Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Clefsy (“we,” “us,” or “our”) is a studio management platform for music and voice teachers, based in Portland, OR, USA, and operated by Ayuda Ventures Inc., a Delaware corporation. Contact us about privacy at support@clefsy.com, or use our data request page.

Two roles: your account, and a studio’s records

Information about you as our customer or user. When you create an account, start a studio, pay us, visit our website or contact our support team, we decide what we collect and why. For that information we are the controller, the word data-protection laws use. It includes your login (your name, your email address or phone number, how you sign in, and any passkeys), your studio’s plan and billing with us, what you send our support team, how you use our website and apps, how you found us, the record that you accepted our terms, and our do-not-text list.

A studio’s records about its students, families and teachers. The records a studio keeps in Clefsy, such as students, parents and guardians, teachers, lessons, notes, payments, messages and files, belong to the studio. The studio decides what to collect and what to use it for. For those records the studio is the controller and we are its processor: we hold and handle them only to run Clefsy for that studio, under our Terms and our Data Processing Addendum.

If you are a student, parent or guardian, the studio you take lessons with is responsible for what it keeps about you, and its own privacy notice applies. Requests about those records go to the studio first; section 8 explains how we help. The login you use to sign in is information we hold ourselves, so we can keep every account secure.

2. Information we collect

• Account information — name, and an email address or phone number, when you create an account.
• Studio data — lesson schedules, student records, and payment information you enter into the app.
• Payment information — processed by Stripe. We do not store full card numbers on our servers.
• Usage data — pages visited, features used, words searched in Settings that matched nothing, and error logs to improve the service.
• Requests and feedback — what you send us through “Missing something?” or Send feedback, with your studio, your role in it and the screen you sent it from (never the ids of the people on that screen).
• Device information — device type, OS version, and IP address for security and diagnostics.
• How you found us — if you arrive through an ad or a tagged link, the campaign it names, the ad click ID, the page you landed on and the site that sent you. We keep this in a cookie for 90 days and save it with your studio if you sign up. When you create an account, start a studio, finish setting it up and begin a paid plan, we tell Google Analytics and Meta (Facebook) that each step happened (for a paid plan, with the amount), so we can tell which ads work. The message from your browser carries no name or contact details. A second copy goes to Meta from our servers and carries your email address (and phone number, if you signed up by phone) in scrambled, one-way form, along with your IP address, browser type and Meta’s own cookie ids, which Meta uses only to match the step to the ad. Our own test accounts are never sent.
• Cookies — small files your browser keeps for us:
  • Sign-in — keeps you signed in and protects your account. Needed for the app to work.
  • Your choices — which studio or role you are viewing, how times are shown, and whether you chose to finish setup on your phone.
  • Visit counter — a random id we set on our public pages, kept for one year, so we can count unique visitors and how many reach sign-up. It holds no name, email, IP address or device details, and visits are not counted while you are signed in.
  • How you found us — the ad or link you arrived from, kept for 90 days (see above). A studio’s referral link sets one for 30 days.
  • Google Analytics and Meta (Facebook) — their own cookies, for visit statistics and to tell which ads work. Both run only on our public pages and the sign-up form. Inside the signed-in app they are loaded only when one of the steps described above happens (an account, a studio, a finished setup or a paid plan), to record that step. You can turn these off with Reject under “Cookie settings” at the bottom of our pages, or block or delete them in your browser settings, without losing access to Clefsy.
  • Your choice, where the law asks first — if you visit from the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Turkey, Brazil, Quebec, South Korea or China, none of the above measuring runs until you say yes. A banner at the bottom of our public pages and the sign-up form asks, with Accept and Reject buttons that work the same way. Until you accept, or if you reject, we do not load Google Analytics or Meta, we set no visit counter or “how you found us” cookie (and remove any set before), and we send nothing about your visit or sign-up to either company. If you accept, they start on the page you are reading. We decide where you are from the country (and, in Canada, the province) your internet connection appears to be in, and for an account no web page told us about, from the country of its studio (an account with no studio, or no country, is not sent at all).
  • Changing your mind — open “Cookie settings” at the bottom of any of our public pages to accept or reject again, wherever you are. Rejecting stops the measuring above from then on, removes Google’s and Meta’s cookies from your browser, and is honoured outside those countries too.
  • Your cookie choice — we remember your answer in a cookie that holds only “accepted” or “rejected”, for 6 months, after which we ask again. While measuring is off we also set a cookie that holds only the instruction not to measure, which ends when you close your browser.

