holystic

Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 11, 2026.

This page explains what holystic.ai collects, what we do with it, and the rights you have over your data. Where the language gets legal, we try to also say what it actually means in practice.

What we collect

When you visit our website

This section covers visiting holystic.ai: reading our pages, following a link or ad here, or tapping a button to get the app. You don't need an account and you don't need to use the app. If you do use the Holystic app, including signing in to it on the web at holystic.ai/app, the rest of this policy describes what the app collects, and none of it applies to simply visiting the website.

We don't collect personally identifying information when you visit our website. Your visit isn't linked to your name, email address or any account, and we don't keep your IP address with it. The website uses no cookies, no advertising trackers (such as Facebook or Google pixels) and no third-party analytics services.

What we do record:

  • Page counts: how many times each page was viewed each day, as totals, split by where visitors came from and by the type of device and browser (below).
  • Where visitors come from: the name of the website that sent you here, such as "google.com" or "facebook.com". We never keep the full address of the page you came from or anything you searched for. If the link you followed carried a campaign label (the "utm_" tags some links and ads include), we record that label.
  • Device and browser type: a summary of what your browser reports about itself: the kind of device and its system version (for example "iPhone, iOS 18"), the browser (for example Safari or Chrome), and whether you're using an app's built-in browser (for example Instagram's). We don't keep the full identification string your browser sends, which can include details like your exact phone model.
  • Taps on the App Store and Google Play buttons: which button, the type of device and browser, and the website your visit came from.
  • If you arrived from one of our ads: a randomly generated code, kept in your browser, so a later tap on a store button can be credited to the ad that brought you. It isn't linked to your name, email or app account. It's removed from your browser after 30 days, and you can delete it sooner by clearing this site's data in your browser.

We use your browser's own storage for this, not cookies. It holds the campaign label and random code above, and, only until you close the tab, the name of the website you came from. It's sent only to us.

How we use it: only to understand what brings people to our website, whether those visits go on to the App Store or Google Play from here, and to tell visits by people from automated traffic. For example, it tells us whether an ad, a search or someone's post helped people find us. We don't use it to identify you, build a profile of you, follow you around other websites or show you ads, and we don't sell or share it. We keep these records for up to 13 months.

Two other things that are separate from the above:

  • Server logs: like any website, our servers keep standard technical logs, including IP addresses, for a few minutes so we can fix problems. They aren't used for anything else.
  • The website no longer asks for any personal information. (A beta sign-up form that did was retired in October 2026.)

If you install the app after tapping a store button, Apple and Google report to us only the total number of installs per campaign, never who installed.

From you, when you sign up

  • Email address. Used to identify your account and verify it's you. Authentication is handled by Clerk; we never see your password because there isn't one — we use email-code sign-in.

From you, when you use the app

  • Profile choices: Christian tradition, the values you select, and a free-text description of the digital life you're living toward.
  • Goals: short descriptions of behaviors you're trying to practice or limit.
  • Reflections: the slider positions and the free-text journal entries you submit each day, along with the AI-generated response.
  • Feedback: if you submit feedback on a reflection response, we store what you wrote.

If you turn on activity reminders (optional)

holystic can send you a gentle reminder when you cross a limit you've set for yourself — for example, time spent in a particular app. This is off by default and only runs after you explicitly grant the permission. When it's on:

  • Your device observes the usage tied to your goals so it can tell when a limit is reached. On iPhone this is handled by Apple's Screen Time framework, which only ever tells the app that a threshold was crossed — the app itself cannot read your specific app or website usage. On Android the app reads usage locally to compute the same thing, and that raw usage stays on your device.
  • What reaches our servers is the event, not your usage: which goal was crossed and when (a goal identifier and a timestamp). We do not receive your screen-time totals, an app-by-app or site-by-site breakdown, or your browsing history.
  • The reminders themselves are generated and shown on your device as local notifications.

If you also install our optional browser extension, it reports only coarse, aggregated signals — how many minutes you spent in a category of sites on a given day — to inform the same goal-aligned reminders and reflections. It does not send us individual web addresses or your full browsing history. You can turn this off or remove the extension at any time.

If your church gives you Holystic

Some churches and other organizations pay for Holystic for their members. If yours does:

  • What your church gives us: your name and email address, and whether you help administer your church's list. We use them to invite you and to give you access when you sign in with that address.
  • What your church can see: its member list (names, email addresses, roles, and whether each person has joined) and nothing else. Your church never sees your goals, check-ins, reflections, reminders or activity, or anything you write in the app.
  • If your church removes you: your access through the church ends, and we'll email you. If your account was created through your church's invitation, you have 30 days to start a personal subscription; after that the account is deleted as described under "How long we keep it". If you had your own account before joining, it stays yours.
  • If your church's license ends: it works the same way as being removed: your access through the church ends, we'll email you, and the 30 days above apply. A license that lapses is given a week for renewal first.
  • How long your church's list is kept: entries for people a church removes, or who never join before the list ends, are deleted 30 days after removal.

