Privacy Policy

Effective November 6, 2026 · Elo Hell is operated by P&T Labs LLC (“we”, “us”).

Elo Hell is a chess training app. The short version: we store your email so you can sign in and so we can write to you, and your chess games so we can analyze them and train you on them. We don't run ads, we don't sell data, and you can delete everything yourself, in the app, at any time.

What we collect

• Account details. Your email address and password, handled by Google Firebase Authentication. We never see or store your raw password.
• Connected chess handles. The Lichess or Chess.com usernames you choose to connect, so we can fetch your recent games from those sites' public APIs.
• Your games and training data. The games you import (synced, pasted, uploaded, or fetched by link or username) and everything we derive from them: engine evaluations, mistake classifications, generated puzzles and your progress on them, opening repertoires, skill estimates, and your practice streak.
• Diagnostics. Standard server request logs (IP address and timestamps, used for rate limiting and abuse prevention) and crash reports when something breaks (via Sentry on the web app and Firebase Crashlytics in the mobile apps: device details and a stack trace, not your games). We do not use advertising trackers or build analytics profiles.
• The link you came from. If you arrive on our website through a link that names a campaign (a creator's video or an ad, for example), your browser keeps that name for 30 days, and if you sign up on the website we save it with your account. We also count, per campaign and per day, how many visits, game reviews and sign-ups there were. Those counts don't identify anyone.

How we use it

To run the product: analyze your games with a chess engine, generate puzzles from your own mistakes, build training recommendations, sync your data across your devices, keep the service fast and abuse-free, see which links bring people to Elo Hell, and email you (see below). That's the whole list.

Emails

We email you about your account and your subscription, for example two days before a free trial ends. We also send occasional emails about new features and Plus. Every one of those has an unsubscribe link, and you can turn them off in the app under Settings; emails about your subscription still come. We send email through Resend, which receives your email address and the message.

AI-generated commentary

Some game commentary is written by a large language model. For that feature we send game-derived data only (moves, engine evaluations, and position facts, never your name or email) to an AI provider (Google Vertex AI today; potentially Anthropic) to turn into prose. The output is always labeled “— AI commentary” in the app, and we cache it so the same game isn't processed twice.

Guest reviews

You can review games without an account. In that case the username you type is used only to fetch public games from Lichess or Chess.com for that session; we don't create a profile or store the games server-side. Standard server logs still apply.

Photos of a board

If you read a position from a photo or a screenshot, the app shrinks the picture on your device and sends it to our server, which reads the pieces and sends the position back. We don't save the picture or write it to our logs: it is held in memory only while it is read. We count reads, by account or for guests by IP address, to apply the daily limit.

Public insights page

If you turn on a public page in Insights, everything Insights shows becomes visible to anyone with its link: your Lichess or Chess.com handle, your results and rating history, your openings, and example games with links to them on Lichess or Chess.com. Search engines may list the page. It updates when you open Insights. You can turn it off or replace its link in Insights at any time; it goes offline within five minutes. Deleting your account, or replacing the handle it is named after, deletes it.

Where your data lives

On Google's cloud (Firebase Authentication, Cloud Firestore, Firebase Hosting, and Cloud Run), processed in the United States, plus local caches on your own device so the app works offline and loads fast.

Who we share it with

Only the service providers that run the product: Google (hosting, database, authentication, AI, and crash reporting in the mobile apps), Sentry (crash reports on the web), Resend (sending email), and, if you buy Plus, Stripe, Apple, Google and RevenueCat (payments). Game data comes from Lichess and Chess.com via their public APIs under their terms. We don't sell personal data, we don't share it with advertisers, and we'd only disclose it if legally required.

Retention and deletion

Your data is kept until you delete it. You can remove individual games in the app, and you can delete your entire account (profile, games, analysis, puzzles, repertoires, streak) under Settings → Delete account. Deletion is immediate and permanent; residual copies in server logs and backups clear on standard schedules (typically within 30 days). You can also email us and we'll do it for you.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have statutory rights to access, export, correct, or erase your personal data, or to object to its processing. Email us at support@elohell.app and we'll honor them. Your games are portable by design: they're standard PGN files you can copy out of the app at any time.

Children

Elo Hell is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we'll delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes, we'll update this page and its effective date. Material changes will be called out in the app.

Contact

P&T Labs LLC · support@elohell.app