3. How we use your information

This table lists what we do with information we control and, for people in the European Union, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, the legal reason that allows it.

Where we rely on a legitimate interest, we have weighed it against your rights, and you can object (section 8).

We do not sell your personal information to third parties. We do not use studio records to train AI models, and our AI provider may not train on them either. We do not make decisions about anyone based only on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects on them.

4. Who we share information with

We share information only with the service providers we need to run Clefsy. Each is bound by a contract that limits what it may do with the information, and we remain responsible for how it handles studio records. We do not sell your data. Our subprocessors page lists each provider with what it receives, where it processes it, and how transfers are protected.

We email studio owners at least 14 days before we add or replace a provider that handles studio records. If we must replace one urgently to keep the service running or secure, we tell them as soon as we can.

Address suggestions and maps. When you type an address into Clefsy, such as a teaching location, a student’s or your own address, or an event venue, your browser sends what you type, with your IP address, to Google Maps Platform so it can suggest matching addresses. A teacher’s public profile page may show a Google map of the teaching address. Google handles this under its own terms and privacy policy, not as our service provider.

Services you or your studio connect. Some features work by connecting an account you or your studio holds elsewhere: Google Calendar and Zoom (section 11), a studio’s own Stripe account for taking payments (including Tap to Pay in the phone app), calendar feeds, webhooks a studio sets up, and signing in with Google or Apple. When one is connected, we send it what the feature needs; a Zoom meeting, for example, is created with the lesson’s start time and length and the student’s name in its title. From then on that company handles the information under its own terms and your agreement with it.

Other sharing. We share information when the law requires it, for example to answer a valid court order; to protect the rights, property or safety of our users, the public or us; and with a buyer or successor if our business is sold or reorganized, who must then honor this policy.

Where information is processed, and how transfers are protected

We are a US company. Our database is in the United States (Amazon Web Services, Oregon), and most of our providers process information in the United States. Some, such as our hosting and bot-check providers, run worldwide networks, so a request may be handled first by a server near you.

If you are in the European Union, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, moving personal information to the United States needs a legal safeguard. Clefsy itself is not certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, so we use these safeguards:

• A studio’s records are transferred to us under the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses (2021), with the UK Addendum for the UK and the Swiss adjustments for Switzerland, built into our Data Processing Addendum.
• Information you give us yourself, when you sign up or contact us, you send to us in the United States directly, and we protect it as this policy describes.
• Our providers are each either certified under the Data Privacy Framework or bound by the Standard Contractual Clauses in their data processing terms. The subprocessors page says which applies to each.

You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply to your information. We may remove commercial terms from the copy.

If you are in Canada, your information is stored and processed in the United States, where it may be available to courts, law enforcement and national security authorities under US law. Our contracts with our providers require protection comparable to what Canadian law expects.

If you are in Australia, information about you is likely to be disclosed to recipients in the United States, and possibly in the other countries where our providers operate, as listed on our subprocessors page.

5. Data retention and inactivity

We retain your data as long as your account is active. You may close your studio or account at any time from Settings. A studio with students or lessons in it is kept for 30 days so you can change your mind, then deleted; an empty studio is deleted right away. A few things are treated differently, and we would rather say so than round it off to “everything is deleted”:

