Privacy Policy

Katalyna is operated by Katalyna Labs LLC (“Katalyna,” “we,” or “us”). It is an admissions workspace, so most of what we hold is information you deliberately put into it.

Information you give us

• Account information: your name and email address. Your password is handled by our authentication provider and is stored only as a secure hash — we never see it. If you sign in with Google or Apple instead, we receive your name and email address from that provider to create or access your account; we never receive your Google or Apple password.
• Your academic profile: the type of program you're applying to, target graduation year, home city or region, country, intended major, GPA, standardized test scores (such as SAT, ACT, or LSAT), and interests.
• Optional context you choose to give: whether you are a first-generation college student, a family income band, and whether you have family ties to a particular school. Every one of these is optional, each has a “prefer not to say” option, and leaving one blank never assumes an answer. We ask because they change what you actually qualify for — fee waivers, need-based aid, and programs that set explicit income or Pell requirements.
• Your application work: essay and personal-statement drafts, the colleges on your list, deadlines and calendar events, brag-sheet entries (activities, awards, roles), and research notes.
• Advisor conversations: the questions you send to the AI admissions advisor and the answers it returns.
• Support correspondence: anything you send us by email.

Information collected automatically

• Session data: an authentication cookie that keeps you signed in.
• Usage counts: the number of AI advisor messages you send each day, so we can apply free-plan limits.
• Technical logs: standard server logs such as IP address, browser type, and timestamps, used for security and debugging.

Information you provide before you sign up

If you start the onboarding questionnaire before creating an account, your answers are stored only in your own browser (local storage) until you create an account. If you never sign up, they never reach our servers, and clearing your browser data removes them.

Payment information

Paid subscriptions are processed by Stripe. We never receive or store your full card number. We keep only your subscription status, plan, billing interval, renewal date, and Stripe identifiers.

Essays and details you submit for a human review

You can ask a member of our team to review a college essay through our public essay-review form, without creating an account. When you do, we collect the draft you paste in, your name and email, any social-media handle or username you give us so we can reach you, and the optional details you choose to add — the target school, the prompt, and your class year. Submitting requires your explicit consent, described in section 2, and if you tell us you are under 18 we require a parent or guardian to consent as well.

• To provide the features you ask for — essay feedback, college matching, chance and net-price estimates, deadlines, and the advisor.
• To personalize results to your profile, so advice reflects your scores, goals, and school list instead of generic guidance.
• To process payments and manage your subscription.
• To enforce plan limits (for example, the free plan's daily advisor message allowance).
• To keep the service secure, prevent abuse, and debug problems.
• To respond to your support requests.
• To send you deadline reminder emails — but only if you switch them on. They're off by default, every one carries a one-click unsubscribe link, and turning them off never affects your account.
• To improve Katalyna in aggregate — for example, noticing that a feature errors often. This never involves training AI on your work.

Other than the essay-review submissions described in the box below (which you consent to on that form), we do not use your information for advertising, and we do not build profiles of you for any purpose other than delivering the product.

Katalyna's feedback, podcast, research, chance-analysis, and advisor features are powered by large language models operated by Anthropic. To generate a response, we send the relevant content to that provider over an encrypted connection.

What gets sent

• The text of the essay or draft you asked us to review.
• Relevant profile fields — such as applicant type, intended major, GPA, test scores, and your college list — so the response is tailored.
• The messages you type into the advisor chat.

We do not send your name, email address, or payment information to AI providers as part of these requests.

AI output is a suggestion, not a decision

Admission-chance percentages, net-price figures, and feedback are estimates generated from public data and statistical models. They are not predictions, guarantees, or professional advice, and no admissions outcome is ever determined by Katalyna. See our Terms of Use for details.

Audio features

If you generate an AI Admissions Podcast episode, the episode script is sent to a text-to-speech provider to synthesize audio, and the resulting audio file is stored in your account. Katalyna does not currently record or collect your voice. If we launch voice intake, we will update this policy before collecting any audio from you.

We share information only with the providers needed to operate Katalyna. Each is bound by its own contractual and security obligations, and none is permitted to use your data for its own purposes.

Public data sources

To populate school information we query public, free data sources: the U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard, the Urban Institute Education Data API, Wikipedia, and OpenStreetMap's geocoding service. These receive only the search terms needed — a school name, or the home city or region you entered so we can calculate distance. We do not send your identity, essays, grades, or test scores to any of them.

Other disclosures

• Legal requirements: if required by law, subpoena, or valid legal process, or to protect the rights and safety of our users or the public.
• Business transfer: if Katalyna is acquired or merged, your information may transfer to the successor. We will give you notice and this policy will continue to apply until you are told otherwise.

