and debugging
Failed login attempts — tracked per account for brute-force protection (counter resets on successful login)

1.6 Cookies and Session Data

We use essential cookies for authentication:

Session token — a secure, HTTP-only cookie containing a JSON Web Token (JWT) for authentication. Sessions expire after 30 days of inactivity.
CSRF token — automatically managed by our authentication framework to prevent cross-site request forgery.

We do not use advertising cookies, analytics cookies, or third-party tracking cookies. We do not use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or similar tracking services.

2. How We Use Your Information

Purpose	Data Used
Account authentication	Email, password hash, session tokens
Newsletter generation (AI)	Brand voice profile, user prompts, newsletter content
Image generation (AI)	Image prompts (text descriptions you provide)
Brand analysis	Website URL, social media URLs
Subscription billing	Stripe customer/subscription IDs
Abuse prevention	IP address, failed login counts, rate limiting counters
Customer support	Audit logs, account information

3. Website and Social Media Scraping

When you submit a website URL for brand analysis, our scraper visits that URL to extract publicly available information: page title, meta description, CSS color values, logo, and Open Graph data. We:

Only scrape URLs you explicitly provide — you are authorizing access to your own website
Only access the specific page you submit — we never crawl beyond that URL
Limit requests to 30 seconds per page with a 5 MB body size cap

Since you are providing your own website URL for analysis, standard robots.txt restrictions do not apply — you are granting us permission to access your site for this purpose.

If you link social media profiles, we extract publicly available profile information (name, bio, recent public posts) to enrich your brand voice analysis. Social data is refreshed periodically if you keep profiles linked.

4. Third-Party Services

We share limited data with the following services to provide our core functionality:

Service	Purpose	Data Shared
Anthropic (Claude)	AI newsletter content generation and brand analysis	Brand voice profile (tone, vocabulary, style, audience, industry), section prompts, newsletter content. No user IDs or email addresses are sent.
OpenAI (DALL-E)	AI image generation for newsletters	Text prompts describing the images you request. No personal information is sent.
Google	OAuth sign-in	During Google Sign-In, Google shares your email, name, and profile image with us. We store OAuth tokens to maintain your session.
Stripe	Payment processing	Business ID and subscription tier (sent as metadata). All payment card data is handled directly by Stripe and never touches our servers.

Each of these services has their own privacy policy governing how they handle data:

5. Data Retention

Active account data — retained for the lifetime of your account
Deleted newsletters — permanently deleted from our database and storage immediately upon deletion
Deleted images — permanently deleted from our storage immediately upon deletion
Deactivated brands — soft-deleted (marked inactive) and retained for potential reactivation; the brand data remains in our database
Sessions — expire and are removed after 30 days
Audit logs — retained indefinitely for security and compliance purposes
Failed login records — reset on successful login; lockout expires after 15 minutes

6. Data Security

We implement the following security measures:

Password hashing — bcrypt with 12 rounds (industry standard)
Brute-force protection — accounts are locked for 15 minutes after 5 failed login attempts
Rate limiting — login, registration, AI generation, and export endpoints are rate-limited per IP and per user
Input sanitization — all user inputs are sanitized to prevent injection attacks
HTTPS — all data is transmitted over encrypted connections
Image validation — uploaded files are verified by magic bytes (file header), not just file extension; EXIF metadata is stripped from uploaded images
Multi-tenant isolation — all data queries are scoped to your business; you cannot access another business's data

7. Your Rights and Choices

Data Export

You can export your newsletters at any time in HTML, PDF, or PNG format from the newsletter editor.

Data Deletion

You can delete individual newsletters and images at any time. To request deletion of your entire account and all associated data, contact us at forgeborn.dev@gmail.com.

California Residents (CCPA/CPRA)

If you are a California resident, you have the right to: know what personal information we collect, request deletion of your data, and opt out of the sale of personal information. We do not sell personal information. To exercise your rights, contact us at the email above.

European Residents (GDPR)

If you are located in the European Economic Area, you have rights including: access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection. Our legal basis for processing is contract performance (providing the service you signed up for) and legitimate interest (security and abuse prevention). To exercise your rights, contact us at the email above.

8. Children's Privacy

GutenForge is not directed at children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have collected data from a child under 13, we will delete it promptly. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us.

9. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by posting the updated policy on this page with a revised effective date. Your continued use of GutenForge after changes constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

10. Contact Us

For privacy questions, data requests, or concerns:

Forgeborn
Email: forgeborn.dev@gmail.com
Website: forgeborn.dev