• Support requests and product feedback are emptied, not deleted — we erase the name, email address, subject and what was written, and keep the date, the status and the kind of request so our support counts still add up. Two things are not erased this way: later replies in a support conversation, and the copy of a request our support team received in Slack.
• We keep a small record that the account existed and was closed — the dates, the plan, the studio name, our payment-processor reference, the version of our terms you accepted, when, and the name you signed them with, any reason you gave for leaving, and a one-way scrambled form of your email address. It holds no student, lesson, payment or message data.
• A few records outlive the studio, with nothing in them that names a person — a log of each text message sent (its kind, cost and date, with no phone number and no words), kept for billing and usage counts; counts of AI use (the feature, the model, how much was used and the device type, with no content); and where the studio first came from (the ad campaign, landing page, referring site and dates), with the email domain and ad click identifiers removed. We do not delete these on a schedule.
• A number that replied STOP stays on our do-not-text list until it replies START, so it is not texted again by mistake.
• Payment records go with the studio. Stripe keeps its own record of the payments it processed, under Stripe’s policies, and our email and text providers keep their own logs (see section 4).

Our database provider keeps daily backups for 7 days and then overwrites them, so a deleted record can stay in a backup for up to 7 days after it is deleted. Our AI provider deletes what is sent to it within 30 days, unless it is flagged for misuse (then up to 2 years) or the law requires longer.

Support chat transcripts are deleted 24 months after the last message, or sooner if the studio is deleted.

We also remove studios that have gone unused. When a studio has had no lessons on its schedule, and no sign-in by its owner or a studio admin, for 18 months, we email the owner. We email again at 21 months, and the studio and its records are deleted at 24 months — never before both emails have been sent to the address on the account, and never sooner than three months after the second one. Any lesson, any sign-in by the owner or an admin, or the Keep my studio button in either email resets the clock. A studio on a paid plan is never removed this way. If the owner’s login is used for nothing else (no other studio, team, teaching or student account), it is closed with the studio and we keep the same small closure record described above; otherwise the login stays.

You may also submit a data access or deletion request at any time via our data request page.

6. Security

We use industry-standard encryption (TLS in transit, AES-256 at rest) and row-level security to protect your data. Clefsy has no passwords: you sign in with a one-time code sent to your email or phone, with Google or Apple, or with a passkey. There is no password for us to store, and none for anyone to steal from us.

If a security breach affects your personal information, we will notify you, and regulators where the law requires, without undue delay. Where the information is part of a studio’s records, we will also tell the studio so it can tell its students.

7. Children’s privacy

Clefsy is designed for studio owners and instructors (adults) and is not directed to children under 13. Studios teach children, though, so a studio’s records often include them, and a student under 18 uses Clefsy through a parent or guardian. The studio is responsible for those records, including any consent the law requires from a parent or guardian, in the United States, Europe or anywhere else.

• We do not knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13, and we never ask a child for consent to anything.
• A child under 13 cannot be given their own login. The studio invites a parent or guardian instead, and the parent’s login shows the child’s lessons, notes and invoices.
• When a studio adds a student under 18 by hand, it must enter a parent or guardian email before the record can be saved.
• A student aged 13 to 17 may be given their own login if the studio chooses, and should use it with a parent’s or guardian’s permission.
• We never use studio records, including children’s records, for advertising, and we do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.
• In the United States we comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). In the EU, the UK and Switzerland, children’s information has extra protection, and a studio that teaches children must have a lawful reason for what it keeps and tell families how it uses it.
• Parents or guardians may request access to or deletion of their child’s data through the studio, through our data request page, or by emailing support@clefsy.com.
• If you learn that a child’s information was added without the consent the law requires, tell the studio or us, and we will help remove it.

8. Your rights

Depending on where you live (including under the GDPR in the EU, the UK GDPR, Swiss law and the CCPA in California), you may have the right to:

• Access — ask for a copy of the information we hold about you.
• Correction — ask us to correct it if it is wrong or incomplete.
• Deletion — ask us to erase it.
• Restriction — ask us to keep it but stop using it while a question about it is settled.
• Portability — receive it in a common, machine-readable format, or have it sent to another company where that is technically possible.
• Objection — object to our use of it based on legitimate interests, and at any time to its use for marketing.
• Withdrawing consent — where we rely on your consent, withdraw it at any time. That does not undo what we did before.

