Privacy Policy

Thera-Buddy (“we”, “us”) provides practice-admin software for solo child and play therapists. For questions about this policy or your data, contact us at therabuddyapp@gmail.com.

Your data as a therapist — your name, email, practice details, session fee, and billing records. We are the data controller for this.

Your clients’ data — the children you see and their parents or guardians. You are the controller of that information; we process it strictly on your instructions, in order to provide the service. Your own professional and legal obligations to those families continue to apply, and nothing in this policy displaces them.

When you connect your Google Account, Thera-Buddy asks for the narrowest permissions that let it work:

• Send email on your behalf (gmail.send) — used only to send parent emails and invoices that you have triggered. This permission cannot read, search, or delete any message in your mailbox.
• Files Thera-Buddy creates in your Drive (drive.file) — used to file session notes and invoice PDFs into a folder per child. This permission gives us no visibility of any other file in your Drive.
• Your calendar (calendar) — used to read the day’s sessions and to update or create session events.
• Your email address (userinfo.email) — used to identify your account.

You can withdraw this access at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Doing so stops Thera-Buddy working, but does not delete anything already saved in your Drive or Calendar.

Thera-Buddy’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Specifically, we do not use Google user data for advertising, we do not sell it, we do not transfer it except as needed to provide the service or where required by law, and we do not allow humans to read it except with your explicit consent, for security purposes, to comply with the law, or where the data has been aggregated and anonymised. We do not use Google user data to develop, improve, or train generalised AI or machine learning models.

Deliberately very little. Clinical content lives in your Google Drive, not on our servers. What we hold is the minimum needed to show you a client list, send a parent an email, and raise an invoice:

• Your account and practice settings
• Child’s name, and the parent or guardian’s name, email and phone number
• When a session happened, its fee, and whether it has been wrapped up
• Invoice records and payment status
• A record that a message was sent to a parent — the channel and the time, but not what it said
• Basic technical logs needed to keep the service running and secure

We do not store your session notes. Written notes, voice notes and session photos are saved directly into your own Google Drive. We keep only the Drive file reference, so the app knows the note exists and doesn’t file it twice — we do not keep the text, the audio, or the images. We do not store children’s dates of birth.

We do not store your Google password. Access tokens are held encrypted and used only to carry out actions you have asked for.

We use a small number of providers, each bound to protect the data:

• Supabase — database and authentication
• Vercel — application hosting
• Google — Drive, Gmail and Calendar, within your own account
• Resend — service and account emails from us to you
• Paddle — subscription billing. Card details go to Paddle, never to us
• Xero or Zoho Books — only if you choose to connect one, and only for invoices you raise
• OpenAI — if you record a voice note, the audio is sent to OpenAI’s speech-to-text service to turn it into text you can edit before saving. The audio is passed through for transcription only; neither we nor OpenAI keep it as part of this process, and it is not used to train AI models. If you would rather no audio left your device, type your notes instead — typed notes never leave your Drive

We do not sell or rent personal information to anyone.

We keep your data for as long as your account is active. If you cancel, you can ask us to delete your account and we will remove it from our systems within 30 days, other than records we are required to keep for tax or legal reasons.

Anything Thera-Buddy has written into your own Google Drive or Calendar stays with you — it is in your account, and deleting your Thera-Buddy account does not remove it.

To request deletion, email therabuddyapp@gmail.com.

Thera-Buddy is not intended for use by children. It is used by therapists, and it holds information about children on their therapist’s instruction. Because that information is sensitive, session notes are written into your own Drive rather than held as the primary copy on our systems, and access is limited to your account.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal information, and to object to or restrict how we use it. South African users have these rights under POPIA; users in the UK and EU under the GDPR. Email us and we will help.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, access tokens are stored encrypted, and access to production systems is restricted. No system is perfectly secure, and we will tell affected users promptly if a breach puts their data at risk.

If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will email you before it takes effect.