Bible-StudyGuide

Last updated: 17 August 2026

This policy covers Bible-StudyGuide — the web app at app.cribinc.com and the Bible-StudyGuide app for iPhone and iPad. Both are made by CRIBINC. Questions go to [email protected].

Two things are worth reading before anything else. Bible-StudyGuide runs on your AI provider key, so when an insight is written, the text of that source is sent to the provider you chose, under your own account with them, and is then governed by their policy as well as ours. And there is no advertising in Bible-StudyGuide, no ad network, no analytics SDK in the iOS app, and we do not sell your information to anyone. Both points are spelled out in full below.

Your account

Sign-in is handled by Clerk, at clerk.cribinc.com. Clerk — not CRIBINC — holds your email address, your name if you gave one, and your sign-in credentials, and is the party that issues and manages your session. Clerk’s handling of that data is governed by Clerk’s Privacy Policy.

Our own servers never receive your password. Each request from the app carries a short-lived, signed session token, and our backend does nothing with it but verify the signature and read two things: the account identifier Clerk assigned you, and — only to check whether your address is on our complimentary-access list — the email address in the token. That identifier is what every volume, source and note of yours is filed under.

What you create

The study you do in the app is stored on CRIBINC’s servers, filed under your account identifier and readable only by your own signed-in requests:

• Volumes (notebooks) — their titles, descriptions, and shelf order.
• Sources — text you type or paste, links you add, files you upload, and text read from pages you scan.
• Notes and insights — what you write yourself, and what an AI model wrote for you.
• Your settings, including which models and ways of study you have chosen.

Files you upload are kept in CRIBINC’s own storage so their text can be extracted and searched. When you add a link as a source, our server fetches that page and extracts its text — so the page’s operator may see a request coming from our server.

To make your sources searchable, their text is turned into numeric embeddings by the embedding model you have configured — which, like every other model, runs under your own provider key.

Your AI provider key — the important part

Bible-StudyGuide is bring-your-own-key. You supply an API key for the AI provider you want to use — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, a local Ollama server, or another supported provider. This has real consequences for your privacy, in both directions.

How your key is held. Keys are encrypted at rest in our database using Fernet symmetric encryption (AES-128-CBC with an HMAC-SHA256 authentication tag), under a secret held in the server’s configuration and never stored alongside the data it protects. Each key is filed under your account and is not readable by another user’s requests. Our API never returns a stored key’s value back to anyone — you can see that a key is saved, and delete or replace it, but not read it back.

Where your text goes. When you ask for an insight, chat with a source, or otherwise put a model to work, the text of the source in question is sent to the provider you chose, using your own key. From that moment it is in that provider’s hands and subject to their privacy policy, their retention periods, and their terms — not ours. CRIBINC cannot control, inspect, or undo what a provider does with text sent under your own account. If a request fails because a model is rate-limited or unavailable, we retry on another model from the same provider under the same key; your text is never quietly moved to a different company.

We say this plainly because it is the single most important thing to understand about the app: choose your provider with the same care you would choose anyone you let read your study, and read their policy.

Scanning printed pages

On iPhone and iPad you can scan a printed page with the camera. The text recognition runs on your device, using Apple’s built-in Vision framework. The photographs never leave your device — they are not uploaded to us and not stored by the app. Only the recognized text is sent up, and it is laid into your volume as an ordinary text source, exactly as if you had typed it.

Payment

Subscriptions are handled by Stripe. Card details are entered on Stripe’s own checkout pages — CRIBINC never sees or stores your card number. What we keep is the bookkeeping we need to know whether your subscription is active: the customer and subscription identifiers Stripe assigns, the status, which plan you are on, and the date the current period ends. Stripe’s handling of payment data is governed by Stripe’s Privacy Policy.

Audio overviews

If you have an audio overview generated, its script is written by the AI provider you configured, under your own key, as described above. The spoken audio is then produced either by a text-to-speech service CRIBINC runs inside its own infrastructure, or — if you have configured a speech provider of your own — by that provider under your key.

What we do not do

• No advertising and no ad networks.
• We do not sell your information, or share it for anyone else’s marketing.
• No third-party analytics SDK in the iOS app. The only third-party software package the app depends on is Clerk’s iOS SDK, for sign-in; the two libraries that come along with it handle image loading and phone-number formatting. None of them is an analytics or advertising product.
• No use of your study to train models on our behalf. We do not send your content to any model except the provider you chose, under your key, when you ask for it. What that provider does under your own account is set by your agreement with them.

Like any web service, our servers keep operational logs — the ordinary record of requests and errors that lets us keep the app running and diagnose faults. These are working records, not a profile of you, and are not used for advertising.

Deleting things

You can remove your work as you go:

• Sources, notes and insights can be deleted in both the web app and the iOS app. This is permanent.
• Volumes can be deleted outright in the web app, which also deletes their notes, and can take their exclusive sources with them. In the iOS app a volume is retired — archived rather than destroyed — and can be brought back.
• Your provider keys can be deleted or replaced at any time in settings.

Deleting your whole account is not yet self-serve. Email [email protected] and we will delete your account and the study filed under it. Your sign-in record is held by Clerk and your billing record by Stripe; we will remove ours and ask them to remove theirs, subject to any record-keeping either is legally required to observe.

Children’s privacy

Bible-StudyGuide is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, email [email protected] and we will remove it.

Your rights

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it — email [email protected]. Depending on where you live you may have these rights by law; we intend to honour them either way. Requests about the data Clerk or Stripe hold in their own right may need to go to them as well, and we will point you to the right place.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with a new date. If a change materially affects how your study or your keys are handled, we will say so plainly rather than quietly reposting.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email [email protected].