Privacy Policy

thedebateprep.com is run by The Debate Prep, an independent project built by a competitive debater. You can reach us at thedebateprepsupport@gmail.com or through the contact page.

When you make an account and use the app, we save:

• Account details: your email address, name, school, grade level, debate format, whether you're a student, judge or both, and whether the account is for someone under 13. We ask for your birth month and year when you sign up, but we don't keep them.
• Your work: cases, introductions, plans and conclusions, flows, evidence cards and Evidence Finder searches, Refute Tables, speeches and their feedback, practice rounds, ballots, imported pairings, rubrics, and judge-training progress.
• Dictation and recordings: when you speak into the app, your browser turns your voice into text and we save only that text. We never upload or keep audio files. Your browser's own speech service handles the audio (Chrome uses Google's, and Safari uses Apple's).
• Teams: which teams you're on and your role, team names and join codes for coaches, assignments, which assignments you started work from, for a student under 13 joining a team, the parent's approval record (described below), evidence cards added to a team's evidence library, who added each one, and a history of who added, edited or removed which card and when, and failed join-code tries (kept to slow down guessing). If a coach buys Premium seats: how many seats the team has, its billing period, and who has a seat.
• Use of coaching tools: which tool you used, when, and how many credits it cost, so we can keep your credit balance right. On a Free account, when you use your free weekly Practice Round, we also save your time zone and which week you used it, so the next one unlocks on your own Monday.
• A short record of how the app is used: for example that you signed up, opened the app, or looked at the pricing page. We keep this ourselves, use it only to see what's working in the app, and never share it. We don't use advertising or analytics companies.
• Emails we've sent you and your email choices, so we don't email you too often or after you unsubscribe.
• Billing (Premium only): your plan, its status, and the Stripe customer ID. We never see your card number.
• Messages you send us through the contact form, and the coaches form if you fill it in.

Some device preferences, like timer sounds, are kept only in your browser on that device.

These companies process data for us, only to provide the parts of the site listed:

If you import a Google Doc or Sheet by link, our server downloads that public document to read it. We don't use any advertising or tracking services.

You can share a case, Refute Table or evidence search with a partner. Only you decide to do that, and you choose what they can do: view it, comment and suggest changes for you to approve, or edit it. Nothing else in your account is shared. You can change someone's access or remove them at any time, and a partner can leave a shared item at any time.

• If you invite someone by email, we store that email address with the invite, so only that person can use it. The invite is emailed to them by us (through Resend, listed above), or from your own email app.
• Suggested changes are saved until you or an editor approve or reject them. Comments are saved with your name, and the owner, editors and commenters on the item can read them. Viewers can’t see comments. When a shared item is deleted, its invites, suggestions and comments are deleted with it.
• While a shared item is open, the people on it can see each other’s names, who else has it open, which box each person is in, where their cursor is, and the last few words they typed. This is live only and isn’t saved.

A coach can create a team after confirming they're 13 or older and coach or teach debate. Students join a team only by entering the coach's code and choosing to join on a screen that names the coach and lists what they'll see. Nobody can add a student to a team. While a student is on a team, the team's coach and any assistant coaches the coach adds can see:

• Your name and the debate format you picked, and when you last saved work.
• Your cases, including introductions, plans, conclusions and point-of-information and heckle prep.
• Your Refute Tables.
• Your speeches with their feedback and scores.
• Your practice rounds, including the judge’s decision.
• Your Evidence Finder searches.
• Comments on your cases, Refute Tables and searches, including ones from partners you shared them with.
• Whether you have a Premium seat the team pays for.

They can’t edit your work, and can’t see your email address, your school, your other settings, or your billing. Coaches can comment on a student's cases, Refute Tables and evidence searches. They can also assign a resolution to the team, and see which students started work from it. Students on a team can't see each other's work, and they see the names of their team's coaches. Students under 13 can join a team only with a separate approval from a parent or guardian (see “Students under 13 on a team” below), and what a coach sees about them is shorter.

