We run on subscriptions, not advertising. That means we never need to know who you are to make money — we only need to know whether Steel Magnolias is working as a community. This page is the plain-language inventory of everything we measure, everything we deliberately refuse to measure, and what will change as the product grows. It exists because our members deserve to check our claims, not just trust them. (The Privacy Policy is the legal version; this page is the readable one.)
01What we measure today
- Website analytics. Page views, clicks, and performance on steelmagnolias.app — tied to a random identifier, with your IP address anonymized before it reaches our analytics. Standard, boring, and it never follows you into the app.
- One anonymous count at the age gate. When someone does not pass the 18+ check, the app sends a single anonymous event so we can count blocked attempts. It carries a one-time random identifier tied to no account, name, or profile.
- Subscription lifecycle events (server-side). When Apple or Google tells our servers that a subscription changed — a trial started, became a paid membership, renewed, was cancelled, or was refunded — we record that step under a dedicated random analytics identifier. The event says which store, which plan, and which lifecycle step. Nothing else. This is how we know, in aggregate, whether trials convert and whether members stay.
- Weekly community aggregates. We count, weekly and in aggregate, how many members contributed to the community — a count of contributing members, never a feed of who said what to whom. Private surfaces are excluded entirely (see below).
02The identifier, explained
The analytics identifier is a random ID minted for analytics and nothing else. It is never your name, email, account ID, or handle. It is never shown to you or to anyone else, never used to sign you in, and never used to connect you to other members. When you delete your account, we delete the analytics records held under it and sever the identifier itself — in both deletion modes.
03What we never measure
- Receipts emits nothing. Your private documentation is yours. No analytics event ever fires from Receipts — not a count, not a timestamp, nothing per-member. The same is true of direct messages, the app lock, and every crisis flow.
- No session replay, ever. We do not record your screen, your taps, or your scrolling. This is permanent, not a launch posture.
- No advertising identifiers, no third-party trackers, no cross-app tracking. Anywhere.
- Your stage is never in analytics. Where you are in your process (Unraveling, Rebuilding, Blooming) is yours to name in the app — it is permanently excluded from every analytics system we run.
- No location tracking. The only location signal anywhere is the country/region level on website analytics, derived from an anonymized IP address.
04What changes next
The app itself currently runs zero usage analytics — it does not track how you use it. In an upcoming release we plan to add a strictly scoped set of in-app events (things like "signup completed" and "paywall viewed") under the same rules: the dedicated random identifier, explicit events only, and the sensitive surfaces above still emitting nothing. When that ships, this page and the Privacy Policy will be updated first.
Questions? hello@steelmagnolias.app — a real person answers.