Privacy policy

What we collect

We collect a child's first name, birth date, birth time, and birthplace. For gift pre-orders we also hold a due month until the recipient fills in the birth details. That is everything the reading needs. The only other things we keep are the email address you give us and, if you answer the optional question after you pay, how you found us.

To send the keepsake, we also hold the email address you give us. Payment runs through Stripe, so we never see or store your card number.

Orders placed through Etsy

You can also buy a Starhour report through our Etsy shop. If you order there, you enter the birth details into Etsy's personalization field rather than into this website. Etsy collects and stores that information under its own privacy policy and as an independent controller of it, which means we can't delete Etsy's copy for you. To have it removed from Etsy, contact Etsy directly.

We copy those details into our own systems only to make your report. Once we do, we hold and delete them on the same schedule as any order placed on this site: twelve months after the report is delivered, the birth details are deleted and we keep only the order record we need for tax and accounting.

We ask for a first name only. We don't ask for a child's surname, and we'd rather you didn't give one.

How we use it

We use the birth details to plot the sky for that exact moment and set it in your report. We use your email to deliver it and to reach you if something goes wrong.

We don't sell anything to anyone, we don't run ads, and we don't build a profile of you or your child. There's no feed and no account.

Who else sees it

Only the services that make delivery work: Stripe processes payment, Supabase stores the order data on our behalf, and Resend delivers your email (it receives your email address and the messages we send).

To write the reading, we send Anthropic's API the child's first name, birth date, birth time, and birthplace, along with what we compute from them: the birthplace coordinates, timezone, and elevation, and the positions of the sun, moon, and planets at the moment of birth. Anthropic's commercial API terms do not use submitted data to train their models.

To suggest places as you type the birthplace, the text you type in that field goes to Photon (photon.komoot.io), a geocoding service built on OpenStreetMap. If we still need coordinates after checkout, we send the place name once to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim geocoder (nominatim.openstreetmap.org). In both cases only the place text travels there, nothing else.

To plot the sky precisely, we look up the birthplace's elevation by sending its coordinates to the USGS Elevation Point Query Service (epqs.nationalmap.gov) and, if that has no answer, to Open-Elevation (api.open-elevation.com). Only the two map numbers travel there, nothing else.

To stop the site being flooded with automated requests, Upstash counts recent requests by network address for a minute at a time and then forgets them. That is the one place your network address goes, and it is never joined to your order.

No advertisers, no data brokers, no third-party trackers on the report itself.

Cookies

We use one, and only if you arrive through a link a creator shared, like thestarhour.com/hello/sarah. It stores that creator's name and nothing else, so we know who to thank when you buy. It lasts sixty days. It holds no personal detail about you, it cannot be read by other sites, and we run no advertising or analytics cookies of any kind.

After you pay, we also ask an optional question about how you found us. You can skip it. If you type a name there, we keep it only to credit the person who sent you, and we delete it on the same schedule as the rest of your order.

How long we keep it

For delivered orders, we keep the birth details and the finished report for twelve months so your download link keeps working. After twelve months we delete both, the file included. Save the downloaded PDF to keep it beyond that.

If your order was refunded or failed, we delete the details after ninety days.

If you bought a gift pre-order and the recipient never used the link, we delete the details twelve months after purchase.

If you started checkout but never completed it, we delete those details within a couple of hours.

You can ask us to delete what we hold at any time and we will, sooner than any of those windows.

Your choices

To see, correct, or delete what we hold about a child, email hello@thestarhour.com. We'll confirm and take care of it, usually within a few days.