The one exception is the team's evidence library. Coaches, assistant coaches and students can each add evidence cards to it, and everyone on the team can see every card there and save their own copy. Nothing goes into it unless the person adding it chooses to, and the app says that the whole team will see it, with their name, before a student adds a card. Like comments on a shared item, each card shows the name on the account of whoever added it. The team can also see the library's history: who added, edited or removed which card, and when. A student can remove a card they added at any time, and coaches can remove any card.

A student can leave a team at any time in Settings → Teams, which ends the coaches' access straight away and takes the evidence cards that student added, and the history about them, out of the team's library. A coach can also remove a student (which does the same), or delete the team. Copies of a card that teammates already saved stay in their own libraries. Comments a coach left on a student's work stay on it, where the student can read or delete them. Settings always lists who can see your work.

Separately, a student can share a specific item with a partner, as described above. Students use their own credits on a team unless the head coach gives them a Premium seat, which makes them Premium while the coach pays. The team's coaches see who has a seat. They don't see a student's credit balance or what the credits were used on. The coach's payment goes through Stripe, like Premium; students' billing details aren't involved.

• To run the app: save your work, sync it across your devices, and give you feedback when you ask for it.
• To keep your credit balance and Premium plan correct.
• To answer you when you contact us, to fix bugs, and to see which parts of the app are working.

• We don't sell student data, or anyone's data, and we don't rent or trade it.
• We don't use it for targeted advertising. There are no ads on the site at all.
• We don't build profiles about you for anything other than running the app for you, like keeping your credits and showing your own progress.
• We delete it when you ask. Delete your account in Settings, or ask us (see "Your rights and requests" below).
• We protect it with reasonable security, described in the next section.

• Everything between your browser and our site, and between our servers and the services above, is sent over encrypted connections (HTTPS).
• Our database provider encrypts the stored data on its disks.
• Every table in our database has access rules (row-level security), so your account can read only your own data and the items someone has shared with you.
• Only one account, the site owner’s, has administrator access. In the app it shows totals, like how many people signed up, and coach sign-up forms. It never shows your work. The owner can also reach the database through our hosting provider, and does that only to fix a problem or to handle a request from you.

No system is perfectly secure. If something ever goes wrong with your data, we'll tell you.

We keep your account and your work for as long as your account exists. When you delete your account, we delete your work, your account details, and any messages or coach forms you sent us from our database straight away. Copies can stay in our hosting provider's encrypted backups for a short time after that, until those backups expire. Stripe keeps payment records it is legally required to keep.

We also delete some data on a schedule, because the app no longer needs it:

• Under 13, no parent approval: 14 days after sign-up, the account and the parent's email are deleted.
• Under 13, approved by a parent: if the account goes 12 months without being used, we delete it and all its data. Records of how they use the app are deleted after 12 months.
• Failed team join-code tries: after one day.
• Under 13, a team request nobody approves: the request and the parent's email address are deleted a week after its link expires.

Go to Settings → Account → Delete my account and type DELETE to confirm. That cancels any Premium plan, then removes your account and everything saved in it. It can't be undone. You can also ask us to do it (see below).

You, or a parent or guardian of a student under 18, can ask us to:

• see the data we hold about you, or get a copy of it;
• correct something that’s wrong (most of it you can also change yourself in the app);
• delete your account and its data.

Email thedebateprepsupport@gmail.com or use the contact page. We'll answer within 30 days. We may ask you to send the request from the email address on the account, so we know it's really you.

Students under 13 can use The Debate Prep only after a parent or guardian approves. When someone tells us they're under 13, we ask only for their first name and a parent's or guardian's email address, and we email the parent. The account can't save anything until the parent approves. If nobody approves within 14 days of signing up, we delete the account and the parent's email address.

The email tells the parent what we collect once they approve:

• Their email address and how they sign in (a password, or their Google or Microsoft account).
• Their name, school, grade level and debate format.
• The work they create: cases, speeches (as text), practice rounds, flows, evidence and searches.
• Feedback on that work, a record of which tools they used and the credits each one cost (and their time zone, when they use the free weekly Practice Round), and a short record of how they use the app (for example, when they signed up and opened it).

If they use the microphone to dictate, their web browser turns their voice into text using the browser maker’s own speech service (Google’s in Chrome, Apple’s in Safari). We never receive or keep the audio, only the text.

