Privacy policy

Vow&Kin is the online service at vowandkin.com for digital wedding invitations, Save the Date pages, RSVP and guest planning. The controller responsible for the processing described in this policy is:

For anything about your personal data, write to hello@vowandkin.com. [Whether a data protection officer must be appointed will be confirmed.]

Vow&Kin is the controller for the data we decide about ourselves: your account, payments and invoices, our website, support conversations, security records and analytics and advertising measurement (with your consent, or for visitors outside the EEA, the UK and Switzerland unless they opt out).

Guest lists and RSVP answers are different. The couple decides whom to invite, which events each household sees and which questions to ask. For that information Vow&Kin works on the couple's behalf as a processor (Article 28 GDPR): we store it, show it to the right household, send invitations or reminders when the couple asks us to, and do not use it for our own purposes. A couple organising their own private wedding is usually covered by the GDPR's exemption for purely personal or household activities, but we apply the same safeguards either way. [Data processing terms for couples will be added to the Terms of Service.]

If you are a guest, please contact the couple first with questions about your invitation or your answers. You can also write to us and we will help them respond. Some guest-related data is ours to look after: delivery status and bounce records for the emails we send, security logs, and the consent choice you make on our cookie banner.

Account information: your email address, the display name, language and time zone you choose, an optional profile picture, sign-in links and codes, the weddings you belong to and the role you have there, and your choice about product emails.

Wedding and invitation content: the couple's names, dates, venues, events, schedule, story, travel and accommodation notes, photographs, videos, music you upload, gift and registry wording, the payment link for a gift fund, seating plans, budget, checklist and vendor notes. Photographs and videos are kept in private storage and shown through short-lived signed links.

Guest information entered by the couple: names, households, email addresses and phone numbers, preferred language, whether a guest is an adult or a child, plus-ones, the events each household is invited to, tags, seating and private notes. Couples can type this in or import it from a CSV file.

RSVP answers given by guests: attendance for each event, menu choices, answers to the couple's questions, a contact email, a note for the couple and, if the couple uses a gift fund, contributions a guest chooses to report (name, amount and message). Vow&Kin never receives or holds gift money.

Dietary and accessibility answers deserve special care. An answer such as an allergy, a medical diet, a religious meal requirement or a need for step-free access can reveal information about health or beliefs. These questions appear only when the couple adds them, answering is voluntary, and the answers are used only so the couple and their caterer and venue can plan the day. They are visible to the couple and the collaborators the couple invites, can appear in the couple's kitchen summary and exports, and are never used for analytics or advertising. [The wording guests see before answering these questions will be reviewed.]

Payments: the plan you buy, the price, currency and tax, the billing email, Stripe's payment and session references, refunds, and the record of the withdrawal-right request you confirm at checkout (wording version, time and language). Card details go directly to Stripe; we never see full card numbers.

Messages: for each email we send for a couple, the recipient address, greeting, message text and private invitation link, plus delivery events such as delivered, bounced or marked as spam. Open and click tracking are switched off. Where SMS sending is enabled, the phone number, message, delivery status, STOP and START replies and the couple's confirmation that guests agreed to receive texts.

Technical and security data: IP address, browser and device information, the pages requested and error reports, processed by our hosting provider and our servers to deliver the site, prevent abuse and fix faults, together with records of security-relevant actions such as RSVP submissions.

Support: what you write to us by email or through the contact form on our legal notice page (your email address, the optional name and your message), and our replies. Contact form messages are delivered to our mailbox through Resend and are not stored in our website's database.

Analytics and advertising data are described in the section on cookies below. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland they are collected only with your consent.

You need to give us an email address to create an account, and payment details to buy a plan. Everything a guest is asked in an RSVP is voluntary. We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing.

We use specialist providers. They may process personal data only on our instructions and under a data processing agreement, unless the table says they act as an independent controller.

Where this table says “with consent”, visitors outside the EEA, the UK and Switzerland are measured by default unless they opt out, as explained in the section on cookies; for them, “marketing consent” below means they have not opted out of advertising measurement.

When you have given marketing consent and server-side conversion delivery is switched on, our server can also report a sign-up, purchase or refund to Google, Meta or Pinterest. That report contains an event ID, the plan, value and currency, the ad click ID from your visit and, for Meta and Pinterest, your email address in hashed (SHA-256) form. It never contains guest data, invitation content, RSVP answers or private links. If you withdraw marketing consent, stored click IDs are erased and queued reports are cancelled.

For the collection and transmission of data through the Meta Pixel, we and Meta Platforms Ireland Limited are joint controllers under Article 26 GDPR; Meta's Controller Addendum applies and Meta is responsible for the processing that follows. [Joint-controller wording for Meta, Google and Pinterest will be reviewed.]

AI assistants: you can copy reviewed instructions into an assistant of your choice and import its answer, which sends nothing from Vow&Kin to that assistant. If direct connections are switched on and you connect an assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, it can read your invitation text, wedding titles and languages and an RSVP total, and save private drafts. It never receives guest names, contact details, RSVP answers or invitation links. The assistant's provider processes this under its own terms; you can disconnect at any time under Account settings.

We also share data with our accountant and legal advisers where needed, with the collaborators and Concierge team members a couple invites to a wedding, and with authorities when the law requires it. We do not sell personal data.