How to ask. Use our data request page or email support@clefsy.com. We confirm a request through the email address it concerns before we act on it; a deletion is confirmed by email before anything is deleted. You may ask through someone you have authorized, and we may ask for proof of that.

When we answer. Within one month, and never later than the law where you live allows. If a request is complex, or we receive several from you, we may take up to two more months where the law allows, and we will tell you within the first month. Requests are free unless they are clearly unfounded or excessive.

Records a studio keeps about you. If you are a student, parent, guardian or teacher, the studio is responsible for what it keeps about you, so ask the studio first; it can correct or delete most records itself. If you ask us instead, we will pass your request to the studio and help it respond. Our data request page can also email you a copy of the studio records held under your email address. A teacher’s private assessment notes are left out of that copy, because whether to release them is the studio’s decision; the copy tells you how to ask the studio for them.

Complaints. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please tell us first at support@clefsy.com, and we will look into it and tell you the outcome. You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority: in the European Union, the authority where you live or work (the European Data Protection Board lists them); in the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner’s Office; in Switzerland, the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner; in Canada, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or, in Quebec, the Commission d’accès à l’information; in Australia, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

California residents have the further rights in section 9.

9. California privacy rights

If you live in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act, gives you the rights below. This section adds to the rest of this policy.

• What we collect — in the past 12 months we have collected these categories of personal information, each described in section 2: identifiers (name, email address, phone number, IP address, and device and cookie ids); customer records and commercial information (your account, your plan and payments, and the records studios enter); and internet activity (pages visited, features used, how you arrived, and error logs). We do not collect sensitive personal information such as Social Security numbers, financial account log-ins or precise location. Card details go straight to Stripe.
• Where it comes from, and why — from you, from the studio you take lessons with (for students and parents), from your device, and from the services in section 4. We use it to provide and secure the service, process payments, answer support requests, improve the product, measure our own ads, and meet legal obligations (section 3).
• Who receives it — the service providers in section 4, for the purposes listed there.
• Selling and sharing — we do not sell personal information. To measure which of our ads work, we tell Google Analytics and Meta when someone signs up, starts a studio, finishes setup or starts a paid plan, as described in section 2. California law can treat that as “sharing” for cross-context behavioral advertising. We never use the records studios keep about their students for advertising, and we do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.
• Your rights — to know what personal information we collect, use and disclose, and to get a copy of it; to have it deleted; to have it corrected; and to opt out of the sharing described above.
• How to ask — use our data request page for a copy or deletion. For anything else, including a correction or opting out of sharing, contact us or email support@clefsy.com. To opt out of that sharing in your browser yourself, choose Reject under “Cookie settings” at the bottom of our pages; you can also block or delete Google’s and Meta’s cookies in your browser. We verify a request through the email address it is about before acting on it, and we respond within 30 days. An authorized agent may ask for you; we may ask for proof that you authorized them.
• Records a studio keeps about you — if a studio entered your information, for example as a student or parent, we hold it for that studio as its service provider. We will pass your request to the studio or help it respond.
• No discrimination — we will not deny you the service, charge you a different price, or give you a lower level of service because you used these rights.
• How long we keep it — see section 5.

10. Text messages (SMS)

Studios use Clefsy to text their students, parents and teachers. We send those texts for them through our provider, Telnyx, from a Clefsy number.

