What we collect, who sees it, what we'll never do.
Vela handles family-coordination data — events, tasks, shopping items, who's picking up whom, the occasional school flyer you forwarded. That's intimate stuff. This page is the document that says, in plain English, what we do with it. If the in-app settings say one thing and this page says another, the in-app settings are wrong and we need to know.
01What we collect.
The data your family puts in: events, tasks, shopping items, photos, voice notes, and the emails you forward to your family inbox. Plus the metadata around them — when you sent something, from which platform, and which family member it belonged to.
To run your account: your name and email, and — if you add them — a phone number and a photo; the Apple or Google sign-in you use; your Telegram username if you link Telegram; your family members' names, and their birthdays and photos when you add them (children included); your subscription; a count of the actions you've used this month; and the tokens that let Vela send you notifications and reach a calendar you've connected.
One more, only on the waitlist or the Android list: if the link you arrived on carried campaign labels (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign), or you came from one of our comparison pages, those three short labels are stored next to your email — so we can tell which page brought you. Nothing else from the link is kept: no referrer, no ids, no fingerprint.
The data we have on your family is what you and your family put in, plus what it takes to run your account. There is no shadow profile, no “interest graph,” nothing assembled from third parties.
02Who sees it.
People inside your family see the family's data. Vela (the AI) sees it so she can answer the family. The vendors we work with (next section) see only the slice they need.
We do not sell, share, rent, or license your data to anyone else. We do not use it to train AI models, and neither do the AI providers we send it to — their API terms say so.
Inside Vela, access to your family's data is strictly limited to what's necessary to provide the service — in practice, support looks at a specific issue only when you ask us to, and nothing beyond it.
03The processors we work with.
Vela is built on a small set of third-party services. The full register — who they are, what each one does for Vela, and what data it touches — is rendered plainly in How it works, chapter 06. That includes the two AI providers that read what your family sends — Anthropic and OpenAI — and the services that store it, queue it, deliver it and watch for crashes.
We don't sell your family's data and we never train models on it — and our AI providers' API terms state the same on their side. This is the list today: when it changes, we update this page and email everyone with a Vela account, and everyone on our lists, before the change ships.
04How long we keep it.
We keep your family's data for as long as you use Vela. Delete your account and it's erased 30 days later — you can undo it until then. Your family's shared calendar, lists and inbox stay for the other adults in it; when the last adult deletes their account, those go too, on the same 30 days. Logs and crash reports age out on our hosting and monitoring providers' own schedules. Some anonymized usage statistics may be kept for product improvement.
05Exporting and deleting.
You can export a copy of your family's data from the app — Settings → What I know about you → Send me a copy of everything — once a day. Vela builds a zip of your events, tasks, shopping and conversation history and emails a download link, good for seven days, to the email on your account. Photos aren't in it yet.
Deleting your account is on the same screen: Delete my Vela account.
Leaving a family is separate: the Leave button on the same screen steps you out without removing anything for everyone else.
06Kids.
Kids are tracked without accounts — a parent or guardian adds them to the family and removes them when needed. No account, no email, no login. Vela never collects PII directly from a child. What Vela holds about a child is what an adult added: a name, and a birthday or photo if you choose to.
07Where you live.
Vela is a small, early-stage product, and we're keeping this simple while we grow. Wherever you live, if you want to see, export, or delete your family's data, email support@vela.family and we'll take care of it. As our data practices formalize, this page gets more specific — and everyone on our lists hears first.
08Connected accounts (Google Calendar).
If you connect your Google Calendar, Vela asks Google for access to your calendar events, the list of your calendars (so you can pick which to bring in), and the email address of the account you connect — nothing else in your Google account. Every way of connecting — the app, the web, the chat bot — requests read-write access to events (the calendar.events scope), because the calendars you pick stay in step both ways: your Google events appear in the family view, and an event added, moved, or cancelled in Vela follows back into Google. Vela only ever reads or writes the calendars you pick — the rest of your account is untouched.
To answer your family's questions, Vela's AI reads the events you've brought in: they go to Anthropic and OpenAI, under API terms that forbid training on them, and OpenAI also turns event titles into the search index that lets Vela find them.
We store only what that needs: the secure connection token and the events you bring into Vela. Disconnect any time and we revoke the token; delete your account and the calendar data goes with everything else, on the same 30-day timeline above.
Vela's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We never sell this data, use it for advertising, or use it to train AI models. We transfer it only to provide Vela's features to you — to the AI providers named above, which read it to answer your family's questions and are bound not to train on it.
09When this page changes.
This policy covers vela.family, the Vela app, the Telegram bot and your family inbox at @mailvela.com. Material changes — a new vendor, a new data category, a new retention rule — get an email to everyone with a Vela account, and everyone on our lists, before the change ships, with the diff. Cosmetic changes (typos, wording) get a note in the changelog at /changelog.
If you have a Vela account or you're on one of our lists, you'll be told.