Our privacy promise
Hintwell is run by Alexandria Thorsgard, as an individual. Effective November 14, 2026. Questions about your data go to hello@hintwell.app — that inbox, not only the Help form. Post: 2724 Bald Eagle Ave, Salem, OR 97304, USA.
What we store about you
The minimum we need to sign you in, remind you, and suggest ideas: your email address, the name you go by, your time zone, and the settings you pick (including whether reminder emails are on, and whether “What I like” is shared). If you turn on phone reminders, we keep the push address your browser gives that device. It isn’t your phone number.
For each person you add: a first name, how you know them, pronouns if you set them, taste tags, notes, what to avoid, a budget band, occasion dates, the hints you write, and the ideas you were shown, saved, skipped, or marked as given. We never store a recipient’s email, phone number, or street address, and we never import from other services.
People who don’t have an account
A gift quiz doesn’t ask for an email, phone, or address. The answers are saved on the account of the person who sent the quiz. On a group link (/f/…), we also save a first name and a birthday, and the circle’s creator owns that record. The page says, before you start, who will see it. If you played a quiz and want your answers removed, ask whoever sent it, or email hello@hintwell.app.
Under 13? Don’t fill a quiz in yourself. Ask a parent or guardian.
Who can see what
Your people, hints, budgets, and the gift ideas Hintwell shows you stay on your account. Other members don’t read those rows.
A circle always shows members’ names (the name on the account) and the dates someone chose to share: a first name, the occasion, and the day. That’s all a shared date is.
“What I like” — interests, things to skip, sizes, an about-me note, and a wishlist — is shared with a circle only while Share this with my family circles is on. For new accounts that switch starts off. While it’s on, people in a circle with you can see those fields. The same share also includes the names of up to eight gifts you marked “loved” and eight you marked “not for me”, which Hintwell uses when someone in the circle asks for ideas for you. Turn the switch off and that profile stops being shared. Your own gift ideas for other people are not part of it.
A private quiz you send from a person’s page goes only to you. A quiz someone played from the group link is visible to the circle, as that page says up front. In a gift exchange, the one person who drew a name sees that person’s first name and that quiz summary. Nobody, including the organizer, can read the full list of who drew whom.
If the circle’s owner turns the leaderboard on, members see each other’s names and points for the month. Points are for planning (a person, a date, a saved idea, a quiz). Nothing is earned for buying.
A wishlist link, if you turn it on, shows your first name, wishlist, sizes, and about-me note to anyone with the link. It’s off until you turn it on.
Gift ideas and AI
Ideas are suggestions. Many are written by an AI model (Anthropic). A card that came from the model says “Suggested with AI”. The catalog fills in when the model isn’t available. Don’t put health, medical, or other sensitive details in a hint, a note, an about-me, or a quiz answer. Those words can be sent to the model, and, if you share What I like, to your circle.
For ideas about one person, the model is given:
- their first name, pronouns if set, relationship, the occasion, and the budget band
- quiz picks, when there is a quiz: categories, duels, colors, brands, sizes, wishes, and anything they said no to
- hints you wrote, with the date, plus interests and your notes
- if they share a Hintwell profile: wishlist names, about-me, sizes, and names of gifts they marked loved or not for them
- vibes and the “please skip” list
- names of ideas already shown, saved, skipped, gifted, or rated, including recent ones for your other people (gift names, not those people)
Explore, when you’re shopping for someone, sends their first name, relationship, vibes and interests, the skip list, and quiz items they said no to, plus the topic you picked and names already on screen. A search you type is not stored. Pinning a product to its Amazon page sends the product name and the search words, not who it’s for.
Who else handles data
- Supabase stores the database and the accounts, and sends the sign-in code email.
- Vercel hosts Hintwell. On the website it also counts page visits, without cookies. A count is the kind of page, never a name, an account, a private link, or a search you typed. Those counts stay off inside the iPhone app until the App Store privacy answers say they’re on.
- Resend sends reminder emails and the messages from the Help form.
- Anthropic writes gift ideas and looks up product pages, from the fields above.
- Amazon is where Buy links go. We don’t send Amazon your profile. A tagged link lets Amazon see the visit came from Hintwell, which its Associates rules require. We may earn a commission. It never changes your price, and Amazon doesn’t tell us what you bought.
- Google, only if you tap Continue with Google, signs you in. We host our own fonts. The iPhone app doesn’t offer Google sign-in.
- Phone reminders go out through Apple, Google, or Mozilla’s push service. They get the reminder text and that device’s push address, not a phone number.
We don’t sell personal information, and we don’t share it for advertising.
How long we keep it
Account data stays until you delete the account (Me → Delete my account). That removes the account and what it owns. A circle you started is handed to another member so their calendar keeps working. Quiz answers live on the sender’s account (or the circle creator’s, for a group link) and go when that account, or that person, is deleted.
A push address is deleted when you turn phone reminders off on that device, or when the account is deleted. Buy taps are a screen name and a kind of link, with no account attached. Explore topic pages are kept about a day. A found Amazon page is remembered about 45 days (about 7 when nothing matched). We also keep a short note of each reminder run — whether it worked, and a shortened address if a send failed — with no message body, so a broken morning can still be seen after the host’s logs expire.
Your choices and rights
You can see and fix your information in the app. Me → Download my data gives you a JSON file of your own rows. Me → Delete my account deletes it. Email hello@hintwell.app to ask for access, a correction, a copy, or deletion if the app can’t do it, including quiz answers that sit on someone else’s account.
If you live in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland: we process the account because you asked us to run Hintwell (contract), we keep the service secure and count anonymous visits because that lets us run it (legitimate interests), and phone reminders, sharing What I like, and Google sign-in happen because you turned them on (consent). You can withdraw that consent in the app. Some of the companies above process data in the United States. You can object to or restrict some processing, and you can complain to your data protection authority.
If you live in a US state with a privacy law: you can ask to know, correct, delete, and get a copy of personal information. We don’t sell it, and we don’t share it for cross-context advertising. If we refuse a request, email hello@hintwell.app and we’ll treat that as an appeal.
Children
Hintwell is for people 13 and older. We don’t knowingly collect personal information from a child under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, or filled in a quiz, email hello@hintwell.app and we’ll delete it.
Contact
Privacy requests: hello@hintwell.app. Post: 2724 Bald Eagle Ave, Salem, OR 97304, USA. You can also write through the Help & contact page. The email is the one to use when you want a person to read a privacy request. These terms sit next door, on the Terms page.