• Only people who agreed — after signing in, a student (or the parent or guardian who manages their account) enters a mobile number in their profile and ticks the box agreeing to texts from Clefsy; a teacher can tick the same box when first claiming their account. A parent or guardian whose own number the studio has (as the guardian’s phone or the family’s phone) ticks their own “OK to text me” box on their child’s profile, or when claiming an invitation that reached their number. Only the person can tick their box; a studio cannot tick it for them. We record when they agreed. We never text a number without that agreement, whoever entered the number. Agreeing is never a condition of buying anything. We never text a number a studio entered only as a contact, and studios on the free plan send no texts.
• A changed number agrees again — the agreement belongs to the number. When a number is changed, by anyone, its agreement is cleared and nothing is texted to the new number until the box is ticked again for it. A person who changes their own number can tick the box again in the same save.
• What we send — texts about something you already have with the studio. Each one starts “Clefsy:”, names the studio, and ends “Reply STOP to opt out.”, for example “Clefsy: Hanson Vocal Studio canceled your 3:00 PM lesson today. Reply STOP to opt out.” We send:
  • an invitation to join the studio on Clefsy, when there is no email address on file;
  • a link to download the Clefsy app, when the studio sends it by text;
  • a payment link, when the studio chooses to send it by text;
  • a lesson reminder about an hour before a lesson you have not confirmed, if you do not get notifications from our app and either were emailed first or have no email on file;
  • a same-day lesson cancellation, or a same-day change to where a lesson takes place;
  • an offer of a seat in a class when there are only hours to take it;
  • a reminder to return something borrowed from the studio, if there is no email on file or it is overdue;
  • an urgent notice from the studio: the studio is closed, a lesson or class is canceled, a schedule change, or weather or an emergency.
• What we never text — event invitations, birthday notes, low-package notices, receipts and marketing. Those go by email or in the app, or not at all.
• Other texts — if you sign in with a phone number, your one-time code is sent by Twilio, only when you ask for one. If you text our number and we cannot tell which studio you mean, we answer once to say how to reach your studio. Those two are the only texts that do not need the box ticked. Our support team may text a studio owner or account holder who agreed to texts a single message written by hand, for example to help finish setup.
• How often, and cost — it depends on your lessons and on what your studio sends. Message and data rates may apply.
• Stopping texts — reply STOP (or STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END or QUIT) to any text from us. That number then gets no more texts from Clefsy, from any studio, until it replies START (or UNSTOP or YES). Unticking the texts box in your profile (or a parent’s “OK to text me” box) stops every text from Clefsy to that number too. You can also turn off lesson reminders, or reschedule and cancellation notices, in your notification settings, which stops them on every channel.
• Help and replies — for help, contact your studio, or contact us. A reply to one of our texts, including HELP, is passed to the studio that texted you: saved on your conversation with them and emailed to the studio. If we cannot tell which studio, we answer once (at most once a month) to say this number is not monitored and how to reach your studio.
• Your number — we use the numbers we text to send these texts, to keep the do-not-text list, and to pass replies to the right studio. We never sell them, and we never share them, or anyone’s agreement to receive texts, with anyone for their own marketing. If you sign up for your own account with a phone number, section 2 describes one more use: a scrambled form of it helps us measure our own ads.
• What we keep — a record of each text we send for a studio, with the number and what it said, is kept with that studio’s records and deleted with the studio. A record of each text’s kind, cost and date, with no number or words, is kept for billing (section 5).

11. Google Calendar and Zoom connections

Connecting Google Calendar or Zoom is optional, and nothing below happens unless a studio chooses to connect one.

• What we ask Google for — permission to see your calendars and the events on them, and to create, change and delete events. Google’s permission covers every calendar you can open; we use it to show you the list of your calendars so you can choose one, and to read events only from the calendar you choose. We do not ask for permission to read your email, contacts, or files.
• What we do with it — we write your lessons onto the calendar you selected, update them when a lesson moves, and remove them when a lesson is canceled. If you ask us to import your existing schedule, we read events from the calendar you choose so we can turn them into lessons. That is all we use it for.
• What we store — the access and refresh tokens that let us do the above, encrypted, and the ID of the calendar you selected. We do not keep a copy of your calendar.
• Who else sees it — nobody. Google Calendar data is not sold, not shared with third parties, not used for advertising, and not used to train any AI or machine-learning model. Our use of information received from Google APIs follows the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements.
• Turning it off — disconnect the calendar in your studio settings, which deletes the stored tokens. You can also revoke our access at any time from your Google account permissions page.
• Zoom — if you connect Zoom, we store its tokens the same way, encrypted, and use them only to create meeting links for lessons you schedule as virtual.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes via email or an in-app notice at least 14 days before they take effect.

13. Contact

Questions? Contact us, or email support@clefsy.com.