Privacy

What we collect

• Waitlist. Your name, email address, and the date you joined.
• Your account. Your name and email address, and your password, which we store only as a one-way hash. If you sign up with a .edu address, we note the school domain.
• Optional profile details. A photo, bio, company, school and class year, and X, LinkedIn, or Instagram handles, if you add them.
• Whether you’re a student. If you choose to answer “Are you a student?”, your answer and, if you say yes, the school you name. It’s optional, you can skip it or change or clear it in Settings, and it’s never shown publicly: not on your profile, your events, or anywhere other people can see.
• Optional phone number. If you add one, we text you a one-time code to confirm it.
• Your events. What you enter about them: titles, descriptions, dates, city and address, guest counts, budgets, tasks, run sheets, notes, photos, and the vendors and venues you’re working with (name, email, phone, website).
• Your guest lists. Names a host keeps for planning, including names added from their guest book and an email when that contact has one. A phone number only if it is already on a guest’s Hosty account. Guests don’t need Hosty accounts, and Hosty doesn’t contact them. Hosty no longer collects RSVPs, plus-ones, dietary notes, or check-in times.
• No tickets. Creating an event does not take a ticket type or a price. Hosty doesn’t sell tickets or charge guests.
• Security data. Cookies that keep you signed in, and counts of sign-in and sign-up attempts by IP address and email, to stop password guessing and spam.
• iOS notifications. If you allow notifications in the iOS app, a device token so we can send them.
• Page views. Vercel Web Analytics records anonymous page views, with no cookies.
• Error reports. When Hosty crashes or hits a server error, a report goes to our error monitor (Sentry, below) so we can find and fix the problem: the error’s message and stack trace, and the page path. Cookies, request bodies, URL query strings and console output are stripped before anything is sent, and Sentry keeps a report for up to 90 days.
• Feedback you send. The Send feedback form emails your message, your name and email address, and the page you came from to the team.
• Vendor outcomes, shared as totals. When you draft a vendor inquiry, add that vendor’s email or phone yourself, send the inquiry, or record a reply, a quote, a booking, or a decline, we keep that stage. A quote is a whole number of cents. Anonymized, aggregated vendor outcomes are shared across hosts for the same vendor, and for vendors in the same metro and category. We show a reply rate and how many hosts contributed once at least three different hosts have asked. A typical quote range is shown only once at least five different hosts have quoted, and that range is rounded. We never show another host’s quote, name, event, or message. The only Google data kept in that total is the place ID. A Google vendor’s metro comes from the city name, not from Google’s coordinates.

When you fill in an event’s city, your browser may ask for your location to suggest the nearest town. If you allow it, we send your location, rounded to about a kilometre, to our maps provider (below) to name the town you’re in, and don’t keep it. We save only the city you keep, and the map point for that city, so we can search for venues and vendors near it.

We don’t use advertising or cross-site tracking, and we don’t sell personal information.

How we use it

• To run Hosty: your account, your events, guest lists, and budgets.
• To send the messages you choose to send to vendors and venues.
• To send service messages: email confirmation, password resets, waitlist invitations, and phone verification codes.
• To tailor Hosty for student hosts, if you tell us you’re a student.
• To keep Hosty secure and fix problems.
• To show anonymized, aggregated vendor outcomes shared across hosts, so a later host can see how often a vendor or a metro usually replies and, once five hosts have quoted, a rounded typical quote range. We never show another host’s quote.
• To improve Hosty’s planning. We keep anonymized planning choices to train Hosty’s models: which venues, vendors, tasks, run-sheet lines and budget splits Hosty suggested, and whether you kept, changed, or turned them down. Each record holds the kind of event, the city if it’s one of the larger US cities Hosty knows, a range for the headcount and the budget (never your exact budget), and the day it was made. It never holds your name, account, contact details, guests, your own descriptions of the event or its tasks, or your chat messages, and it isn’t linked to you or your event. A place from Google Places is recorded only by its place ID.

When you message vendors or venues through Hosty, they see your name, your message, and your email address as the reply-to, so replies come straight to you.

AI

To rank venue options, Hosty sends event details to Anthropic’s Claude API: the kind of event, city, guest count, timing, your description of the event, the venue budget, and the candidate venues. Hosty also uses Claude to draft a first plan and budget for a new event, and to word your daily digest. We may also send some of the same event details to TypeSafe’s Jev model, through Vercel AI Gateway, for quick checks on those results.

We don’t send your guests’ names or contact details to these AI providers. Anything you type into an event’s title or description may be included, so please keep sensitive personal information out of those fields. AI output is only a draft: Hosty never sends, publishes, or spends anything on its own. A short question in chat may be answered by a smaller Claude model; a change to your event still goes to the same model as before.

