Privacy policy

The information we collect

We collect the information you give us and a small amount of technical information as you use RYSE:

Account details: your email address, and your name if you choose to add it.
Home and candidate addresses, and the map coordinates we derive from them, so we can show which schools your address is zoned for. This is the most sensitive information we hold, and we treat it that way. It is never sold and never shared with schools, realtors, or marketers.
Family details you choose to share, such as grade levels, priorities, and preferences. We never ask for a child’s name.
Your quiz and priority answers, the schools you save, and your hearts, ratings, and notes.
Your conversations with the RYSE Guide. Because these are open text, anything you type is stored as you wrote it, so please avoid typing details you would not want saved.
Feedback and survey responses you send us.
Payment information handled by Stripe. We store which plan you have and Stripe’s references to your payment, never your card number.
Technical and usage data, such as your device and browser, the pages you visit, and events that describe how you use RYSE, collected through our own product-analytics events.
Cookies and local storage used to keep you signed in and remember your preferences, including the cookie choice you make on your first visit.

How we use your information

We use your information to run RYSE and make it better:

To provide the service. Looking up the schools your address is zoned for is the core reason we use your address and coordinates.
To build and personalize your school list, measure distance and bus fit, and save your notes and ratings.
To improve the product, through analytics, session replay, and reviewing conversations with the RYSE Guide so it stays accurate and helpful.
To send you transactional emails, provide support, keep RYSE secure, prevent fraud and abuse, and meet our legal obligations.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it for advertising. If that ever changes, we will update this policy and tell you first.

A note on why we charge. A lot of school-search tools are free, but "free" usually has a catch: the family becomes the product, and their information is packaged up and sold to advertisers, realtors, and data brokers to pay for it. We built RYSE the other way around. You pay a fair, upfront price, and in return we answer only to you. Where you live and where you’re looking at schools for your child are never the thing we’re selling.

The providers that help us run RYSE

We work with a small set of trusted companies so RYSE can function, and each one receives only what it needs for its role.

Supabase hosts our database and handles secure sign-in.
Vercel hosts and serves the website, and measures traffic and page performance.
Stripe processes payments and subscriptions. Your card number goes to Stripe, never to us.
Resend sends transactional emails, such as confirmations and sign-in links.
Microsoft Clarity captures how you use RYSE through behavioral metrics, heatmaps, and session replay, which help us see where families get stuck and improve the product.
Sentry monitors errors and captures a small sample of session replays to help us fix bugs.
Google provides sign-in with Google and Google Maps, which we use for address lookup and to find your zone.
Calendly schedules workshops and one-on-one sessions.
Anthropic and OpenAI are the AI providers that power the RYSE Guide and related features. Your messages are sent to them to generate responses. They act as our service providers and process your messages only to provide that service. We do not permit them to use your conversations to train their own models.

Apart from the providers above, there are a few limited situations where we may share information:

When the law requires it, or to keep people safe. We may disclose information if we are required to by law, for example in response to a subpoena, court order, or lawful government request, or when we believe in good faith that it is necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of you, other families, the public, or RYSE, including to prevent fraud or abuse.
If RYSE changes hands. If we are ever involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale of our assets, your information may transfer as part of that transaction. Any successor will be bound by this privacy policy, or will give you notice and a choice before using your information under different terms.
De-identified information. We may share aggregated or de-identified information that can no longer reasonably be linked back to you, for example to understand product trends.

Children and families

RYSE is a service for parents and other adults, and account holders must be at least 18 years old. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

The family details we hold, such as a grade level or a school preference, are provided by you, the parent or guardian, about your own family, and we treat them as your information. We never ask for a child’s name. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, please contact us and we will remove it.

RYSE is not a school, school district, educational agency, or "school official" under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) or any similar student-privacy law. We do not have access to, receive, or maintain student education records. The information we hold comes from you and from public data sources, not from a child’s school records.

Session replay and analytics

We partner with Microsoft Clarity to capture how you use and interact with RYSE through behavioral metrics, heatmaps, and session replay, which help us improve our services. This usage data is captured using first- and third-party cookies and other tracking technologies to understand how families use the site. For more information about how Microsoft handles this data, see the Microsoft Privacy Statement (https://privacy.microsoft.com/privacystatement). Sentry captures a small sample of visits and what happened around an error so we can fix it. These session replays are set to mask text and block media, and RYSE uses them only to improve the product. We never sell this information.

You choose whether this happens. The first time you visit RYSE, a banner asks you to accept or to continue with only what is necessary. Session replay and analytics stay off until you accept, so if you choose "Only necessary" we do not record your session, we do not send behavioral analytics, and we do not identify you to Microsoft Clarity. Only the cookies and local storage RYSE needs to work, such as keeping you signed in and remembering your saved schools, are used.

We remember your choice on your device so you are not asked again, and we keep a record of the choice itself. You can change or withdraw it at any time using "Manage cookie preferences" in the footer of our public pages, or from your account settings. If we materially change what we collect, we will ask you again.

Your privacy choices and rights

You can edit or remove your saved addresses, priorities, and schools at any time, and you can delete your account from your account settings.

We honor privacy rights for everyone who uses RYSE, wherever you live, rather than only where a law requires it. That includes the right to access the information we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, and to receive a copy of it. To make a request, email hello@rysekids.com and we will help. We will not treat you differently for exercising these rights.

Before we act on a request, we may need to verify your identity, so that we are only sharing or changing information for the person it belongs to. If we can’t fully honor a request, we will explain why, and where the law gives you a right to appeal that decision, we will tell you how.

How long we keep your information, and deletion

We keep your information for as long as your account is active so RYSE works for you across devices and over time.

When you delete your account, your access drops to the free plan right away and we cancel any active subscription. We then remove the core information tied to your account, including your saved schools, notes, ratings, saved addresses, family profile, and profile, within 30 days. We hold it for that window in case you change your mind and ask us to restore it.

Some of what you shared may be kept after your account is deleted, including your conversations with the RYSE Guide, your quiz and priority answers, and any feedback you sent us. We are expanding our deletion process so these are removed automatically too. In the meantime, you can email hello@rysekids.com to ask us to erase everything, and we will.

A few records we keep even after deletion, because we are legally required to or because they contain no personal profile: billing and transaction records, which are held by our payment provider for tax and accounting, and a simple record that you accepted our terms. Information that has been de-identified, so it can no longer be linked to you, may be kept to understand product trends. Any copies in our encrypted backups are removed as those backups rotate out.

How we protect your information

We protect your information with encryption in transit and at rest, database access rules that keep each family’s data scoped to their own account, and internal access controls that limit who on our team can see what.

RYSE is operated from the United States, and your information is stored and processed here. Some of the providers listed above may process limited data in other countries where they operate; when they do, they remain bound to protect it under their agreements with us.

No service can promise perfect security. If a breach ever affects your personal information, we will notify you as required by North Carolina law, including the North Carolina Identity Theft Protection Act.

Emails from us

We send two kinds of email. Transactional emails, such as sign-in links, confirmations, and receipts, are part of using RYSE. Occasional product updates let you know what is new. Every product-update email has an unsubscribe link that we honor, and unsubscribing does not affect the transactional emails you need. We never buy or sell email lists.

Changes and how to reach us

We will update this policy as RYSE grows. The date at the top of this page shows when it last changed. When a change is meaningful, we will ask you to accept the update before you keep using the parts of RYSE that require an account.

For privacy questions or requests, and for anything else, email hello@rysekids.com.