A week of loose thoughts, brewed into a few sentences.
Last updated September 29, 2026
Steep keeps your pieces and sentences on your phone. There's no account. To write sentences, Steep sends the text of your pieces to an AI, and it asks your permission first. A few other things can leave your phone, like dictation audio and your subscription status. Each one is covered below.
The short version. We don't have a copy of your pieces. They're stored on your phone, along with your photos and sentences. When Steep brews, the text of your pieces passes through our relay to Claude, Anthropic's AI, and the sentences come back. The relay doesn't save either one.
Steep is built to let go. When you finish a brew, the week's pieces and the sentences you didn't keep disappear from the app. They move to an archive on your phone, where you can't browse them, and each one is deleted a year later. Until then, Steep draws on that archive for the old sentences it brings back. An old sentence that comes back to you disappears if you don't keep it within a day.
Photos you attach stay in Steep on your phone. Steep never uploads them and never sends them to the AI. Steep never adds anything to your photo library on its own. A monthly result lands there only if you tap Send Out and choose Save Image.
If iCloud Backup is on, it includes Steep's data, as it does for most apps. That backup lives in your Apple account, and we can't see it.
To write sentences, Steep sends text to Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. Steep asks for your permission before it sends anything. If you say no, or turn it off later in Settings, Steep stops sending your text. Brewing and Steep's other AI features pause until you turn it back on.
What gets sent, and when:
Steep doesn't send your photos or your name, and there's no account to tie your text to you. Requests go through our relay server, which runs on Supabase. The relay passes the text to Anthropic and hands the sentences back to your phone. It doesn't save your text or the sentences. If a request fails, the relay logs what kind of error it was, never your text. Like most hosts, Supabase keeps a short-lived log of each request. It records your IP address and the rough location it points to, such as city and country, but not your text. Anthropic sees our server, not your phone or your IP address.
Under its commercial terms, Anthropic doesn't train its models on this text, and deletes it within 30 days unless it needs to keep it longer to enforce its usage policy or comply with the law. See how long Anthropic keeps API data and Anthropic's privacy policy.
If you dictate a piece, your phone turns your speech into text. If it can't do that offline in your language, the audio goes to Apple's speech recognition service under Apple's privacy policy. Steep keeps only the text.
Purchases run through the App Store, and we use RevenueCat to check whether your subscription is active. RevenueCat receives what it needs to do that, such as:
We never send your name, email address, or advertising ID, and the app never asks for them. Apple handles the payment. We never see your card.
Steep relies on three services to work: Anthropic (the AI), Supabase (the relay's host), and RevenueCat (subscription status). We chose them because their terms protect this data at least as well as this policy does, and we don't use any others.
Delete a piece in Steep and it's gone from your phone. Discarding a sentence works differently: it goes to the archive with everything else Steep lets go of, and it's deleted within a year. The only way to clear the archive sooner is to delete the app. Delete the app and everything stored inside it goes with it.
A phone backup made before you deleted the app may still include its data. That backup is yours, so we can't see it or delete it. We don't keep a copy of your pieces or sentences, so there's nothing for us to delete on our end. Text already sent to the AI is handled under Anthropic's policy described above. Purchase records held by RevenueCat and Apple are governed by their own policies. See RevenueCat's privacy policy and Apple's.
Steep is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.
Privacy laws in some places (including the GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California) give you the right to see, correct, or delete personal information a company holds about you. Apart from the purchase records and short-lived server logs described above, we hold nothing about you. There's no name, no email, and no profile. To have your purchase records deleted, email us with the order ID from your Apple receipt, and we'll ask RevenueCat to remove them.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change means something new would leave your phone, Steep will ask you in the app first.
Steep Notes is made by Jinho Lee in Decatur, Georgia. Questions about privacy: support@steepnotes.app