We use it only to run the app for the child. For accounts under 13:

• No advertising, and we never sell their data.
• No marketing or credit emails to them.
• They can’t share work with partners. They can join a coach’s team only if you separately approve that team, and then only the team’s coaches see their work.
• Practice opponents use the basic browser voice, not an outside voice service.
• They can’t buy Premium.

These services receive a child's data, only to do these jobs for us:

• Supabase stores the account and their work, and runs our server.
• Vercel hosts the website, so it sees standard web request data like an IP address and browser type.
• Anthropic writes the feedback, from the text they send to a coaching tool (never their email address or school), and runs the web searches in Evidence Finder. Its terms say it won’t use this to train its models.
• Resend sends our emails to you: your email address, their first name and what the email says.
• Google or Microsoft, only if they choose to sign in with that account.

Information from a child under 13 is never shared with anyone beyond the service providers listed here, and never used for anything except running the app.

After a parent approves, we email them a confirmation with a way to undo it. The link in the parent's emails lets them see what the account holds and delete it, with all its data, at any time. A parent can also email thedebateprepsupport@gmail.com to get a full copy of the data, correct it, or stop us collecting more (which means deleting the account). We answer within 30 days. We never ask a child for more information than the app needs.

If you think a child under 13 is using an account without a parent's approval, tell us and we'll delete it.

A student under 13 can join a coach's team only if a parent or guardian says yes to that team. This is a separate approval from the one the parent gave when the account was made, and the account approval does not let any coach see anything. We switch this on team by team. Until we switch it on for a team, students under 13 can't join that team.

How it works:

• The student enters the team's code and sees the same screen as everyone else, which names the coach and lists what the coach will see. Then we email the parent or guardian who approved the account, at the address they gave then (the student can't choose a different one), with the coach's name, the team's name, exactly what the coach can and can't see, and a link.
• Until the parent says yes, the student is not on the team. The coach can see how many joins are waiting, and nothing else about them: no name and no work.
• The link works once and expires after 7 days. If nobody approves, we delete the request and the parent's email address a week after the link expires.
• When the parent says yes, they can change the name the coach will see. We save a record of the approval: which student, which team, the parent's email address, the name the parent approved, the date and time, which link was used, and the exact words the parent was shown.

If a parent says yes, the team's coach and any assistant coaches the coach adds can see:

• Their name (first name and last initial, or the name you approve), the debate format they picked, and when they last saved work.
• Their cases, including introductions, plans, conclusions and point-of-information and heckle prep.
• Their Refute Tables.
• Their speeches with their feedback and scores.
• Their practice rounds, including the judge’s decision.
• Their Evidence Finder searches.
• Comments on their cases, Refute Tables and searches.

They can’t edit their work, and can’t see their email address, their school, their other settings, or their billing. The coach sees the student by the name the parent approved (a first name, and a last initial if the parent likes), never by a full name.

These stay the same for a student under 13 on a team:

• They still can't share their work with partners, and other students on the team can't see their work.
• They can't add cards to the team's evidence library, which every student on the team can read, and they can't be given a Premium seat.
• Being on a team doesn't change what we collect about them, apart from the approval record above. There are still no ads and no advertising or tracking services, and dictation audio is still never uploaded or kept.

Stopping it. A parent can stop sharing at any time, without an account, using the link in the confirmation email we send after they approve (every email we send them about it has that link). The coach stops seeing the student's work straight away. The student can also leave the team at any time in Settings → Teams, and a coach can remove them. Each ends the coach's access straight away. To join the team again, the student asks again and the parent decides again.

Deleting it. Deleting the student's account deletes the approval record with it. A parent can also delete the account from the link in the first email we sent them, or email thedebateprepsupport@gmail.com and we will delete it. Comments a coach left on the student's work stay on it, where the student can read or delete them, until the account is deleted.

Some browsers can send a "Do Not Track" signal. We don't track you across other websites and we don't use advertising or analytics companies, so there's nothing for that signal to switch off: the site works the same whether or not your browser sends it.

This version takes effect on 10/19/26. If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll change that date, list what changed on the past versions page, and show a notice in the app the next time you sign in.