What we keep, and what we never see.

Ahead on Paper is a résumé studio operated as an independent business, and is the controller of the data described here. For anything in this notice — questions, requests, complaints — write to support@aheadonpaper.com. A person reads that address.

An account exists so the studio can recognise you and remember what you bought. That is all it holds:

• Your email address.
• A hash of your password (PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256, 600,000 iterations). We cannot read your password, and neither can anyone who steals the database.
• The licence key you activated, if you bought Pro — so Pro follows you to a new browser.
• A SHA-256 hash of each active session token, and of any outstanding password-reset token. The tokens themselves are never stored, so a database leak hands out no usable sessions or reset links.

Not as a policy we could quietly change — the database has nowhere to put it. There is no table, no column, no blob field for any of this:

• Your résumé content.
• Your career profile, cover letters, or job descriptions.
• Your AI provider API key.

Résumés live in your browser’s own storage, and in a local folder if you point the studio at one. Clearing your browser data deletes them; we could not restore them if you asked, because we never had them.

This is the part most privacy pages leave out, so here it is plainly. When you run an AI feature — job match, rewrite, deep evaluation, cover letter, grammar — the text you are asking about is sent from your browser to our server, and on to the AI provider you chose. It has to be: a model cannot read a document it was never given.

What travels, for that one request:

• The résumé text, job description, or career profile relevant to what you asked for.
• Your API key for the provider, used to authenticate that single call.

We do not store any of it, and we do not log it. Once the response comes back, our server is holding nothing. But it did pass through, and the provider you picked — one of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, Mistral, Qwen or Kimi — receives it under theirterms, not ours. Their retention policy is the one that governs what happens next. If that is not acceptable for a particular document, don’t run an AI feature on it; every other part of the studio works without one.

• Vercel — hosting. Serves the site and keeps short-lived request logs (IP address, URL, timing) for operations.
• Vercel Web Analytics — aggregate page view counts. It sets no cookies and does not follow you between sites.
• Neon — the Postgres database holding the account fields listed above, hosted in AWS US East.
• Resend — sends password-reset email. It records the recipient address and delivery outcome so we can tell whether a reset actually arrived.
• Gumroad — takes payment as merchant of record and issues licence keys. Card details go to Gumroad, never to us; we never see or hold them.
• Your chosen AI provider — as described above.

Data is processed in the United States. We do not sell data, and there are no advertising trackers on this site.

One: aop_session, set when you sign in. It is httpOnly, expires after thirty days, and exists only to keep you signed in. Signing out deletes the session on our side, so the cookie stops meaning anything even if a copy of it survives. There are no advertising or cross-site cookies.

• Sessions: thirty days, or until you sign out.
• Password-reset tokens: one hour, and they are single-use.
• Account record: until you delete it.

You can see everything we hold about you on the settings page — it is the short list in What we store, and there is nothing behind it.

Deletion is self-serve and immediate. Settings → Danger zone → Delete account removes your account row, and every session and reset token with it, in one transaction. There is no soft-delete and no recovery window; when it is gone it is gone. Your résumés are untouched, because they were never ours — they stay in your browser.

Depending on where you live you may also have rights to access, correct, or export your data, and to complain to a data protection authority. Write to support@aheadonpaper.com and we will handle it.

The studio is not intended for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly create accounts for them.

If this notice changes in a way that affects what we store or who receives it, the date at the top changes and account holders get an email. Wording fixes will not.