Plainly

Privacy Policy

Effective date: June 14, 2026

Plainly ("the extension," "we," "us") turns confusing text, documents, screenshots, and PDFs — medical, insurance, tax, and financial documents especially, but also anything you find hard to understand — into plain English. It was built to be privacy-respecting. This policy explains what the extension accesses, what leaves your device, and what we do — and don't — keep.

What Plainly processes

When you ask Plainly to decode something, the content you choose is sent to our service to generate the explanation. Depending on how you use it, that content may be:

Text you highlight on a page or paste into the popup.
An image or screenshot you capture, paste, or attach.
A PDF you attach.

We only send content when you take an explicit action to decode it — clicking the floating Plainly Decode button, the Decode button, a Capture button, or pasting a screenshot to decode.

How it's processed

The content you submit is sent over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection to our backend (hosted on Vercel), which forwards it to Anthropic's Claude API to produce the plain-English summary, then returns the result to you.

We do not store, log, or retain your documents or their contents on our servers. Your content is processed in memory only to fulfill your request and is not saved afterward. Anthropic processes the content under its own terms and does not use API data to train its models.

Clipboard

For convenience, when you open the popup it may read your clipboard to pre-fill copied text or detect a screenshot. This happens locally in your browser. Nothing from your clipboard is sent anywhere unless you choose to decode it.

Data stored on your device

Plainly stores a small amount of data locally in your browser (chrome.storage.local), never on our servers:

Usage counts and your plan status (free / Pro).
Your most recent result, cached so re-opening doesn't spend another decode.
If you activate Pro, your license key.

Uninstalling the extension removes this local data.

Pro licenses

If you activate Plainly Pro, your license key is sent to our backend to verify it (and, when applicable, to our payments provider, Lemon Squeezy). Payment itself is handled by the provider — we never receive or store your card details.

Third parties

Anthropic — processes submitted content to generate explanations (Claude API).
Vercel — hosts our backend.
Lemon Squeezy — payments and license verification (only if you buy Pro).

We do not sell your data, and we do not use advertising or third-party tracking or analytics.

Permissions, and why we ask

activeTab / access to the current page — to show the floating Decode button and to screenshot the current tab when you ask.
Clipboard — to pre-fill from text or screenshots you've copied.
Storage — to keep usage counts, your plan, and cached results locally.

Children

Plainly is not directed to children under 13 and does not knowingly collect data from them.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy; material changes will be reflected here with a new effective date.

Contact

Questions about your privacy? Contact us at: privacy@heyplainly.com