Privacy policy

What is collected

• Your account. You sign in with Apple or with Google; there are no passwords. With Google we keep your name, email address and profile picture as Google provides them. With Apple we keep Apple's identifier for you, the email address Apple gives us (which may be a private relay address if you chose Hide My Email), whether it is a relay, and your name if you shared it. If you sign in with Apple and with Google using the same verified email address, both sign-ins lead to the same Stepladder account. A relay address is never linked to another sign-in, and two existing accounts are never merged.
• Your workflows. The steps an assistant or app writes for you, including any text and links on them; the answers you give; and a timestamped record of everything that happens to each workflow — a step started or finished, a wait extended, an alarm dismissed, a workflow paused, suspended, resumed or cancelled — and whether it was you, the app on your phone or a connected assistant that did it. That record is the workflow: it is what the app shows you and what the assistant that created it follows.
• Spoken lines. When a step has a line to be spoken (its say text), the audio made from it is stored so your phone can play it in an alarm.
• Your devices. For each phone or tablet signed in: its push token, its platform (iOS or Android), an identifier the app makes for the device so a reinstall is recognised, when it registered and was last seen, and whether you turned ringing off on it. At most ten devices are kept per account.
• Your connections. For each assistant or app you connect: the name it gave itself, the scopes you allowed, when you connected it, when it was last used and when it expires, and the webhook address an app may register. Its tokens are stored only as hashes.
• Usage counts. The times of recent requests, kept only to enforce limits (for example, how many workflows may be created for you in a day).

The apps do not read your contacts, location, photos, microphone, camera or health data. They contain no analytics, advertising or tracking libraries, and Stepladder does not use cookies for tracking.

How it is used

Only to run the service for you: to show your steps and ring your phone at the right time, to let the assistants and apps you connected create and follow your workflows, to keep you signed in on your devices, and to keep the service within its limits. Your data is not used for advertising, not profiled, not sold, and not used to train AI models.

Where it is stored

Everything above is stored in Stepladder's database, hosted by Convex in the United States. Data travels over HTTPS only. On your phone the app keeps the alarms it has booked and the spoken lines' audio, so it can ring on time.

Who it is shared with

Stepladder shares data only with the services that run it, each for its own part:

• Convex hosts the database and the service.
• Vercel hosts this website and passes the connector's and sign-in's requests on to Convex.
• Apple provides Sign in with Apple and delivers notifications to iPhone and iPad (Apple Push Notification service).
• Google provides Google sign-in, and Firebase Cloud Messaging, which wakes the app on Android and passes notifications on to Apple for iPhone and iPad. A push carries no step text: on Android it is a silent signal for the app to check in; on iPhone and iPad it says only “Open Stepladder to check your rings.”, which the app replaces on the device with what rings next.
• OpenAI turns each step's spoken line into audio (text-to-speech). Only that line's text is sent — the words the assistant wrote for the step to say — with no name, email address, account or device identifier. A sentence already spoken for anybody is reused rather than sent again.

Beyond these, your data reaches only the assistants and apps you connect, as the next section says. Links on a step, such as “Open in Chat Baker”, are written by whoever created the workflow; Stepladder never opens them for you, and tapping one takes you to that app or website, whose own privacy policy then applies.

We may disclose data if the law requires it.

Connected assistants and apps

An AI assistant (such as Claude or ChatGPT) or an app reaches your Stepladder account only after you sign in to Stepladder on its behalf and choose Allow. What it may then do depends on what you allowed:

• Workflows (every connection): create workflows for you; read your workflows, their steps, your answers and their history; read what is in front of you now across all of them; and cancel a workflow.
• Control (only if the connection asked for it, and the sign-in page says so before you allow it): pass on what you did or said — mark a step finished, give an answer, say you are back after a wait, pause or unpause a workflow, give a wait more or less time, move to another step, and resume or abort a workflow that was set aside. It is meant to act only on what you tell it.

A connection never sees your other connections, your devices or your sign-in details. What an assistant does with what it reads is governed by that assistant's own privacy policy.

Webhooks. An app may give Stepladder an address to be told about changes. It is then sent the history of the workflows it created, and nothing about anyone else's.

You can disconnect any assistant or app at any time from Agents in the app, and its access ends at once. A connection also ends on its own 90 days after you allowed it; its access tokens last an hour each.

How long it is kept

• Your account, your workflows with their history and spoken lines, and the records of your connections are kept until you delete your account. Finished and cancelled workflows are not yet deleted on their own.
• A device is removed when you sign out on it, when Apple or Google reports its push token no longer valid, or when an eleventh device replaces the one seen longest ago.
• A request to connect an assistant that is not answered expires after ten minutes. An assistant's registration that never leads to a connection is deleted after seven days.
• Usage counts are times alone, with nothing of what was asked; only the last day's are consulted, and they go with your account.
• Audio for a sentence, which identifies nobody, is kept so that it is not made twice.
• Convex and Vercel keep their own operational logs of requests for a limited time.

Deleting your account

In the iPhone and iPad app, open Agents and choose Delete account. Every workflow that is still running is cancelled — the app that started it is told — every connection is revoked, and within minutes your account, your workflows with their history and spoken lines, your connections, your devices and your sign-ins are erased. If you signed in with Apple, Apple asks you to confirm first and your Sign in with Apple authorization for Stepladder is revoked. This cannot be undone.

The Android app cannot delete an account yet. On Android, or without the app, email privacy@stepladderapp.com from the address you sign in with and we will do the same. You can also write to ask for a copy of your data or to correct it.

Children

Stepladder is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it.

Contact

For anything about your data or this policy: privacy@stepladderapp.com.