Privacy Policy

Effective date: May 4, 2026 Last reviewed: November 1, 2026

Yearfold is operated by Hyper Mind Technologies, LLC ("we", "us", "our"), which is the data controller for the personal information processed through yearfold.com (the "Service"). This Privacy Policy describes what we collect, what we do with it, and what we don't do. We aim to collect as little as possible and to be specific about what we do collect.

What we collect

Information you provide

• Calculator inputs. Age, savings balance, monthly contribution, and similar retirement-planning fields. By default these stay in your browser and are never sent to our servers.
• Account information. If you create an account, we store your email address and the magic-link sign-in tokens needed to authenticate you.
• Saved plans. When you click "Save plan," your inputs and a summary of the simulation results are stored against your account.
• Email subscriptions. Your email address and the source of the signup (e.g., footer form, calculator save).
• PDF orders. Your email address, plan inputs, and result summary needed to render and deliver the PDF.
• Retirement milestone reminders. If you ask us to email you before your retirement milestones, we store your email address, your birth month and year (never your full date of birth), your spouse's birth month and year if you add them, and two optional checkboxes (whether you have a health savings account and whether you plan to work past 65). We use these only to work out when each reminder is due and to send it. We also record when you agreed, the exact wording you agreed to, your country (to show the right consent default), where on the site you signed up, and which reminder emails we sent. We never use open-tracking pixels; links back to our site carry campaign tags so we can count visits from reminder emails.
• Pro milestones. If you use the Pro “Milestones & checklist” page, we store your birth month and year (and your spouse’s, if you add them) on your account so we can date your milestones and work out what each one is worth in your saved plan. You can change them on that page at any time; they’re deleted with your account.

Information collected automatically

• Anonymous calculator telemetry. When you run the calculator, we record the plan's success probability, household type ("single" / "couple"), your age and retirement age in 5-year bands, and the simulation time. To count each person once per day in the “How you compare” benchmark we also store the same one-way daily code described under free-tools usage (your IP address and user-agent are never stored, and the code can't be linked across days). This is not linked to your account.
• Server logs. Standard request logs (IP address, user agent, timestamps) for security and operational purposes. Logs are retained for up to 30 days.
• Vercel Web Analytics. Aggregate page views, referrer, country (derived from IP, IP itself not stored), and device class. No cookies are set; no cross-site tracking; no personally identifiable data. Vercel, Inc. is the data processor. Retained for 30 days on Vercel's Hobby tier, 90 days on Pro.
• Vercel Speed Insights. Real-user Core Web Vitals measurements (LCP, INP, CLS, etc.) on a sampled basis. Anonymous; no cookies; no PII. Same data processor and retention as Web Analytics.
• Free tools usage (first-party, cookieless). When you use one of our free tools, we record which tool you opened, whether you ran it, broad bands of what you entered and what it showed (for example an age band such as 60–64 or an income band such as $100k–$150k — never your exact numbers), which menu or page link brought you there, the referring website's domain, campaign tags in the link (utm_source and similar), your country, and your device type (mobile, tablet or desktop). To count visitors per day without cookies, we combine that day's random value with your IP address and browser user-agent into a one-way code. Your IP address and user-agent are never stored, and each day's random value is deleted after that day, so the code can't be recomputed, linked across days, or traced back to you. Nothing is recorded if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, or if you decline analytics in our cookie banner. Signed-in Yearfold administrators are excluded. These events are stored in our own database (Supabase) and deleted after 400 days.
• Tool feedback and suggestions. If you answer “Was this helpful?” on a tool or suggest a new tool, we store your answer and any comment you write, without your name or account. We automatically remove anything in a comment that looks like an email address or phone number.

Information we don't collect

• We do not sell your data to third parties.
• We do not show ads or use third-party advertising trackers of any kind on the Service.
• We do not use cookies for analytics. (Vercel Web Analytics, Speed Insights and our own free-tools usage counts are all cookieless.)
• We do not track you across other sites.
• We do not sell your email address to anyone.

Cookies and similar technologies

Yearfold groups cookies and similar storage technologies into three categories. The first is always on; the other two are opt-in via the cookie banner that appears on your first visit. You can change your choices at any time at Cookie Settings, and you can read the full inventory of every cookie and similar identifier we use at the Cookie Policy.

• Necessary. Always on. These are needed for the site to function — the Supabase session cookie that keeps you signed in, the consent-state cookie itself, and the CSRF token on server actions. No analytics data flows through this category. We cannot operate the Service without these, so they are not opt-in under GDPR/UK GDPR.
• Analytics. Off until you accept. We use Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights, both of which are cookieless and do not set persistent identifiers. The analytics category therefore controls whether the analytics script loads at all, not whether a cookie is set. Our own free-tools usage counts (described above) are also cookieless and store no lasting identifier; they run unless you decline analytics here or your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
• Functional. Off until you accept. Controls third-party widgets that aren’t strictly necessary — currently the Buy Me a Coffee button on the About page. Declining this category prevents the BMC script from loading at all.

