Privacy Policy

Who we are

AppHeard is the service at appheard.com. We measure whether ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name an iOS app when someone asks for an app like it. Contact: hello@appheard.com.

What the service does

We generate discovery questions from an App Store listing, ask those questions through the official APIs of OpenAI, Google and Perplexity with web search enabled, and store the answers, named apps, and cited pages. We report rates across samples, not one-off chats.

We do not scrape consumer chat apps. We do not post on Reddit, email listicle editors, or publish on your behalf. Next-move drafts stay in your account until you act on them.

Information we collect

We collect only what the product needs to run.

• Account: your email address, when the account was created, plan and plan tier, app-slot and prompt entitlements, alert and digest preferences, and last-seen time.
• Sign-in: a one-time magic link sent to your email. The link token is stored as a hash. Sessions last seven days in a cookie named appsaid_session.
• Tracked apps: App Store URLs you submit, listing metadata we resolve (name, icon, developer, rating), the questions we subscribe, and the scores derived from answers.
• Free check: the App Store URL you paste. You may optionally give an email to receive that report. We rate-limit checks by a hashed IP address.
• Billing: Polar is the merchant of record. You can pay from /pricing before an account exists; Polar collects the email at checkout, and we send a sign-in link to that address. We store Polar customer and subscription identifiers on your user row so we can match webhooks to the account. We do not store full card numbers.
• Engine data: prompt text, model replies, citations, and which apps were named or linked. Those records are measurements of public AI answers, not a profile of an end consumer.
• Operations: hashed IP addresses for auth and checker rate limits, coarse usage events for budget caps, and server logs on Cloudflare.

How we use it

• To create and keep your session, and to email sign-in links, reports, and the alerts or digests you enable.
• To run and store measurements for the categories you track, and to show the desk, sample, and checker reports.
• To enforce plan limits, recover failed payments, and pause tracking when a subscription ends.
• To stop abuse (rate limits) and to keep the service within its engine budget.
• To improve the product using aggregated, non-identifying counts — for example how many answers were read this week.

Who processes it for us

We use processors only to operate the service. They are not permitted to use your account data for their own marketing.

• Cloudflare — hosting, DNS, D1, KV, R2, and queues.
• Resend — transactional email (sign-in links, reports, alerts).
• Polar — checkout, subscriptions, invoices, and tax.
• OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity — the APIs we call to ask discovery questions. Prompts we send are category questions and listing-derived text, not your password or session cookie.
• Apple — App Store lookup for listing metadata when a store URL is submitted.

Cookies

appsaid_session keeps you signed in. It is set after you follow a magic link, is HTTP-only, and expires after seven days of inactivity or when you sign out.

The free check may set a short-lived cookie so a summary you unlocked stays unlocked in that browser. We do not use advertising cookies or third-party ad pixels.

Retention

Account and tracking data stay while the account is open. If you ask us to delete the account, we remove or de-identify personal fields (email, billing identifiers, session tokens) and stop sending mail.

Category measurements — prompts, answers, citations — are shared across everyone tracking that category. Deleting your account does not erase a public sample or another customer’s view of the same category.

Hashed rate-limit counters expire on their own (hours to a few days). Server logs rotate with the host.

Sharing

We do not sell personal information. We do not share your email with the AI vendors as a marketing lead. We share information only with the processors above, if required by law, or if the service is transferred and the buyer is bound to this policy or a successor notice.

Your choices

• Turn alerts and the weekly digest off in Settings.
• Remove a tracked app from the desk, subject to your plan’s replacement limit.
• Sign out to end the current session.
• Email hello@appheard.com to correct your address, export what we hold on the account, or delete the account. We will ask enough to confirm it is you.

Children

The service is for people who publish or market iOS apps. It is not directed at children under 16. If we learn we have an account for a child, we will delete it.

International transfers

The site runs on Cloudflare’s network. Processors may handle data in the United States and other countries where they operate. If you access the service from the EU or UK, you do so knowing that transfer is required to provide it. You may contact us to object, correct, or delete personal data we hold.

Changes

If we change this policy in a material way, we will update the date at the top and, for account holders, note it in the product or by email. Continued use after the update is acceptance of the revised policy.

Contact

Privacy questions: hello@appheard.com. Please write from the address on the account if you are asking us to change or delete it.