Privacy

What hewn.build does with your information

Last updated: October 17, 2026

You can use hewn.build without signing in. Pick a shop from the shelf, adapt a plan, print it. No account is needed, and we don't know who you are.

If you sign in, with an invite code or with Google, we keep:

  • the name you give us;
  • the shops you describe: each one's name, tools, and skill level;
  • your own settings, if you set them: your skill level, which tools you prefer, and how comfortable you are with each;
  • your notebook, if you keep one while signed in: the lines Reed wrote from what you did here and you kept, fixed or crossed out, and the notes you wrote yourself. It is written only when you act; nothing in it is inferred. You can read all of it on the Notebook page, download it, and delete it there yourself. Hewn never reads it to adapt a plan or to change how sure it is about anything. If you take a question about a step to someone you know, Hewn doesn't send it and doesn't keep the words you copied; it writes one line saying you took it, and keeps what you write down when they answer, both as your own notes;
  • your sign-in, with when it was last used. It lasts 90 days, then you sign in again;
  • if you signed in with Google: Google's id number for your account and the email address on it. We ask Google for your name and email only, nothing else, and we never read or post anything on your behalf. Signing in with Google from an account you opened with an invite code joins the two: one person, either door.

No password, no analytics, no trackers. Invite codes come from Jonathan; Google sign-in is open to anyone with a Google account. When a code carries a shop someone set up for you, we keep who set it up and when, so your shop can say so, and we keep who invited whom. If you write a page on Your people (a few words about you, a shop someone can use, offcuts, something you can teach), we keep it and the people you ticked to see it; only they see it, and only while you're linked by a code. If you join a gathering, we keep that you joined and what you write on its table (what you're changing, where it stands, what you brought back); only the people at that gathering see it, and leaving takes your row off.

What else we keep, from anyone, signed in or not:

  • Bench feedback, if you choose to give it. What happened at a plan step: the plan, the step, the tools, what you chose, how it turned out, any words you added, your skill level if you gave it, how long the step took, and which shop it was about. If you were signed in, we also note that it was you: only signed-in reports of how a step turned out can change how sure Hewn is about a substitution. Anything given signed out is kept and read, never counted. Only we can read it.
  • Plans you upload, if you upload one, so we can read it and adapt it. Uploading needs you to be signed in. Only you and we can read them.
  • Machine bookkeeping. How much a request cost and how long it took. None of your words.
  • Error records. When something breaks, we keep a note of what broke. It can include the piece of your request that caused the problem.
  • Ordinary web logs. The company that hosts the site keeps standard access logs (your IP address and the pages requested) for a short time. Our own server also uses your IP address briefly to slow down repeated sign-in or upload attempts. We don't use it for anything else.

Your plan requests. When you ask for a plan, your request goes to our server and, to build the plan, to the AI services we run on (Anthropic's Claude, and Voyage AI for searching our craft library). They handle it under their own terms. We built the shop side, not the AI side, and we won't make promises on their behalf.

Yours to change or remove. You can change or delete your shops any time from Manage shops; a deleted shop is gone, not archived. Bench feedback you gave about it stays, no longer linked to the shop. To have everything tied to your name deleted (your name, your sign-in, your settings, your shops, your notebook), write to us at the address below and we will delete it by hand. Any bench feedback you gave stays, but it is no longer linked to you or your shops.

What we will never do: sell your information, trade it, or build an advertising profile from it. If a feature would only work by exploiting the person using it, we don't build the feature.

Questions, a copy of what we hold about you, a correction, or a deletion: hewn.build@gmail.com. Jonathan reads it. If an answer you get doesn't match this page, believe the worse answer and make us fix it.