Vela Privacy
Last updated July 2026
This is written to be read, not skimmed past. It describes exactly what Vela holds about you, why, and what we will never do with it. Where the product makes a promise (the sealed journal especially), this page repeats it in the same words, because a privacy policy that differs from the product is two lies, not one. We treat the Australian Privacy Principles as our floor.
What we hold
- Your name and email address: the name you chose to be called by, and your email, which is your sign-in. You sign in with a 4-digit PIN, stored only as a salted hash we can't reverse; the one-time email links are used only to activate a new account or reset a PIN, and, if you asked for them, to send journal reminders. If you joined the mailing list from the calculator, we also keep the birth details you cast (see below) so we can compose the monthly reading you asked for; unsubscribing erases those birth details.
- Your birth details, if you save a chart or ask for the monthly reading: date, time, and place, kept so your chart can be read against each day's sky. Casting a chart on the free calculator and then leaving stores nothing; the details are kept only if you press save, or if you submit them with the monthly-reading email form. Unsubscribing from the mailing list erases the birth details we kept for it.
- Your journal: as ciphertext only. Entries are encrypted (AES-256-GCM) with a key unique to you before they touch the database; a stolen copy of our data cannot be read. Entries are decrypted only inside one locked-down service, and only to show them to you or to export them with your passphrase. Every opening is permanently logged, and anything anomalous freezes the vault. Your journal never leaves Vela: it is never sent to any outside service or AI, never used to train any model, and never sold, shared, or mined.
- Your readings: the daily, monthly, tarot, and compatibility texts written for you are kept so your pages stay fast. A compatibility reading names the other person and mentions their astrological placements; their raw birth details are used for the calculation in the moment and never saved.
- Subscription state: which plan you're on, via Stripe. Card details live with Stripe, never with us.
- A security log: sign-in and security events, including the network address and browser they came from, kept for about six months and then deleted. We do not keep a trail of ordinary member browsing.
- Feedback you send us: if you use the "Feedback" box, we keep your message, any reply email you chose to give, your account email if you were signed in, and a keyed fingerprint of your network address (to spot spam). It is admin-only, used only to improve Vela, and you can ask us to delete it any time.
- Reminders (web push): only if you turn on browser reminders, we store the push "subscription" your browser gives us (a per-device identifier and its keys) so we can send the nudge. Turn it off in your browser and it stops.
Where your data travels
Your readings are written on Vela's own servers by our own engine, grounded in classical astrology and academic psychology, not a third-party AI. Your chart, your journal, and your name are never sent to any outside model or API. The few services we do rely on never see them:
- Stripe handles payment; card details live with Stripe, never with us.
- Resend delivers our transactional emails only (account activation, PIN reset, and reminders you asked for), never your readings or journal.
- Cloudflare serves the site, screens forms for bots (Turnstile), and provides cookieless analytics: page views and referrers, with no cross-site tracking and no personal profiles. Pages that carry a private link (a sign-in, reset, unsubscribe, or keepsake link) are excluded from analytics, so those links are never recorded.
- We keep a daily tally of our own. On our own server, in our own database, we count how many times a day things happen: charts cast, pricing viewed, trials started. That is the whole record. There is no identifier attached to it of any kind, so a number cannot be traced back to you, and we cannot tell whether ten charts were ten people or one person ten times. Nothing leaves our server, and no other company is involved.
- Google Cloud Text-to-Speech voices a reading aloud only if you press "listen" on it: that reading's text is sent to Google to generate the audio, and nothing else. It is never sent your chart, journal, or name, and if you never use the audio, nothing is sent.
- Browser push services (Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Mozilla, depending on your browser) deliver reminders only if you turn them on. The nudge is a generic line (for example the moon phase); your chart, journal, or name are never included.
Stripe, Resend, Cloudflare, Google, and the browser push services above are based in the United States, so the limited data each handles, as described above, may be processed overseas. Your chart and journal stay on our own servers; a reading's text leaves only to Google (only when you choose to hear it read aloud), and a generic reminder leaves only to your browser's push service (only if you turn reminders on).
We do not run advertising trackers, and we do not sell or rent any of the above to anyone.
What you can do about it
- Export your journal at any time with your passphrase; that path works even if our vault is frozen. It's your journal, not ours.
- Delete journal entries yourself, any time, from the journal page.
- Cancel from your account page without speaking to anyone; a button opens the billing portal where you confirm in a few clicks. No phone call, no retention script.
- Ask for anything else (access, correction, or deletion of your account and everything in it) by writing to [email protected]. We answer within 30 days.
No machine reads your words
Vela writes your readings on our own servers, from the real sky and your chart, using our own engine grounded in classical astrology and academic psychology. There is no third-party AI in the loop and nothing you write is ever sent to one. Your journal is yours alone: it is decrypted only to show it back to you or to hand you an export, and never read to generate anything.