Your writing belongs to you
Writing a book takes months. Sometimes years. Trusting that work to a platform is an act of faith — here is exactly what we do with it, and what we don't.
No AI training. Ever.
This is the most important commitment on this page. Your manuscript is not used to train an artificial intelligence model. It feeds no dataset — not ours, not anyone else's.
This is not a policy that could quietly change in a terms update: if it were ever to change, it would require your explicit consent, asked for separately, book by book. If you don't answer, the answer is no.
Today there is no AI in The Foundry. No suggestions, no corrections, no translation — none. Your writing goes to no AI provider, for any reason.
Writing with an AI — the tool, not the training — is a different question, and we would rather answer it honestly than close the door on it. If a tool like that ever arrived, it would be optional and off by default: nothing would leave unless you switched it on yourself, any provider would have to commit to never training a model on it, and you would know beforehand, not after.
You keep ownership of everything
You are the sole rights holder in what you write. Publishing in The Foundry assigns us nothing. We hold only the technical right to host your text, display it back to you, generate its epub and PDF files, and present it to readers if — and only if — you decide to publish it.
Nothing is public until you decide it is
A book in The Foundry is private. Nobody but you has access to it: not other authors, not readers, not search engines. It becomes visible only through a deliberate action on your part — publishing it on your page, putting it up for sale, or creating a share link. Every one of those decisions is reversible.
You can take it all with you, at any time
One button, in The Foundry: you get your entire book back — text, notes, Codex — as an epub, as a PDF, and as a complete backup file. No request, no waiting, no need to justify why. Your work is never held hostage by the platform.
What we can see, and what we do with it
Let's be accurate rather than reassuring: your writing is stored in a database that is encrypted at rest and protected by strict permissions — but it is not end-to-end encrypted. Technically, administrative access makes it readable. Every online writing platform works this way: it is what makes searching your text, exporting your files, or recovering your account when you lose your password possible at all.
Our commitment is therefore about use, not technical impossibility. Administrative access is limited to what is strictly necessary to operate the service, and your manuscripts are opened in two cases only: at your request, if you need help with a technical problem — or if the law requires it. Never out of curiosity. Never for marketing. Never for training.
If the service ever had to shut down
You would be notified by email, with comfortable time to export everything before anything at all is deleted. No book will disappear overnight.
These commitments are written into our legal texts, in black and white. Read the full Privacy Policy