Privacy
How Visa Trouble handles your information.
Plain English alongside the full wording. Read each explanation together with its matching section.
1. US discovery
You can use public discovery without an account. For US discovery, we keep permitted structured answers from that journey in this browser so your citizenship and other answers are prefilled when you return or choose Start again. If account saving becomes available, they move to owner-isolated account storage only after you sign in.
2. Canada information
Canada questions are free and anonymous. Only enumerated plans, region, citizenship, age band, work-location, language-test and sponsor-status choices are kept in this tab, with a version and last-update time. We do not send Canada answers to an account or analytics service. You can resume them for up to 24 hours after the last change; stored copies can remain after that period. Clear Canada answers removes this tab’s copy. Duplicating a tab may copy its answers, so clear each copy on a shared device. Canada browsing still involves ordinary hosting requests and technical logs.
3. Your account
When private account sign-in is available, we use your email and the identity information needed to sign you in. An admitted account can save permitted structured questionnaire progress. If the guided preparation coach is enabled, it also saves the story and reference text you enter, including unfinished reference edits. A separate temporary grant controls access to that guided journey. Signing in does not by itself give permission for general marketing. When signup asks for them, we store which Terms and Privacy versions you accepted, when you accepted them, and the country (and, in the US, the state) where you said you live; we use this only to record your acceptance and check where the service is offered, never to assess a visa route. When you ask for an email sign-in link to create an account, we keep a record of that email address that lets the account be created for 30 minutes. It is removed when your account is set up or deleted; an unused record stops working after 30 minutes and is removed at the next account signup on the service. Your answers to the questions before application preparation stay in your browser tab and are not saved or sent to us. To prevent abuse, the account service briefly holds your IP address, sign-in email and account ID in its memory to limit repeated sign-in and save requests; these counters are not written to the database.
4. Keep sensitive details out
Public discovery does not accept passports, documents, payment details or free-text immigration histories. The guided coach may accept story and reference text, but not document uploads. The one exception is a USCIS or State Department notice you choose to add to your petition or application record from a PDF, scan or photo (up to 10 MB): we read it once to fill in the notice type, dates, form and outcome for you to check, and we do not keep the file after reading it or store any receipt number, A-number or other government number from it. Nothing from it is saved until you confirm the fields. If the file is a photo or a scan without selectable text, we send it to OpenAI to read it, with its no-storage setting (store: false), and we do not keep it; OpenAI’s API policies may still let it hold API data for a limited period to monitor abuse. If that reading is unavailable, you enter the notice by hand. Do not enter passport numbers, financial records, health or criminal history, or sensitive case details that are not needed for a draft. Your answer about needing a private review is not included in browser or account progress; you may need to answer it again when you return.
5. Account providers
The planned account service uses Supabase for authentication, saved progress and guided preparation drafts, with Frankfurt as its intended hosting region. It is moving to our own sign-in with a PostgreSQL database hosted by Render in Frankfurt. When we send email sign-in links ourselves, they go through Resend, our email delivery provider, which sends them from its EU region in Ireland. Google is used only if you choose Google sign-in. These account features may not yet be available on this site. If the optional section review is available and you choose “Review this section”, we send that section of your guided preparation notes to OpenAI for processing: your story answers, your reference list (titles, locations, excerpts, how each relates and its topic), or both. We do not send your case record, form answers, questionnaire answers, unfinished reference edits, or your account name, email or other account details; anything you typed into the section itself is sent as written. We make each request with OpenAI’s no-storage setting (store: false), so OpenAI does not keep the request or its answer as a stored response; OpenAI’s API policies may still let it hold API data for a limited period to monitor abuse. The review answer is shown to you and is not saved to your account. Nothing is sent unless you ask for a review.
6. Saved progress and expiry
Saved questionnaire progress and guided preparation drafts carry an expiry date 90 days after their last successful save. Automatic deletion of expired items is not running yet, so an expired item stays stored, and may still reopen, until you delete it or your account. We will update this notice before automatic deletion starts. Deleting a saved journey clears its answers and associated drafts and leaves a content-free recovery record.
7. Deleting your account
When you have an account, open Your account to delete it after a recent sign-in. This removes your sign-in identity, saved journeys, guided preparation drafts, terms-acceptance and residence record, testing access and any matching route waitlist entries. We keep a content-free record of the internal account number and deletion time so a restored backup cannot bring the account back. It does not immediately erase backup copies or messages already sent to support.
8. Waitlists and your answers
If a route waitlist is available, it collects your email, chosen route and consent record, not a case file. We do not sell your discovery answers or use them to train an AI model.