Some providers above are based in the United States or can access data from there. Where a provider is certified under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, the European Commission's adequacy decision of 10 July 2023 applies. Otherwise we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR) together with additional safeguards such as encryption in transit. You can ask us for a copy of the relevant safeguards. [Each provider's certification and transfer basis will be confirmed.]

We use cookies, browser storage and similar technologies. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland only the necessary ones run without your choice: when you first visit, a banner lets you choose Necessary only, Allow analytics, or Allow all.

Before you make a choice, Google's tag may load on our public pages in Google Consent Mode with every consent signal set to denied. It then sends cookieless measurement pings to Google: it sets and reads no cookies and stores no advertising identifiers, and the pings carry technical information such as the page, the time and the browser, which Google receives together with your IP address. Google uses them to model conversions in aggregate. Meta and Pinterest never load before you allow marketing. When you choose, the tag follows your choice; with Necessary only it stays in this cookieless state.

For visitors outside the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, analytics and advertising measurement are on by default. A short notice tells you so, and you can switch either off at any time with “Privacy choices”, which offers the same three options as the banner. We work out the region from the country our hosting provider Cloudflare reports for your connection; if it cannot be determined, we treat you as being in the EEA. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as an opt-out of advertising measurement and keep only analytics on, unless you choose otherwise.

Also necessary: to show prices in your currency, we set the first-party cookie vk_currency for 30 days. It holds only a currency code (EUR, GBP or USD), worked out from the country Cloudflare reports for your connection or picked by you on the pricing page; it contains no identifier and is not used for analytics or advertising.

Our own team sets the cookie vk_internal on its own devices so that its visits are left out of our statistics and never reach advertising platforms. It is never set for visitors.

Third-party tags load only on our public pages and on the checkout confirmation page. They never load on private invitations, Save the Date pages, demo invitations, previews or the wedding workspace. If you are signed in and allow analytics, PostHog links events to your internal account ID (a random code, never your name or email). Events never include guest details, invitation text, RSVP answers or invitation links. Durations for third-party cookies are set by each provider and can change.

You can change your choice at any time with “Privacy choices” in the footer of every page, which reopens the banner. Clearing this site's cookies and stored data in your browser settings also brings the banner back on your next visit. When you withdraw marketing consent, we delete the ad click IDs we stored and cancel any queued conversion reports.

To know which of our own campaigns bring visitors, sign-ups and orders, we keep a small amount of campaign information without using cookies or browser storage, whatever you choose in the cookie banner.

• Landing counts: when a page of our website is loaded, our server adds one to a daily counter for that page, the campaign parameters in the link (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content) and the country our hosting provider Cloudflare reports for the connection. The counter stores no IP address, browser details, cookie, advertising click ID or time of day, so it cannot be linked to you.
• Sign-up source: while you browse, the page keeps the campaign parameters of the link you arrived with, the referring website's name (not the full address), the landing page and the kind of advertising click (for example “Google Ads click”, never the click ID itself) in memory only. Nothing is written to your device, and it is gone when you close or reload the tab. When you create an account or start a checkout, this information is sent with that request and stored with your account, together with the country Cloudflare reports. It is used only inside Vow&Kin, in aggregated reports of which campaigns lead to sign-ups, invitations and purchases, and is never shared with Google, Meta, Pinterest or any other advertising platform.

Advertising click IDs (such as gclid, fbclid or epik) and any reporting to advertising platforms still require your marketing consent, as described in the section on cookies.

Legal basis: our legitimate interest in measuring the effectiveness of our own advertising in aggregate, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR. Because nothing is stored on or read from your device for this purpose, the consent rule for device storage (Art. 5(3) ePrivacy Directive, § 25 TDDDG) does not apply to it. You can object at any time by writing to us; we will then remove the sign-up source from your account. The sign-up source is kept as long as your account exists; the landing counters contain no personal data. [This assessment will be confirmed in the legal review.]

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• get confirmation of whether we process your data and a copy of it (Art. 15)
• have inaccurate data corrected (Art. 16)
• have data erased (Art. 17)
• have processing restricted (Art. 18)
• receive data you gave us in a structured, machine-readable format (Art. 20). Couples can export guest responses as CSV at any time
• object to processing based on legitimate interest, for reasons arising from your situation, and to object at any time to direct marketing (Art. 21)
• withdraw any consent at any time, with effect for the future (Art. 7(3)); this does not affect processing before the withdrawal

To use these rights, write to hello@vowandkin.com. We answer within one month and may ask you to confirm your identity. Guests asking about data a couple entered: we will pass the request to the couple and help them answer.

You can complain to a data protection supervisory authority. Our lead authority is the Bulgarian Commission for Personal Data Protection (Комисия за защита на личните данни), 2 Prof. Tsvetan Lazarov Blvd., 1592 Sofia, Bulgaria, www.cpdp.bg. You can also contact the authority in the EU country where you live or work, or where you believe an infringement took place; the European Data Protection Board keeps a list of all authorities.

We protect data with encryption in transit, access controls on every database table, private storage for photographs and videos, signed links that expire, and invitation links that are stored only as one-way fingerprints. No online service can be perfectly secure, so please keep your sign-in email account safe and tell us at once if you suspect misuse.

Accounts are for adults planning a wedding. Couples may add children who are invited to the wedding to their guest list; please add only what is needed, such as a name and whether the guest is a child for catering. We do not knowingly allow children to create accounts.

We update this policy when the service or the law changes. The date at the top shows the latest version. If a change significantly affects how we use your data, we will tell account holders by email before it takes effect.