Privacy Policy

Last updated 21 October 2026

This policy explains what ElevationArk LLC (“SmrtSites”, “we”) collects and why. We don’t sell your personal information and we don’t use advertising trackers.

What we collect

• Account: your email address, sign-in sessions (a cookie that keeps you signed in), and your handle / profile if you make one. If you set a password we store only a one-way scrambled form of it (scrypt), never the password itself. If you sign in with Google we keep the account identifier Google gives us and your verified email — not your Google password or contacts.
• Free trials: when a free trial is claimed we keep the internet address and network it came from, to enforce one trial per person and the daily limits.
• Your work: descriptions you write, pictures and files you upload, and the sites, versions, templates and reels you make.
• Billing: your plan, credit balance and purchase history. Card details go straight to Stripe — we never see or store them. Creators who get payouts give their details to Stripe.
• Usage and safety: error logs (which can include your email address) to keep SmrtSites working, kept for a few weeks. Internet addresses are used briefly, in memory, to limit abuse.
• Visits to published sites (analytics): for each visit we count the page, the referring site, the kind of device and browser, the language and (where our network provider supplies it) the country — as daily totals only. To count a visitor once a day we keep a one-way hash of their address and browser in memory for that day only; it’s never stored and can’t be turned back into an address. No cookies are used.
• Domains: to register a domain you buy, we pass the owner details you give us (name, address, email, phone) to our registrar partner, as registries require; we don’t keep your address once the domain is registered.
• Affiliates: when someone opens an affiliate link we set a cookie for 30 days that remembers who referred them, and we count clicks per link. Affiliates see sign-ups only as partly hidden email addresses. If you join the Affiliate Program we keep the payout name, website and promotion details you give us, and Stripe collects the identity and tax details it needs for payouts.
• Visits: we count visits as daily totals only (the page, the site you came from, phone / tablet / computer), with no cookie and nothing that identifies you.
• Our ads: when you arrive through one of our ads, its link carries a campaign tag (for example “google / bakery”). Your browser keeps it for that tab only (not a cookie) and we add 1 to that ad’s daily counts: the visit, the type of device (phone, tablet or computer, read from your browser’s user-agent and not stored), and each later step in that tab (using the page, starting a design, seeing designs, opening checkout), with nothing about you. If you then create an account, we note on it which ad brought you, and the tag goes with your purchases to Stripe, so we can count sign-ups and sales per ad.

Cookies

We use only our own cookies, and no advertising cookies: your sign-in session (30 days), a short-lived check while you confirm a new account, an invite cookie (30 days) and an affiliate referral cookie (30 days) when you arrive through a link, and one that remembers which accounts have signed in on this browser (1 year) so self-referrals don’t count.

Who helps us run SmrtSites

• Anthropic (AI): your descriptions, pictures and site content are sent to Anthropic’s API to generate and edit sites. It is also used to check public text (names, bios, listings, reviews), pages being published and uploaded pictures against our Content Rules; this automatic check can block content, and you can contact us to have a person look at it. Anthropic doesn’t train on this data under its commercial terms.
• OpenAI (AI pictures, only when you make one): your picture description and your site’s name and subject are sent to OpenAI’s image API.
• When you start from a website link, SmrtSites fetches that page from its own servers to read it; nothing about you is sent to that site.
• Amazon Web Services (servers, storage and backups, in the United States) · Stripe (payments and creator/affiliate payouts) · Resend and Amazon SES (sign-in, account and support emails) · Google (only if you choose “Continue with Google”) · name.com (domain registration, when you buy a domain).
• Google Fonts may be loaded in the editor and on sites that use them, which shares the visitor’s IP address with Google. Stock photo search uses Unsplash or Pexels when you use it.

How long we keep it

Your data is stored in the United States. We keep your account and sites while your account is open. When you delete your account (or ask us to), your sites, posts and profile are deleted straight away and published sites go offline. Nightly backups are kept for up to 90 days, then deleted automatically. We keep a record that your email already used a free trial (so trials can’t be claimed twice), and your credit and payment history in a form no longer linked to your email. Templates other people already bought stay available to them, and domains you registered stay yours until they expire. We keep records we must keep for tax, accounting or legal reasons (like payment and purchase records), and support conversations so we can answer follow-ups. We record which devices are signed in (the browser and system name, not your IP address) so you can sign them out. The internet address a free trial came from is deleted after 30 days. Daily visitor totals for published sites are kept for about 13 months.

Your choices and rights

You can download your sites and a copy of all your data, change your email and profile, sign out other devices, delete published sites and delete your account yourself, in Account. You can also email support@elevationark.com for any of these. Depending on where you live (for example the EU, UK or California) you may have further rights, including to object to processing and to complain to your data protection authority. We process your data to provide the service you asked for (contract), to keep it secure (legitimate interests) and to meet legal obligations.

Children

SmrtSites isn’t for anyone under 16, and we don’t knowingly collect their information.

Changes and contact

We’ll post changes here and tell you about important ones. Questions: support@elevationark.com · ElevationArk LLC, Denver, CO, USA.