Tern is made and run by Jay Graves, an individual in Texas, United States — not a company with a department for this. That is why this page is short enough to read.

The short version: Tern works without an account, and until you make one nothing you write leaves your device. When you do sign in, we hold your notes so they can reach your other devices — nothing more. We do not sell anything about you, we do not show advertising, and there is no third-party analytics or tracking in the app or on this site.

Using it without an account

If you never sign in, your notebooks, pages, ink, photos and PDFs are stored on your device and nowhere else. We never receive them. This site sets no cookies and loads no trackers; the only outside request it makes is for the typefaces it uses, from Google Fonts.

What we hold when you sign in

• Your email address, so you can sign in and so we can send you a sign-in link.
• Your password, if you set one — stored only as a one-way hash, never as the password itself.
• Your notes: notebooks, folders, pages, the ink on them, typed text, sticky notes, tags and saved views.
• Files you add: photos you place on a page, and PDFs you import.
• A search index built from your own notes, so search can find them. It contains your words, held under the same rules as the notes themselves.
• Your devices: the name each one calls itself, what kind of device it is, and when it was last seen — which is what makes the device list and handing a page over between devices work.
• Messages between your own devices: the small handover notes that let one device offer a page to another. They are short-lived and are deleted once delivered.
• Share links you create: the link, what it points at, when it expires, and — if you set one — a one-way hash of its passcode, never the passcode.

What we do not hold

• No advertising identifiers, no behavioural profile, no third-party analytics.
• No location data.
• No contacts, calendar or photo library beyond the individual images you choose to place on a page.
• No payment card details — purchases go through the App Store or Google Play, and we never see the card.

Who else is involved

Jay Graves uses a small number of companies to run the service. They act on our instructions and may not use your notes for anything of their own.

• Supabase — the database, the sign-in system and the file storage. Your notes and files live here.
• Vercel — serves this site and the web app. It sees the ordinary request logs any web server sees.
• Apple and Google — handle subscriptions and template pack purchases made on their platforms.
• Google Fonts — serves the typefaces this site uses. The app carries its own and asks Google for nothing.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with anyone else — except where the law requires it, in which case we will tell you unless we are forbidden from doing so.

Is it encrypted?

In transit, yes — everything travels over an encrypted connection. At rest on the server, the disks are encrypted, and the database rules mean no other account can read your rows.

It is not end-to-end encrypted, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise: in principle your notes could be read on the server. If that is not acceptable for what you are writing, use Tern without an account and it never leaves your device.

How long it is kept

• Notes stay until you delete them.
• Deleted notebooks and pages sit in Recently deleted for 30 days, then go for good.
• Handover messages between your devices are deleted once they have been delivered.
• Share links last until they expire or you revoke them.
• When you delete your account, everything above is deleted — the rows, the files, the devices, the links — and the login itself. It is immediate and there is no copy kept.

What you can do

• See it — it is all in the app, and you can export any of it as PDF.
• Correct it — edit it in the app, or write to us.
• Delete it — from inside the app, yourself, at any time, without asking anyone.
• Take it elsewhere — export a page, a notebook or everything.

Depending on where you live you may have further rights over your information, including the right to complain to a data protection authority. Write to support@ternnotes.app and we will help.

Children

Tern is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app rather than quietly changing the date at the top of this page.

Getting in touch

support@ternnotes.app — or the support page.