What we collect. And what we never will.

What we collect

Your email address — to send your grade report and identify your account.

The text of essays you submit to be graded.

Payment information processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card details — Stripe handles all of it.

What we don't collect

Real names. School affiliations. GPAs. Test scores. Social media accounts. Demographic information. Anything beyond what the grader needs, other than the anonymous visit counts described under Cookies.

What we do with your essays

We send them to AI models to be scored against our rubric. Anthropic's Claude grades every essay and produces your score. On paid gradings, OpenAI's GPT reads the same essay as a second-opinion cross-check — it can never change your score, only flag where the two graders disagreed.

We do not have a zero-retention agreement with either provider. Your essay is processed under each one's standard commercial terms, which means it may be retained by them for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring before deletion. That is separate from our own 30-day storage below.

We store them in our database for 30 days so you can review past grades. After 30 days they're permanently deleted.

We do not use your essays to train any model. We do not share them with admissions offices, schools, or any third party.

The essay assistant

On the Unlimited plan you can ask an assistant about your feedback. Your messages and the essay they refer to are sent to Anthropic, which provides the model that answers you. Anthropic processes them under its standard Commercial Terms of Service. We do not have a zero-retention agreement with Anthropic, which means your assistant messages may be retained by them for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring before deletion.

If you would rather no third party see your essay text beyond grading, don't use the assistant. Grading works without it.

What we never do

Sell your data. Share your data with advertisers. Share aggregated or "anonymized" data with researchers, marketers, or anyone else. Build a profile about you for targeting.

These are not optional commitments. They are how EssayLab is built.

Cookies

Functional cookies only: to keep you signed in, to remember whether you chose light or dark mode, and to remember whether you collapsed the essay assistant panel. Your light or dark choice is also saved in your browser's local storage. We count site visits with Vercel Web Analytics: which page you viewed, the site that sent you, your approximate location, and your browser and device type. It uses no cookies and isn't linked to your account. We keep the visit records for at least 12 months to read the reports. No analytics cookies. No advertising trackers.

Third parties

Anthropic (essay grading — see "The essay assistant" above for assistant chat). OpenAI (second-opinion cross-check on essay gradings). Stripe (payments). Supabase (database). Cloudflare (email routing and DDoS protection). Vercel (hosting and anonymous visit counts).

Each has its own privacy policy and signed terms with us that restrict what they can do with your data.

Your rights

You can delete your account and all your essays and scores from Settings. If you'd rather we do it, email support@tryessaylab.com.

You can request a copy of everything we have on you.

You can stop using EssayLab and we forget you within 30 days.

Updates

If we change this policy materially, we'll email every user before the change takes effect.

Contact

support@tryessaylab.com