If you signed up for our beta

Before the apps reached the stores, our website had a beta sign-up form. If you used it, we still hold the first and last name, email address and platform you gave us, so we can contact you about holystic. We don't sell or share it, and you can ask us to remove you at any time at support@holystic.ai.

Automatically, while the app is running

  • Standard server logs: timestamps, IP address, the HTTP request path, and the response status. These are kept for a short window for operational debugging.
  • Crash and error diagnostics (no personal content) — only the type of error and the part of the app that produced it.

We do not collect your location, your contacts, or any biometric data. We don't build an advertising profile of you or track you across unrelated apps and websites, and there are no advertising SDKs in the app. The only activity information we ever receive is the goal-threshold events described above — and only if you choose to turn activity reminders on.

How we use it

The data above is used to provide the service: to identify you when you sign in, generate reflections tailored to your tradition and goals, and let you see your history. We don't sell it, share it with advertisers, or use it to target you outside the app.

AI processing

Parts of holystic are drafted with the help of AI models from third-party providers we contract with: your reflections, the reminders built from your goals and the wording of their nudges, and your morning encouragement. To do this we send the provider the content that feature needs:

  • For a reflection: what you wrote, your slider positions, your tradition and goals, the passages it drew on, and, if you've turned monitoring on, a light summary of recent activity (such as "social media, 40m" or a goal threshold you crossed).
  • For reminders, nudges and morning encouragement: your goals and tradition.

We never send your name, email address or account identifier. We only use providers whose terms prohibit using any content we send them to train their models, and allow them to keep it only for a limited time (for example, to detect abuse) before deleting it.

If you intentionally submit the reflection form with no current-day answers, we may instead send a bounded selection of your recent reflection entries, related response feedback, and consented goal-linked activity signals so the service can produce a cumulative reflection. If there is not enough history, it does not infer a pattern.

If you turn on Include web voices, the AI may also write a short search query, based on the themes of your reflection, that is sent to a web search service limited to a list of trusted sites. The results are read once to inform the reflection and are not stored; only the source link is kept.

Services that help run holystic

  • Sign-in: Clerk.
  • Hosting and database: Fly.io, in the United States.
  • Email: an email delivery service sends account emails and, if you don't have notifications on, your reminders.
  • Notifications: Apple and Google deliver push notifications, which requires a device token for your phone and passing the notification text through their services.
  • Purchases: Apple or Google handle payment; we never see your card details. A subscription-management service tells us whether your subscription is active, using an anonymous account identifier.

Each of these receives only what it needs to do its job.

Where it's stored

Your data is stored in a managed Postgres database hosted by Fly.io in the United States.

Free-text fields you provide — journal entries, goal descriptions, and the "what you're living toward" statement — are encrypted at rest using envelope encryption: each user has a personal 256-bit data encryption key (DEK), and that DEK is itself wrapped by a global key (KEK) that lives only in our server's runtime environment, never in the database. The cipher is AES-256-GCM with a fresh random IV per stored value. A copy of the database alone is not enough to recover plaintext — an attacker would also need the KEK from our server's environment. Identifiers and timestamps are stored unencrypted so the application can function.

Rows that were written before envelope encryption was deployed (2026-05-25) remain in unencrypted form for now; new writes use the scheme above.

How long we keep it

As long as your account is active, your data is retained. When you delete your account from the Settings screen, your profile, goals, reflections, and responses are marked deleted immediately and permanently removed after a 30-day grace period during which deletion can be reversed by contacting support. Feedback rows you submitted may be retained anonymized (with all links to your account severed) for service-quality purposes.

Server logs are kept for 14 days, then deleted automatically.

Your rights

  • Export. Settings → Data → Export your data produces a JSON file containing your profile, goals, reflections, responses, and feedback. You can save it to your phone, email it to yourself, or move it to another service.
  • Edit. Profile, goals, and tradition can be edited at any time from Settings. Past reflections can be deleted individually.
  • Delete your account. Settings → Data → Delete account. This starts the 30-day deletion window described above.
  • Ask us a question. support@holystic.ai — we read these.

Children

holystic is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, please contact support and we will remove the account.

Changes to this policy

We'll update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page when anything changes. Material changes — like a new category of data we collect, or a new service we send data to — will be flagged in the app before they take effect.

Contact

Holystic.ai LLC
support@holystic.ai