Privacy policy

Softforge Digital LTD, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16621737, provides Animey and is the controller of the personal data described in this policy. For anything in it, including your rights, write to privacy@animey.ai.

• Account data: your name, email address, password (stored only as a hash), interface language, sign-in method, workspaces and role, and when you accepted the terms.
• Your content: series ideas and bibles, characters, locations, outlines, scripts and dialogue, the reference sketches you upload, your voice choices and voice descriptions, and the images, audio and episodes generated for you.
• Billing data: your plan, subscription status and credit ledger, and the customer record, payments and invoices held by Stripe. Card details go to Stripe and never reach our servers.
• Technical data: the IP address and browser of each session, security and error logs, and records of the generation jobs you run and what they cost us.
• Messages: emails you send us, the emails we send you and your notification choices.
• Analytics, only if you accept it: how the site is used, through Google Analytics (see section 11).

We use your data to provide Animey: to sign you in, check your content against our policies, write, draw, voice, animate and assemble your series, keep the credit ledger, take payments, send the emails the service needs, prevent fraud and abuse such as repeated free trials, keep the service secure, answer you, and meet our legal and accounting duties. With your consent, we also measure how the site is used so we can improve it.

We do not sell your personal data, we do not show you advertising, and we do not use your content to train our own AI models.

Under the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR we rely on:

• contract, for your account, your content, generation, credits and billing;
• legitimate interests, for security, fraud and abuse prevention, service logs and the cookie-free purchase reports described in section 11, balanced against your rights;
• legal obligation, for invoices, tax and accounting records;
• consent, for Google Analytics in your browser, which you can withdraw at any time.

To generate your series, we send each AI provider the parts of your content its step needs: story text to the text model, descriptions and reference images to the image and video models, and dialogue lines and voice descriptions to the voice models. They return the results to us, and we store them in your workspace.

Before anything is generated, your text and uploaded sketches are checked automatically against our content policy, with keyword lists and an AI classifier. A refusal only stops that generation and costs no credits. If you think a refusal is wrong, write to support@animey.ai and a person will review it. We make no other automated decisions about you.

We use these service providers, each only for the task named:

• Hetzner: application servers and database.
• Cloudflare: file storage (R2), content delivery and DNS.
• Vercel: hosting of the website.
• Stripe: payments, subscriptions and invoices.
• Resend: account and notification emails.
• xAI: story writing, subtitle translation and content checks, including checks of uploaded sketches.
• Kie, Poyo and fal: character sheets, location plates, keyframes and shot animation. They give us access to models made by other companies, which may also process the request of the step that uses them: Google (Gemini image models), ByteDance (Seedream and Seedance), Kuaishou (Kling), Alibaba (Wan), MiniMax (Hailuo), PixVerse and OpenAI (GPT Image). A request carries the step's prompts and reference images and, for shots whose dialogue guides the animation, the voiced lines. Poyo also voices dialogue with ElevenLabs voices when ElevenLabs is unavailable, and fal times dialogue audio to place subtitles.
• ElevenLabs: dialogue voices, voice samples and voice designs.
• Google: Analytics, only with your consent, and sign-in with Google when you choose it.

ElevenLabs keeps the text we send it and the audio it generates under its own retention policy. When you delete a series or your account, we delete the voices we designed for you with ElevenLabs, and our copies of the audio as section 8 describes, but copies held by ElevenLabs are governed by its policy and may remain with it for a period after that. The other AI providers may also keep inputs and results for a limited time under their own terms, for example to detect abuse.

Our database and application servers are in the European Union. Files are stored in Cloudflare R2 and delivered through Cloudflare's worldwide network, and the website is served by Vercel from Frankfurt and its global network. Several providers, including Stripe, Resend, xAI, fal, ElevenLabs, Google, Cloudflare and Vercel, are based in the United States or process data there.

Kie, Poyo and fal pass requests on to the companies that make the image and video models they give us access to: several are based in China (ByteDance, Kuaishou, Alibaba, MiniMax and PixVerse), others in the United States (Google and OpenAI). Your prompts, reference images and, for some shots, voiced lines can therefore be processed outside the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area, including in China.

When personal data leaves the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, we rely on the providers' terms and, where the law requires them, on standard contractual clauses with the UK addendum, or on an adequacy decision where one covers the destination, such as the EU-US Data Privacy Framework for a certified US provider. Write to privacy@animey.ai to ask which safeguard applies to a provider.