We do not use cross-site tracking pixels, fingerprinting scripts, or data-broker tags. Your consent choices are stored in a first-party cookie called yearfold-consent that contains only your opt-in state for the optional categories and a version number; declining analytics and third-party features stops any other third-party cookie from being set.

How we use your information

• To operate the Service (saving plans, sending magic links, generating PDFs).
• To send transactional email (sign-in links, plan summaries, PDF deliveries).
• To send our newsletter, only if you opt in via the footer form (double opt-in required — you'll receive a confirmation link before being added).
• To improve the Service via aggregate, non-personal telemetry.
• To prevent abuse and respond to security incidents.

Who we share with

We use the following third-party services as data processors:

About Buy Me a Coffee (optional-contribution widget)

Our About page includes an optional Buy Me a Coffee button so visitors who want to support Yearfold can contribute. The Buy Me a Coffee widget loads a small JavaScript file from cdnjs.buymeacoffee.com when the About page renders; this can record that you visited the page even if you don't click the button. If you choose to contribute, payment processing is handled entirely by Buy Me a Coffee and their payment partners (e.g., Stripe). Yearfold does not see your payment details. See Buy Me a Coffee's Privacy Policy for their data handling. Data is processed in the United Kingdom and the United States.

About Anthropic (LLM provider)

When you purchase the $9.99 PDF retirement plan, the narrative paragraphs in that document are written by Anthropic Claude (specifically the model claude-sonnet-4-6 via Anthropic's API). We send Anthropic only the structured numerical output of your simulation — the success probability, percentile balances, your age range (decade bucket), household type ("single" / "couple" / "couple_with_deps"), and asset allocation preset. Your name, email address, IP address, and any other personally identifiable information never cross this boundary. A boundary scrubber re-checks every outgoing prompt for email/IP/phone/SSN/credit-card patterns and rejects the request if any are present, as defense-in-depth.

Anthropic processes this data per Anthropic's commercial Privacy Policy and does not train models on it. Data is processed in the United States.

If a fabricated number ever appears in your PDF — a dollar amount or percentage that isn't traceable to your engine output — the rendering falls back to a deterministic template that uses only your engine's numbers. No paid PDF ever contains an LLM hallucination by design.

We do not share your information with anyone else except when required by law or to protect rights and safety.

Data retention

• Saved plans: kept until you delete them or close your account.
• Email subscribers: kept until you unsubscribe or request deletion.
• PDF orders: kept for 30 days after purchase, then archived for 7 years for tax-record purposes.
• Anonymous telemetry: kept indefinitely in aggregated form.
• Free-tools usage events: deleted after 400 days. The daily random value used to count visitors is deleted after its day ends.
• Tool feedback and suggestions: kept while useful for improving the tools; you can ask us to delete a comment at any time.
• Milestone reminders: a sign-up that isn't confirmed within 7 days is deleted. When you unsubscribe — with the link in any reminder (stop reminders only, or stop all Yearfold email) or from Settings — reminders stop at once, and 30 days later we erase your email address and birth data, keeping only an anonymous record that a subscription existed. To delete it immediately, email hello@yearfold.com.
• Server logs: kept for 30 days.

Your rights

Regardless of where you live, you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you.
• Delete your account and associated data.
• Correct inaccurate information.
• Opt out of marketing email at any time.

If you live in the EU, UK, California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, or similar jurisdiction with formal data-protection law, you may also have rights to data portability, to object to processing, and to lodge a complaint with your local data-protection authority.

To exercise any of these rights — including data-subject access, correction, deletion, or portability requests — write to hello@yearfold.com. We will respond within the timeframes required by your applicable law (45 days under California CCPA/CPRA; 30 days under GDPR/UK GDPR).

Children

The Service is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you believe we have, contact hello@yearfold.com and we will delete it promptly.

Security

We use industry-standard security measures: TLS in transit, encryption at rest for all database fields, hashed and salted authentication tokens, and least-privilege access controls. No system is perfectly secure; if we discover a security incident that affects your data, we will notify you within 72 hours.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. Material changes will be announced via email (if you have an account) and via a prominent notice on the Service at least 30 days before they take effect.

Change log. November 1, 2026 — Yearfold no longer shows ads: Google AdSense, the advertising cookie category and Google as an advertising processor were removed. This reduces what is collected, so it took effect immediately.

Contact

Hyper Mind Technologies, LLC, the data controller, can be reached at hello@yearfold.com for any privacy question or data-subject rights request.