Privacy Policy
Last updated 17 September 2026
OnceEver is a language-learning app. You write down phrases you want to keep, it helps you understand them and reminds you to practise them. This page describes everything it records about you, everyone else who handles it, and how to take it all back.
The short version: your account is an email address, your material is the phrases you save and how your practice has gone, and there is no advertising, no tracking and nothing sold to anybody. Photos you scan are read on your device and never uploaded at all.
Who is responsible
OnceEver is made and run by an individual developer based in the European Economic Area, who is the data controller for everything described here. For any question about your data, or to exercise any of the rights below, write to support@onceever.app.
What is collected
- Your email address. Either the one you signed up with, or — if you used Sign in with Apple and chose to hide your address — the relay address Apple gives the app instead. If you hid it, your real address is never seen here.
- An account identifier, which is what every row below hangs off.
- Your password, if you set one. It is stored as a hash by the authentication service described below and is never visible to the developer.
- Your settings: the language you are learning, your own language, the language you want explanations in, the interface language, your time zone, and whether you prefer light or dark.
- Your material. The phrases you save and everything the app builds around them — meanings, example situations, model answers, the parts you chose to review, your own attempts, the questions you ask and the answers you get, your decks and tags.
- Your practice history: which points you rated, how you rated them, and when each is next due. This is what the scheduler runs on.
- A notification token for each device, and only if you turn reminders on. It identifies the device to Apple’s push service so a reminder can be delivered; turning reminders off removes it.
- A Sign in with Apple handle, if you signed in that way. It is kept for one purpose — so that deleting your account can also end the app’s authorisation with Apple — and for nothing else.
- Operating records. Each time the app asks a language model for something, the size and cost of that request is written to a ledger so that the running costs can be watched. It is described further down, because deletion treats it differently.
On the website only, two Vercel measurement scripts run: Analytics and Speed Insights. They record page views and loading performance in aggregate. No phrase, answer or any other text you write is ever put into either. Neither runs in the iPhone or iPad app.
What is not collected
- Photos never leave your device. When you read a phrase off a menu or a poster, the picture is scanned by Apple’s text recognition on the device itself. Only the phrases you then pick are saved, as text.
- Recordings never reach OnceEver’s servers from the app. Dictation and harvest recordings are handed to Apple’s speech recognition, which the app asks to run on the device whenever the language’s model is installed there. Where it is not, iOS transcribes the audio through Apple’s own speech service instead — so in that case the recording does leave your device, to Apple, under their privacy policy and never to anyone here. Either way the app receives only the text, and the recording is deleted straight after. On the website there is no such framework in the browser, so audio recorded there is sent to OpenAI to be transcribed and is not stored afterwards.
- No advertising identifier, no advertising, no tracking. The app contains no ad network, no attribution service and no analytics SDK. Nothing about you is combined with data from other companies’ apps or websites, which is what tracking means — so the app never has cause to show you the tracking permission prompt.
- No location, no contacts, no health data, no payment details. The app is free and asks for none of them.
- Nothing is sold or shared for anyone else’s marketing.
Who else handles it
Running the app means using a small number of other companies. Each acts as a processor: they handle the data to provide their service and for nothing of their own, under their data processing terms, which include the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses where data reaches outside the EEA.
- Supabase — accounts, sign-in and the database. Hosted in Ireland (AWS eu-west-1).
- Vercel — the website and the app’s server. Hosted in Ireland (Dublin).
- Anthropic — the language model that works out meanings, writes example situations and marks your attempts. The phrase and the context you give it are sent; your email address and account identifier are not. United States.
- OpenAI — reading phrases aloud, and transcribing dictation on the website. Only the text to be spoken, or the audio to be transcribed, is sent. United States.
- Apple — delivering reminders to your device, and Sign in with Apple if you use it.
Anthropic and OpenAI are used through their commercial APIs, whose terms state that content sent this way is not used to train their models.
How long it is kept
Your account and everything under it are kept until you delete them. There is no other expiry: a phrase you saved two years ago is still yours to review.
Two things are kept differently, and both are worth stating plainly. The operating ledger described above outlives a deleted account, because it is the record of what running the service cost — but on deletion the account identifier and the text of the requests are erased from it, leaving sizes, costs and timestamps that belong to nobody. And spoken audio is cached by phrase, so that the same sentence is not paid for twice: that cache is keyed by the words and the voice, carries no account identifier, and cannot be traced back to who asked for it.
Deleting your account
In the app, open Settings and choose Delete my account. On the website, the same control is on the settings page. It is immediate and it cannot be undone.
It removes your sign-in, your profile, every card and point and rating, your decks and tags, your conversations and questions, and your device tokens. If you signed in with Apple, the app’s authorisation is revoked with Apple at the same time, so it disappears from the list in iOS Settings rather than lingering there. What remains afterwards is a single line recording that an account was deleted, with the date and how many items went — no email address, no content, nothing that names you.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you may ask for a copy of your data, have it corrected, have it erased, take it elsewhere in a portable form, restrict or object to how it is used, and withdraw consent where consent is what allowed it. Deletion is built into the app so you never have to ask for it; for anything else, write to support@onceever.app and you will have an answer within 30 days.
If you think your data has been mishandled, you may complain to the data protection authority of the EEA country you live or work in.
Children
OnceEver is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 16. No age is asked for, and nothing about the app is designed to appeal to children. If you believe a child has created an account, write to support@onceever.app and it will be deleted.
Security
Everything travels over HTTPS. Sign-in is handled by Supabase Auth rather than by hand, so passwords are hashed and never stored or seen in the clear. Every request the app makes carries your own session and is answered only with your own rows. No system is perfect, and none of this is a guarantee — but there is no analytics pipeline, no data warehouse and no third party holding a copy for their own purposes, which is the part that matters most.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and a change that affects what is collected or who handles it will be told to you in the app before it takes effect.
Contact
support@onceever.app — questions, requests, or anything that looks wrong on this page. The support page answers the things that come up most.