Privacy

This page covers the Paywall iOS app and the joinpaywall.com website. It is written to be read, not to be scrolled past. The short version: the app collects nothing, and we mean nothing.

The app collects no data

No account. There is nothing to sign up for. We do not know who you are.
No analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising, no third-party software of any kind inside the app.
No network requests. The app never talks to our servers, because it has no code that could. The only network traffic it causes is Apple's own: the App Store for purchases and Apple's Screen Time services, both governed by Apple's privacy policy, not ours.
The App Store privacy label for Paywall says Data Not Collected. That is a factual statement, not a category we picked.

What stays on your phone

Everything the app knows lives in its own storage on your device and nowhere else:

Your blocked list. Apple hands the app opaque tokens for the apps and categories you pick. The app cannot read their names or icons; only iOS can. We never see what you block.
Your rules. Unlock price, free wait, weekly cap, and whether the wall is up.
Your receipts. A local count of what you paid and how long you waited, so the app can print your running totals. It is not sent anywhere.
The date you installed the app, so the free first week does not restart on every reinstall. It is stored in the iOS keychain, it contains no identifier, and it is the one item that survives deleting the app.

Deleting the app deletes all of the above except that one date, and also removes every block the app put in place.

Screen Time

Blocking works through Apple's Screen Time frameworks (Family Controls, Managed Settings and Device Activity). You grant the app permission once; you can withdraw it at any time in Settings → Screen Time, which takes every wall down. The "time you will not get back" figures shown in the app are drawn by an Apple-sandboxed report extension that iOS runs on the device. That extension cannot write anything, cannot use the network, and cannot pass usage data to the app, to us, or to anyone else. Apple designed it that way, and we rely on that design.

Money

Every purchase, whether a single unlock or the Pro subscription, is made through Apple's App Store with your Apple Account. Apple processes the payment, holds your payment details and sends you the receipt. We never receive your name, email address or card details from a purchase; Apple gives developers aggregate sales figures only. Refunds are requested from Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com; subscriptions are cancelled in your iPhone's Settings under your Apple Account, like any other subscription.

Notifications

The app shows notifications when a free wait is ready, when an unlock ends, and near the end of the free week. All of them are scheduled on the device by the app itself. There is no push server and no notification token is created or sent.

The website

joinpaywall.com uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views in aggregate without cookies, fingerprinting or personal identifiers.
If you joined the waitlist, we stored the email address you typed and the time you joined, and nothing else. Write to us and it is deleted.
If you email us, we keep the conversation for as long as it takes to answer and to remember what we promised you.

Children

Paywall is made for adults who want to manage their own phone. It is not a parental-control product and it is not directed at children. Since the app collects no data, it collects none from children either.

Changes

If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. We will not quietly start collecting data; if the app ever did, the App Store label would change and this page would say so first.

Contact

Paywall is built by one person. Privacy questions go to founder@joinpaywall.com and are answered by the person who wrote the code.