Privacy policy · KickScholar

In short

Private by default. Nothing about a student is public until the student chooses to publish it.
We do not sell your personal information and we do not show ads.
You stay in control. You confirm the facts on your profile, approve every essay and decide what a funding page shows.
Questions or requests go to us through our contact page.

This policy explains how KickScholar ("KickScholar", "we", "us") handles personal information when you use kickscholar.com and its related services. It covers students, parents and guardians, and supporters.

Information we collect

Information you give us

Account details: your name, email address and password. We store passwords only as a one-way hash. If you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address and profile picture from Google.
Student profile: what you add or confirm, such as school, grade level, graduation year, state, activities, achievements, experience, goals, stories, and academic information like GPA and test scores.
Optional eligibility details: for scholarships with those rules, you may add details such as birth date, citizenship, county, school district, heritage, first-generation status or financial need. These stay private.
AI credit requests: if you ask for more free AI credits, we keep the request, any note you choose to add, and the counts of upcoming deadlines we used to decide it.
Documents you upload, such as a resume or transcript. Files are stored privately. We keep a short, redacted excerpt of the text so we can suggest facts for you to review.
Applications and essays: drafts, versions, notes and the statuses you record.
Funding pages: the story, budget, updates and other content you write, and messages supporters leave for you.
Guardian links: invitations you send or accept, and a record of actions a linked guardian takes on a student's behalf.
Credit purchases: if you buy an AI credit pack, we keep the pack, the price, the payment status and the buyer's account. Card details are collected by Stripe; we never receive your full card number.
Supporter details: when you contribute, your email address, the name you choose to show (if any) and your message. Card details are collected by Stripe; we never receive your full card number.
Messages you send us through the contact form: your name, email address, topic and message, delivered to our team's inbox by email. We don't store them in the app.
Reports you send us about a funding page.

Information collected automatically

Security data: your IP address when you sign in, used to limit repeated sign-in attempts. When someone who is not signed in reports a page, we store a salted hash of the IP address, not the address itself.
Usage analytics: pages viewed and product events, recorded with PostHog. We strip query strings from page addresses and do not record sessions.
Service logs: our hosting provider keeps standard request logs for operating and securing the service.

How we use information

To run your account and the features you use: scholarship matching, the application workspace, funding pages and guardian access.
To check scholarship requirements against your profile. Exact facts such as GPA, state and deadlines are checked by fixed rules, not by AI.
To provide AI features you choose to use, described below.
To send account emails and the notifications you have not turned off, such as deadline reminders and contribution receipts.
To process contributions, refunds and payouts.
To keep KickScholar safe: preventing fraud and abuse, reviewing reports, and moderating funding pages.
To understand how the product is used, in aggregate, so we can improve it.
To meet legal obligations.

How AI is used

KickScholar uses AI models from third-party AI providers to suggest facts from documents you upload, help draft and check essays and funding page text, and judge things fixed rules cannot, such as how well a story fits a prompt.

We send only what a task needs. Judgments about your fit use the profile facts you have confirmed, not your name, contact details, birth date or city.
Private eligibility details such as citizenship, heritage and financial need are used by fixed rules only and are never sent to an AI model. If you share your county, school district or heritage, KickScholar may use them, never with your name, in the searches it runs to find scholarships for you; an AI assistant you connect as your Scout sees heritage only if you tick it. If you suggest a heritage that is missing from the list, only its name is kept, without your name or account.
When you ask us to read a document, the document's text is sent to a model to extract suggested facts. Nothing is added to your profile until you accept it.
AI output is always a suggestion for you to review. AI never submits an application or publishes a funding page.
To find scholarships our directory is missing, we may search the web with general words from your confirmed profile: your state, class year, and fields or activities you are interested in (for example, “California music scholarship class of 2027”). These searches never include your name, school, city, contact details or private eligibility details, and what they find is checked by a person before it is listed.
If you turn on Scout and connect an AI assistant you already use, that assistant can read only the scholarship-search details you choose to share — for example your state, class year and general interests, and only if you tick them, your GPA or sensitive eligibility details. It never gets your name, contact details, address, birth date, school, documents, essays or stories. The assistant is run by its own provider under its own terms, and you can stop it at any time from Scout. A parent scouting for you can share only the general details; you see and control what they share.

What is ever public

Your profile, documents, grades and eligibility details are never public.
A funding page becomes public only when the student publishes it, and it shows only the fields the student turned on.
Contact details, home address and birth date are never shown on a funding page.
Funding pages of students under 18 are shared by link only: they are not listed in our directory, sitemap or search results, and they cannot show a surname, city, grades or social links. A linked parent or guardian must approve the page before it is published.
A supporter's name appears only if the supporter chooses to show it. Supporter email addresses are never shown to students or the public.

We share personal information only in these ways:

Service providers who run parts of KickScholar for us, under contracts that limit their use of the data: Vercel (hosting), Neon (database), Amazon Web Services (private file storage), Stripe (payments and payouts), Resend (email delivery), AI model providers (AI features), a web search provider (scholarship searches), PostHog (analytics) and Google (if you choose Google sign-in).
Parents and guardians you link to your account, who can see and help with your account as described on the family pages. Students see every action a guardian takes.
The public, only for funding page content a student chooses to publish.
For legal reasons, when required by law or to protect the safety, rights or property of our users, the public or KickScholar.
In a business transfer, such as a merger or acquisition, subject to this policy.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

Cookies and similar technologies

Sign-in cookie that keeps you signed in. It is required for the service to work.
Family preference cookie that remembers which linked student a parent or guardian is helping, for up to 30 days.
Analytics storage set by PostHog to count visits and product use.

We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Students under 18 and parents

KickScholar is built for high school and college students, and many of them are under 18. We apply stricter rules to their information, described above, and parents or guardians can be linked to help. Students under 13 cannot publish a funding page.

KickScholar is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from a child under 13 without a parent's consent. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

How long we keep information

We keep account and profile information while your account is open.
When you delete a document, we delete the file and its stored excerpt.
Contribution, credit purchase, refund and payout records are financial records. We keep them as long as the law requires, even after an account is closed.
We keep a record of what our AI features cost to run: which feature ran, the model, token counts, cost and time. It contains nothing you wrote or uploaded, and we keep it after an account is closed for cost accounting.
You can delete your account yourself from Settings. Deleting it removes your profile, documents and files, applications, essays, funding page, AI credits, notifications and family links. We keep the financial records and AI usage cost records described above, and a record that an account was deleted that contains no personal information.
If your funding page has received contributions or you have payouts, contact us from the address on the account and we will close it with you once the funds are settled.

Your choices and rights

See and correct most of your information in your account at any time.
Delete documents yourself, and delete your whole account from Settings.
Choose your emails in notification settings. Every notification email includes a one-click unsubscribe link. Account and receipt emails are always sent.
Control what is public in your funding page settings, and unpublish a page at any time.
End guardian access from your account settings at any time.

Depending on where you live, including California, you may have rights to know what personal information we hold, to get a copy, to correct or delete it, and not to be treated differently for exercising these rights. Use our contact page to make a request. A parent or guardian may make a request for their child.

Security

We protect information with encrypted connections, hashed passwords, private file storage with short-lived access links, access checks on every account action, and an audit log of staff actions. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a strong, unique password and tell us right away if you notice anything wrong.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use your information, we will tell you by email or in the product before it takes effect.

Contact us

Questions, requests or concerns about privacy: send them through our contact page.