PrintBound only collects what we need to print your book and ship it to you. We never sell your data, and we delete the sensitive parts soon after your order is fulfilled — or soon after it's refunded, if we never print it.
1. What we collect
To take and fulfil an order, we collect:
- Your name — to address and label the shipment.
- Shipping address — to deliver your book.
- Email address — to send order confirmations, status and tracking updates, and to reach you about your order.
- The book content you submit — the text, and any images, that you ask us to print. This can be personal and sensitive (for example, a memoir, a family story, or a photo of you or someone you know), and we treat it accordingly. If an image includes another real person — including a child — our Terms require you to have their (or their parent's/guardian's) consent before you submit it.
We do not store your full payment-card number. Card payments are processed by Stripe on Stripe's own systems; we receive only a confirmation that payment succeeded and limited details such as the last four digits.
2. Website & waitlist
Before we launch, the only thing our website collects is a waitlist signup. When you enter your email to be notified, we store your email address, a keyed one-way pseudonym of your IP address (never the raw address — without our secret key, the pseudonym can't be linked back to you), your browser's user-agent string, and any campaign tags (UTM) in the link you arrived from. We use these only to email you at launch and to catch abuse of the signup form. The IP pseudonym and the user-agent string are automatically deleted 30 days after you sign up. Your email address stays on the list so we can reach you at launch; unsubscribing stops our emails, and you can ask us to delete your address entirely (see section 7). Ordinary browsing of the site needs no account. We do use a product-analytics tool, PostHog, to measure how the site is used — pageviews and button clicks, never your name or email — described under Who we share it with below.
3. How we use it
We use your information only to:
- format, render, and print your book;
- process payment and prevent fraud;
- ship your order and provide tracking;
- send transactional emails (confirmation, delays, delivery) and respond to support requests; and
- meet our legal, tax, and accounting obligations.
We do not use your book content to train AI models, and we do not use it for advertising.
4. Who we share it with
We share data only with the service providers that make PrintBound work, and only as much as each one needs:
- Stripe — payment processing (handles your card details directly).
- Lulu Press, Inc. — our print-on-demand partner, which prints and ships your book; it receives your name, shipping address, and the print-ready file.
- Cloudflare — hosting for our application, plus our database (D1) and file storage (R2), where your order data and the print-ready PDF are securely stored.
- PostHog — website analytics. So we can see how the site is used — which pages people read, which buttons they click — we use PostHog, a product-analytics service. It records pageviews, clicks on our buttons and links, and the waitlist signup, along with standard browser and device details (browser type, screen size, referring page, and approximate location from your IP address). We route this through our own subdomain, h.printbound.net, and we do not send PostHog your name or email address. Visitors who don't sign up aren't given a profile.
- OpenAI — content-safety screening. Before we print, we send your book's text — and, for a picture book, each illustration — to OpenAI's moderation API to check it against our prohibited-content rules. OpenAI does not use data sent to its API to train its models.
- Replicate — image sharpening. For a picture book, we run each illustration through Replicate's upscaling model (Real-ESRGAN) to bring it up to print resolution. Replicate does not use the images we send it to train models.
Our fonts are self-hosted, so simply viewing our website does not send your data to Google or any font CDN. We may also disclose information if required by law, to enforce our Terms of Service, or to protect our rights, users, or the public.
5. How long we keep it
We keep the most sensitive data for as little time as possible:
- Your book content and the print-ready PDF are deleted within 30 days after your order is fulfilled — or, if we never print it, within 30 days of the refund or of our decision to turn the order down under our content rules. The exception is where the law requires us to keep records longer, such as to comply with child-safety reporting laws or legal process.
- If you start a checkout but never pay, the book content and the shipping address attached to that order (see below) are deleted together, shortly after Stripe confirms the checkout session expired unpaid (sessions expire about 24 hours after they're created). We don't keep a book — or the address that went with it — that you decided not to order.
- Shipping addresses collected during checkout are attached to your order right away so we can complete the purchase, and the standalone checkout record is deleted within 24 hours either way. If you complete the order, that address stays on the order as order metadata (see below); if you don't, it's deleted along with the rest of the abandoned order, as described above.
- Order metadata (such as the order record, amount, and shipping destination, excluding the book content) is retained for up to 7 years to meet tax and accounting requirements.
- Waitlist signup data — the IP pseudonym and user-agent string recorded with your signup are automatically deleted 30 days after you sign up. Your email address and its unsubscribe token are kept so we can email you at launch and honor your unsubscribe; you can ask us to delete them at any time (see section 7).
One exception applies to the schedules above that describe an order's content and metadata: if the law requires us to preserve an order's records — for example, child-safety reporting laws or legal process — that preservation comes first, and deletion of that order waits until the hold is released.
6. Children's privacy
PrintBound is for adults: you must be 18 or older to order, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. A book may be about a child — their name, their likeness — but that content is supplied by an adult placing the order, and we treat it as sensitive. We delete it like all book content: within 30 days of fulfilling the order, or within 30 days of refunding or turning down an order we never print, unless the law requires us to keep records longer (see section 5).
If the book includes a photo or likeness of a child, the adult placing the order must be that child's parent or legal guardian, or must have that parent's or legal guardian's consent, before submitting it — see our Terms.
7. Your choices and deletion requests
You can ask us to access, correct, or delete your personal information. To make a request — including early deletion of your book content — email hello@printbound.net from the address you used to order. We'll verify the request and respond within a reasonable time. Note that we may need to retain limited order metadata to comply with our legal and tax obligations even after deleting your content.
8. No sale of data
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We share data only with the providers listed above: Stripe, Lulu, Cloudflare, OpenAI, and Replicate to produce and fulfil your order, and PostHog to measure how our website is used — never for advertising.
9. California residents
If you are a California resident, you may have rights to know, access, and delete the personal information we hold about you, and to not be discriminated against for exercising those rights. To exercise them, contact us at hello@printbound.net.
10. Contact
Questions about this policy or your data? Email hello@printbound.net, operated by Yak Shaving LLC (doing business as "PrintBound").
Last updated July 31, 2026.