• We never sell or rent your personal information.
• We never share your essays, grades, or test scores with colleges, universities, admissions offices, or scholarship providers.
• We never use your content to train AI models.
• We never serve you targeted advertising or share your data with ad networks or data brokers.
• We never use students' information to build commercial profiles unrelated to the service.
• We never attach your name, handle, or contact details to an essay we use as an example — any such use is de-identified — and we never use a submitted essay to train AI models.
• We do not collect or store your race or ethnicity. You can filter opportunities by eligibility criteria in the moment without telling us anything, and nothing about it is written to your account. We also never use any personal characteristic to generate an admission-chance estimate.

You control your workspace. From within the app you can edit or delete individual essays, colleges, deadlines, and notes at any time.

• Access and portability: download everything we hold about you as a JSON file, yourself, from Settings → Export your data. No request needed.
• Correction: update your profile in Settings, or ask us to correct anything you can't change yourself.
• Deletion: delete your account and all associated content yourself, immediately, from Settings → Delete your account. It cannot be undone, so export first if you want a copy.
• Withdraw consent: stop using AI features at any time, or close your account.

If you'd rather we handled any of these for you, or you can no longer sign in, email privacy@katalyna.app. We will respond within the time required by applicable law (generally 30 to 45 days) and will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.

Your calendar link

If you create a calendar subscription link, that link works without a password — that's how calendar apps read a feed. Anyone you give it to can see your deadline titles and dates, so treat it like a password. It contains nothing else: no essays, no grades, no test scores. You can rotate it (which breaks the old link immediately) or switch it off entirely, any time.

California residents

Under the CCPA/CPRA you have the rights to know, delete, correct, and opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, and to limit the use of sensitive personal information. We do not sell or share your personal information as those terms are defined by California law, and we have not done so in the preceding twelve months. The categories we collect are described in section 1.

Europe, the UK, and similar jurisdictions

If you are in the EEA, UK, or another region with comparable law, we process your data on these bases: to perform our contract with you (providing the service), your consent (optional features such as AI review of a specific essay), our legitimate interests (security, abuse prevention, product reliability), and legal obligations. You also have the rights to object, restrict processing, and lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have, we will delete the account and its contents promptly. If you believe a child under 13 has given us information, contact privacy@katalyna.app and we will remove it.

Our public essay-review form asks whether you are under 18 and, if so, requires a parent or guardian to consent before the draft can be submitted. A parent or guardian may ask us to review or delete a child's submission at privacy@katalyna.app.

For parents and guardians

You may request to review the personal information we hold about your child, ask us to correct or delete it, and withdraw consent to further collection. Email privacy@katalyna.app from an address we can verify and we will assist you.

We treat student information as sensitive. We do not sell it, do not use it for targeted advertising, do not use it to train AI models, and do not create profiles of students for any purpose other than providing the features they asked for.

Katalyna lets you record the names and email addresses of recommenders — teachers, counselors, mentors, or employers — so you can track your letters of recommendation.

When you add someone else's details, you confirm that you have a legitimate reason to record them. We use that information only to display your own recommendation tracker to you. We do not email your recommenders, market to them, or use their details for any other purpose. If a recommender wishes to have their information removed, they (or you) can contact privacy@katalyna.app.

• While your account is open: we keep your workspace so it's there when you return.
• After you delete something: it is removed from the live service immediately and purged from encrypted backups within 30 days.
• After you close your account: we delete your content. We may retain limited billing records where tax and accounting law requires it, and anonymized aggregates that cannot identify you.
• Essays submitted for review: we keep a submission long enough to give you feedback and to keep a record of the consent you gave, and we delete it on request at privacy@katalyna.app.

• All traffic is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS), and data is encrypted at rest by our database provider.
• Row-level security: every table is protected by database policies that restrict each row to the user who owns it. Another user cannot read your essays or profile even if they try to query them directly.
• Secrets and API keys are stored server-side only and are never exposed to your browser.
• Access to production data is limited to personnel who need it to operate and support the service.

No online service can promise perfect security. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you and any required regulators as promptly as the law requires — including, where applicable, under New York's SHIELD Act.

We use a small number of strictly necessary cookies to keep you signed in and to keep your session secure. We also use your browser's local storage to hold onboarding answers before you create an account, and small interface preferences.

For product analytics we use a privacy-friendly, cookieless tool (Plausible) that sets no cookies and collects no personal data about you. We do not currently use advertising cookies or cross-site ad trackers. If we enable one — for example a Meta (Facebook) pixel to measure our ads — it would set cookies and share data with that provider, and we will update this policy and, where required, ask for your consent first.

Katalyna is operated from the United States, and our infrastructure and service providers process data in the United States. If you access Katalyna from outside the U.S. — including as an international applicant — your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those in your country. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses for these transfers.

We may update this policy as the product evolves. When we do, we will revise the “Last updated” date above. If the change is material — particularly anything affecting how your content is used by AI — we will notify you by email or in the app before it takes effect.

Questions, requests, or concerns about privacy:

• Email: privacy@katalyna.app
• Entity: Katalyna Labs LLC
• Mail: 418 Broadway Ste N, Albany, Albany County, NY 12207, US