Privacy, terms and support
Last updated 22 October 2026. This is a plain description of how BranchBook works, not a legal certification.
Support, export and deletion
Write to support@branchbook.app for help, a copy of your tree, or to delete your account. We answer within five working days. A person handles each request; there is no automated account deletion yet.
- Export: we send the people, facts, sources, notes and questions in your tree as a file.
- Deletion: we remove your account, the trees you own, and your links and invitations from the live database within 30 days. Encrypted backups are kept for 90 days and then expire, so deleted data is gone from every copy within 90 days of deletion.
- Records another family entered in their own tree are theirs; deleting your account ends your links to them but does not delete their tree.
What BranchBook keeps
- Your display name, handle and passkey public keys. We never see your passkey's private key or a password.
- Your tree: the people, relationships, dates, notes, questions and sources you or your research add, including details about living relatives. Enter what you would be comfortable sharing with the relatives you invite.
- A record of each research request, AI answer and payment, so cost and results can be checked.
Who can see your tree
- Only you and the people you invite. Invitations create a separate private tree for the person you invite; they do not open yours.
- If you link a person and choose reuse verified evidence, the linked tree sees the cited facts and quoted excerpts about that one person, not the rest of the record or your tree.
- If you choose view my whole tree, the linked family can read your whole tree, living relatives included, until you withdraw it.
- People you share with can save selected information and its sources to their own tree. Stopping sharing blocks future access, not copies already saved. Copies do not update automatically.
Services that process your data
- Vercel hosts the site and runs its servers.
- Neon stores the database.
- AI models through the Vercel AI Gateway: OpenAI reads a note's text and the named person to extract details, and answers questions from your tree's records, which can include living relatives. Typesafe AI classifies relationships named in a note. Anthropic runs archive research about a person who has died. Living people are never sent to archive research.
- Advantage Preservation archives receive the search words used in archive research.
- Stripe processes payments. We do not see your card details.
- PostHog and Vercel Web Analytics receive usage counts. PostHog receives a scrambled account identifier and the name of the action (for example "search used"), never search text, names, notes or family records. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control turn this off.
- GitHub stores encrypted daily database backups for 90 days.
Research credits
- A credit costs $2 (five for $10) and buys one focused genealogy research session across public web sources and historical archives, without a geographic restriction. Coverage and access vary: paid or login-only records, images, and PDFs may require manual follow-up. Findings are not guaranteed, and newly retrieved web findings are saved with their sources and still need confirmation.
- If a run fails, needs a relative's answer, or the discovery service or selected archive cannot be searched, its credit is returned automatically.
- Credits do not expire. If a purchase went wrong, write to support within 30 days and we will refund unused credits.
- AI findings are shown as needing confirmation, research leads or conflicting evidence until the evidence holds up. These labels describe the information, not anyone’s identity or account.
Passkeys
You sign in with a passkey. Add a backup passkey on a second device from Account. If you lose every passkey, we cannot sign in for you or restore the account; you can still ask support for an export or deletion after we confirm you are the account holder.