9. Your organizer or checklist and optional updates
If you request our free research organizer or O-1A evidence checklist by email, we store your email, the version of the request notice, your separate optional educational-update choice, and request, delivery-attempt and confirmation times in our own PostgreSQL database hosted by Render in Frankfurt. We send the requested email through Resend, our email delivery provider, which sends it from its EU region in Ireland. We do not attach discovery answers, a chosen route, citizenship, account details or website tracking to this record. Recurring educational updates require your separate choice and email confirmation; downloading or requesting the organizer or checklist alone does not permit marketing.
10. Email expiry and cancellation
Organizer and checklist requests expire after 48 hours, including confirmed requests. If you separately request and confirm educational updates, that permission expires after 90 days without a fresh confirmation. An unconfirmed new request does not change an existing confirmed subscription. Expired records are removed by a daily cleanup; backups and email-provider records may remain under their separate retention terms. A cancellation link in the email removes the active request and any educational-update permission without sign-in. Use Contact for deletion assistance. These features are offered only when their delivery and storage service is available.
11. Contact messages
The Contact form uses your email, topic and message to respond to your request, not to enroll you in marketing. Please leave out sensitive case details. We confirm acceptance only when our email service accepts the message.
12. Payments
Payments are taken only when the Visa Trouble Planner subscription is offered to you. Stripe, our payment processor, runs checkout, the billing portal and the payments themselves. When you subscribe, Stripe receives your name, the email address on your account, your billing address, your card or other payment details, an account reference and the terms version you accepted. Card details go directly to Stripe and are not stored by Visa Trouble. We keep Stripe's customer and subscription references, the subscription status and dates, the billing country and state Stripe reports (to compare with where you told us you live), the terms, price and residence you confirmed at checkout, and any refunds. Deleting your account cancels an active subscription; refund records stay as business records without the link to your account. Stripe handles payment information under its own privacy policy, including for fraud prevention and its legal obligations. See stripe.com/privacy.
13. Website analytics
We use Plausible Analytics to count visits to selected public pages and improve the website. We send only the canonical page address, with no URL queries, fragments, referrers, form answers or account details. No advertising, interaction tracking or session replay is enabled in Plausible. Ordinary requests disclose your IP address and browser information to Plausible; it derives approximate location, device information and a site-specific daily identifier without storing raw IP addresses or raw browser strings. Plausible processes event and session records in the EU. Records follow our plan retention period (up to five years under the previously disclosed trial), or remain until we delete the site data. Turning counts off stops future requests and does not erase earlier records. We respect Global Privacy Control. You can turn off page counts below; only your requested preference is stored in this browser. Hosting and security logs remain separate. See plausible.io/data-policy and plausible.io/dpa. Separately, to judge which of our advertising campaigns help people, we keep our own first-party daily totals of a few steps in a visit: arriving, starting discovery, seeing results or a route guide, requesting the organizer or checklist, completing signup, starting checkout and paying. Each total holds only the date, the step, a campaign code from our own campaign links (or none) and a number, in our Render database in Frankfurt. We do not store your IP address, browser details, account, email, session, page address, referrer, ad click identifiers or answers with these totals. The campaign code is removed from the address bar when the page loads and kept in this browser tab for the visit only while analytics is on. Your browser sends these steps only when analytics is on in the settings below: on by default outside the EU and EEA, off until you turn it on inside them, and off with Global Privacy Control. Organizer and checklist requests, signups and payments are counted by our server when they happen. Those requests and signups are counted under no campaign unless your browser sent a campaign code with analytics on; payments are always counted without a campaign code. Our own reports show completed days only, and show a campaign code beside a step only when at least five that day had that code and at least five did not; the rest are shown under no campaign. The counting service briefly holds your IP address in memory to limit repeated requests; it is not written to the database. Daily totals are deleted after 25 months.
14. Questions about privacy
This notice was updated 29 October 2026. Use Contact for privacy questions, access or deletion requests, or help when you cannot access your account. The form will tell you if the contact service is unavailable.
Page statistics
We use Plausible for basic counts on selected public pages. No advertising, form tracking or session replay. We respect Global Privacy Control.
Your choice is stored only in this browser for this site. Turning counts off stops future requests; it cannot retract a request already delivered.
Analytics
In your region analytics stays off unless you turn it on. If you do, we count a few steps of each visit (arriving, starting discovery and seeing your results) as daily totals per campaign link, to learn which campaigns help people. No answers, form entries, account details, IP addresses or browser identifiers are kept with these counts, and there is no session replay.
Your choice is stored only in this browser for this site. Turning analytics off stops future collection; it cannot retract what was already sent.
How Plausible handles page counts
How Stripe handles payment information
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