If you haven’t described the event in your own words, a first plan for the same kind of event, a city Hosty already knows, and the same headcount and budget ranges may be reused for other hosts for up to twelve hours. That reuse stays in the server’s memory, isn’t written to the database, and never includes your words, your name, or your exact budget. A venue score may be reused the same way for the same Google place and those same ranges. The only place data in that score’s key is the place ID, and the score itself isn’t saved.

You can also connect your own AI assistant (such as Claude, ChatGPT, or Cursor) on the Connect an agent page. A connected assistant can read your event plans (brief, budget, tasks and run sheet), create new private plans, search venues and vendors near them, and save vendor emails as drafts. It cannot send email, book, publish, or see guest lists. Once data reaches your assistant, its provider’s privacy policy applies.

Google Calendar and Gmail (if you connect them)

You can connect your own Google account in Settings. It’s optional, and Hosty asks Google for only these permissions:

• Your Google address (openid, email), to show which account is connected.
• Free/busy (calendar.freebusy): when you ask for suggested times, Hosty reads when your main calendar is busy over the next few weeks. Only busy and free times, never the titles, places or guests of your events. We don’t keep them after the suggestion is shown.
• Calendar events (calendar.events): after you confirm, Hosty adds one planning hold for an event to your calendar, or updates the one it added before. It has the event’s title, time, place and a link back to Hosty. No guests are invited and nobody is notified. Hosty doesn’t read, change or delete your other calendar events.
• Gmail drafts (gmail.compose): when you press “Save to Gmail drafts”, Hosty saves that outreach message as a draft in your Gmail. It never sends email from your account; you review and send drafts yourself. Hosty doesn’t read your inbox.

Google’s access and refresh tokens are encrypted on our servers and never sent to your browser. We keep the tokens, your Google address, the permissions you granted, and the ID of each calendar hold Hosty made, so it can update rather than duplicate it. Disconnecting in Settings revokes Hosty’s access at Google and deletes all of that; drafts and holds already made stay in your Google account. You can also remove Hosty’s access at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Hosty’s use of information received from Google APIs follows the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. We don’t use Google data for ads, don’t sell it, and don’t send it to AI providers.

If you add busy times in Settings, Hosty keeps them so it can plan around them. Only you see them. They’re deleted when you remove them or with your account, and ones that ended over a month ago are cleared out whenever you add a new one. When you use good nights or suggested times, Hosty also remembers your time zone. Answers from Google free/busy are used for the request that asked and never stored, though what Hosty did with them stays: a task due date it moved (with a note that you looked busy), or free times it wrote into a draft you started.

Who helps us run Hosty

• Vercel: hosting, and storage for photos you upload.
• Neon: our database (hosted Postgres).
• Anthropic, and TypeSafe through Vercel AI Gateway: the AI features above.
• Google Maps Platform (Places API), or Apple Maps (Maps Server API) when Google isn’t set up: suggesting places as you type a city, finding where an event’s city or town is, venue search, and finding vendors near your event. As you type into a city field, the characters you’ve typed so far are sent to suggest matching places; to place the city on the map we send the city or town you entered or picked; for venue and vendor search, the search words and a map point (your event’s own address point if it has one, otherwise the city’s). Never your name, account, contact details, budget or guests. From Google Places, Hosty keeps only Google’s place IDs long-term. A vendor’s name, phone number and website are fetched from Google when a page shows them and aren’t stored. A venue’s name, address, phone number, website and rating are fetched the same way and aren’t stored; its photos stay on the place’s Google Maps page. A place’s map point is kept for at most 30 days.
• Google (Gmail): sending email.
• Google Calendar and Gmail APIs: only if you connect your Google account, as described above.
• Sentry: error reports, as described above.
• Twilio: text messages with phone verification codes.
• Apple: push notifications in the iOS app.

If you publish an event, anyone with its link can see the event page: its title, date, place, description, and who is hosting it. We may also share information if the law requires it, or to protect people’s safety.

Guests and vendors

If a host added you to a guest list or vendor list, the host decided to put your details in Hosty and is responsible for having the right to contact you. Please contact the host first; you can also email us at leowomc@gmail.com.

Keeping and deleting your data

We keep your information while your account is active, or until you or the host who added it removes it. To see, correct, or delete the information we hold about you, email leowomc@gmail.com from the address on your account. We handle these requests by hand and may need to confirm who you are.

The anonymized planning choices described above aren’t linked to you or your event, so they stay after you delete an event or your account.

Hosty used to take RSVPs, check guests in, send guest updates, and record ticket prices. It no longer does any of those. Older replies, check-in times, guest messages, plus-ones, dietary notes, and prices stay stored until you or we delete them. Turning those features off does not delete them.

Age

You must be 18 or older to join the waitlist or use Hosty.

Changes and governing law

If we change this policy, we’ll post the new version here with a new date. This policy is governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Contact

Leo Tu, operating as Hosty. leowomc@gmail.com