• Your account, series and renders: until you delete them or your account.
• Intermediate generation files: deleted automatically about 30 days after the job that made them, or with your other files as soon as you delete your account.
• Copies of the voice audio ElevenLabs returns (dialogue lines, voice samples and Voice Design candidates), which we store as received before using them: kept until you delete your account, even after you delete the series, episode or shot they were made for.
• Review links: until you revoke them or they expire. The episode a link shows can be watched by anyone who has the link.
• After you delete a series or your account: its database records go at once and its stored files within minutes (retried for up to a day if storage is unavailable), copies cached by our content delivery network within a day, and database backups within 35 days. The voice audio copies above and the records of AI requests below stay until your account is deleted. Deleting an episode, a scene or a shot deletes its images, voiced lines, animations and intermediate files in the same way, and deleting an episode deletes its renders too. The earlier audio of a line you rewrite, and the audio of a line you delete on its own, stay until their shot is deleted; the pictures of a location you delete stay until its series is deleted, because its shots may still use them.
• Records of the requests we send to AI providers for your workspace (the prompts, dialogue and voice descriptions they received, their answers and results, and what each call cost us): kept while your account exists, including those made for a series, episode or shot you delete. When you delete your account, they are emptied: only the cost of each call remains, without its content and without a link to your workspace.
• Payment records received from Stripe, which include your email address, the amounts paid and your workspace's identifier, as well as invoices and tax records: for as long as tax and accounting law requires, which is six years in the United Kingdom, even after your account is deleted.
• A normalised form of your email address, in which the aliases of one mailbox count as one: kept after your account is deleted, so that a free trial is given only once per mailbox. The network you signed up from is kept with it for 30 days, to give one trial per network over that time, and then cleared.
• Email unsubscribes: kept, even after your account is deleted, so that we never send that kind of email to the address again.
• Records of administrative actions on your account or workspace, such as a credit adjustment or a plan change made by our staff: 24 months.
• Server logs: kept for a short, rolling period for security and troubleshooting.
• The Google Analytics identifier of a checkout you open after accepting analytics: until its first payment is reported, 7 days at most.
• Google Analytics data: 14 months.

You can use most of your rights yourself, in the app:

• Access and portability: in Settings, Download your data gives you one JSON file with your account, including your free-trial record, the invitations you sent, your email unsubscribes and the emails delivered to your address; your workspaces; and, for each workspace you own, every series with its bible, characters, locations, episodes, scenes, scripts, shots, dialogue, renders and review links, the credit ledger, the billing records with each subscription's scheduled end and the Google Analytics identifiers kept for checkouts, the use of the daily allowances, and every request sent to the AI providers for it (prompts, dialogue and voice descriptions) with their answers, results, errors and timing. Images, audio and video are listed with links to download them, valid for a limited time. One export of your account runs at a time, and the number of exports per minute is limited.
• Correction: change your name and language in Settings, and write to us to change your email address.
• Deletion: in Settings, Delete account removes your account and your personal workspace with everything in it, the intermediate files of your generations included. It also stops the emails still queued to your address, cancels pending sign-in links and password resets, deletes the invitations sent to your address in any workspace, removes any file a generation still running stores after the deletion started, and expires the Stripe checkouts you left open. Remove the other members of your workspace first. While a subscription would still renew, the deletion is refused and you are asked to cancel it in Billing first; a subscription set to end with the current billing period counts as ended. Section 8 lists what we keep afterwards.
• Consent: accept or decline analytics in the banner. Clearing this site's cookies shows the banner again.

You also have the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests, to ask us to restrict processing, and to complain to a supervisory authority: the Information Commissioner's Office in the United Kingdom, or your national data protection authority in the European Union. Write to privacy@animey.ai for anything the app does not cover; we answer within one month.

We use a few essential cookies to keep you signed in and to remember your language and workspace, and one to remember your analytics choice. Google Analytics cookies are set only after you accept them. The cookie policy lists every cookie with its purpose and duration.

If you accept analytics, your browser loads Google Analytics 4, which records the pages you visit and a few product events: sign up, series created, character approved, episode generated, episode rendered and checkout started. These events carry no names, email addresses or content, only counts and choices such as a plan or an art style. Google Analytics does not store IP addresses, and its advertising features and Google signals are off.

Page addresses are sent without what could identify you or your work: review-link and invitation tokens and the identifiers of your series, characters, locations, episodes and scenes are replaced by placeholders, and every query parameter is removed except campaign tags (utm_* and gclid). When you arrive from another site, only that site's address is sent. Pages of the app and review-link pages are sent under the generic title “Animey”, never under the name of a series, a character, a location or an episode.

Purchases are reported to Google Analytics by our server when Stripe confirms a payment: the amount, currency, plan and payment reference. If you had accepted analytics when you opened the checkout, the first payment made through it carries your Google Analytics browser identifier, so the purchase joins your visits. We keep that identifier on our servers for this purpose only, never send it to Stripe, and delete it once the payment is reported, or after 7 days at most. Every other payment, subscription renewals included, is reported under a new random identifier each time, which links it to no one, not even to your other payments. No cookie is read or set for this report.

Connections are encrypted, passwords are hashed, secrets are kept out of the code, access to production systems is limited to the people who run them, and your media is served through signed links that expire, except finished renders, which have long, unguessable public addresses. Deletions follow fixed, checked paths, so deleting one account can never reach another account's files.

No system is perfectly secure. If a personal data breach puts you at risk, we tell you and the regulator as the law requires.

Animey is not for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has an account, write to privacy@animey.ai and we will delete it.

We update this policy when the service or the law changes. The date at the top shows the current version, and we announce material changes by email or in the app before they apply.