Privacy

Who we are

AutoSermon is an independent product rather than a registered company. Everything to do with privacy — questions, requests, complaints — goes to [email protected], and that address reaches a person, not a queue. If you need the name and address of the controller for a formal request, ask there and it will be given to you.

Most of your work never leaves your computer

The desktop app is local-first. Your service library, slides, themes, layouts, imported media, sermon transcripts and recordings are stored in AutoSermon’s folder on the machine you installed it on. They are not uploaded, not backed up to us, and not readable by us.

API keys you paste for your own model providers are stored on the same machine and encrypted with your operating system’s keychain. Where the OS offers no keychain, the app stores them unencrypted and warns you in its log rather than implying a protection it cannot provide.

What your account holds

Signing in creates an account so plans, allowances and devices can be tracked across the computers your church uses. That account holds:

• Your email address, name and profile image, as given to our authentication provider.
• Your church’s workspace name, and which people belong to it and in what role.
• Your plan, its status, whether it bills monthly or yearly, and the identifiers Stripe uses for the subscription.
• One record per signed-in computer: an installation id the app generates on first run, a device name, the platform and app version, and when it was last seen. This is what enforces the device limit on your plan.
• Usage counts — seconds of cloud transcription and AI credits — with the provider they were spent on, so an allowance can be measured. The text that was transcribed is not stored with them.

Sermon audio, and when it leaves the room

This is the part worth reading closely, because it is your choice and the app does not make it for you.

In local transcription mode the speech model runs on your own computer and no audio is sent anywhere. In remote mode the audio goes to another machine on your own network that you have paired. In cloud mode the audio is sent to the speech provider you selected — AutoSermon Cloud, Deepgram, OpenAI, Groq or AssemblyAI — and is processed there under that company’s terms.

The same applies to the AI features. Scripture search, sermon notes, slide generation and the assistant send the text they are working on to whichever provider you chose: AutoSermon Cloud, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Groq, or a model running locally through Ollama, which sends nothing outward at all.

Payments

Payments are handled entirely by Stripe. Card numbers are never sent to AutoSermon, never pass through our servers, and are never stored by us. We keep only the identifiers Stripe gives us for your customer record and subscription, so we know which plan you are on.

What we do not do

There is no analytics in AutoSermon. No usage pings, no crash reports, no session recording, no advertising identifiers, and no third-party trackers in the desktop app. Nothing is sold or shared for marketing, by us or by anyone.

The app once offered switches for crash and usage reporting. Nothing was ever sent, so the switches were removed rather than left implying that something was.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Under the UK and EU GDPR, we rely on the following bases. Performing our contract with you: your account, your plan, your devices and the allowance counts, without which the service cannot be provided. Our legitimate interests: keeping accounts secure, preventing abuse of allowances, and answering your emails. Your consent: where you choose to send audio or text to a cloud provider, which you give by selecting that mode and can withdraw by selecting another.

How long it is kept

Account, workspace and subscription records are kept while your account exists, and are deleted when you delete it. Usage events are kept while they are needed to calculate an allowance period and for a reasonable interval afterwards for billing questions. Device records are removed when you sign the device out or delete the account.

What sits on your own computer is yours to keep or delete. Uninstalling AutoSermon does not remove your library; the app has a setting that shows you exactly where it lives so you can remove it yourself.

Where it is processed

Our providers — the authentication service, Stripe, and whichever speech or model provider you choose — may process data outside the UK and the EEA, including in the United States. They do so under the transfer safeguards each of them publishes. If this matters to your church, local transcription mode and a locally-run model keep everything inside your building.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict or stop a particular use, or object to it. Write to [email protected] and we will answer. You also have the right to complain to your data protection authority — in the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office — and you are welcome to do that without asking us first.

Changes

If this notice changes in a way that affects you, the date below changes with it and the change is described rather than folded in silently. Last updated 4 September 2026.