privacy, in plain language.

The short version

Vesper does not sell your data. Vesper does not use advertising identifiers or cross-site trackers. Vesper does not upload your photos. Personal weather history stays on your device. The app sends your approximate location to a weather provider to get a forecast, and that is nearly the entire data flow. The one exception is severe weather alerts: turn them on and Vesper has to remember roughly where you are, because a tornado warning cannot wait until you next open the app. That exception has its own section below, and everything else on this page is the detailed version of these sentences.

What Vesper collects

Vesper requests your approximate location (typically at the city or neighborhood level) to deliver weather forecasts and sunset predictions for your area. For forecasts, location is used at the time of the request and is not stored on our servers. If you turn on severe weather alerts, a coarse version of it is stored — see severe weather alertsbelow for exactly what that means. You can deny location access entirely and enter a city manually instead.

We collect anonymous, aggregated usage analytics so we can see which features are working and which are not. These analytics contain no personal identifiers, no advertising IDs, no device fingerprints, and no cross-session linkage. We cannot and do not trace any analytics event back to an individual user.

On this website, when you tap a link that leaves it — the App Store button, most of all — the page also asks our own server for a small file and names which button you used. That is how we count how many people go to download Vesper, since a tap that leaves for the App Store leaves no other trace. It sets no cookie, it goes to us and to nobody else, and it carries nothing about you beyond what any request to our servers already includes: the name of the button, the page you were on, and the hostname you went to — never a link’s address, and never anything you typed.

The App Store button also hands Apple a short channel name, such as “web-tiktok” or “web-direct”, taken from the link that brought you to this site. Apple uses it to tell us how many downloads each channel led to, as totals. It names the channel, never you.

If you joined the pre-launch waitlist, we stored your email address only for the purpose of the launch notification. We do not send marketing emails, we do not share the waitlist with third parties, and you can request removal at any time by emailing brief@vespersky.ai.

What Vesper does not collect

Vesper does not collect advertising identifiers (IDFA, AAID, or equivalents). Vesper does not use cross-site tracking cookies on the marketing website or in the app. Vesper does not integrate Google Analytics, Facebook SDK, or any advertising-focused analytics product. Vesper does not sell any user data and has no business model that depends on selling data.

We intentionally avoid the common weather app pattern of monetizing location history. The category has a poor track record here — The Weather Channel, AccuWeather, and Weather Underground have all been cited in privacy coverage for aggressive location data practices. Vesper was designed around the opposite premise: weather is one of the most location- sensitive categories in the store, so the responsible default is to collect as little as possible and store it on the device. Where a feature genuinely cannot work that way — severe weather alerts are the only one so far — we say so on this page and keep what we store as coarse as the feature allows.

Severe weather alerts

This is the one feature that requires Vesper to remember roughly where you are between forecasts, so it gets its own section.

The reason is timing. A tornado warning is useful for about ten minutes. An app that only learns about one the next time you happen to open it is not delivering a warning, it is delivering news. To reach your phone while Vesper is closed, our server has to know there is a phone to reach and roughly which warnings apply to it.

So if you turn severe weather alerts on, Vesper stores three things, and this is the complete list: a push notification token for this device, the National Weather Service zone and county codes for your area, and your coordinates rounded to two decimal places — about a kilometer. There is no account in Vesper, so there is nothing for any of this to be attached to. The push token is the only identifier involved, and its only use is being the address an alert is sent to.

The zone and county codes are the same ones the National Weather Service keys its own warnings on. A county is not a neighborhood, and those codes are what actually decide whether an alert reaches you. The rounded coordinates do one narrow job on top of that: when a forecaster draws a warning polygon inside a county, they let us avoid waking you for a storm on the far side of it. They are deliberately too coarse to be a location history, and the server rounds them again when it receives them, so that remains true even if a future version of the app sends something more precise.

Turning severe weather alerts off deletes those rows. Not flags them — deletes them. Because the push token is the only identifier we hold, removing it removes you from that system entirely. Denying Vesper location access or notification permission prevents the registration from happening at all, and rows expire on their own after 180 days if the app has not checked in.

The alerts themselves originate with the National Weather Service and arrive in the issuing office’s own wording, never rewritten. Vesper does not decide what counts as severe; a government forecaster does. Because the National Weather Service is the source, these alerts are available in the United States and its territories only.

What stays on your device

Photos taken through Sunset Verify are saved directly to your device’s Photos library. They are never uploaded to Vesper servers, never analyzed on our infrastructure, and never used to train machine-learning models. The sky you photographed is yours.

Journal entries, sunset ratings, and your personal verification history are stored locally on your device. If you delete the app, that data is removed along with it. If you reinstall the app, you start fresh — we do not maintain a cloud backup of personal verification data by design.

How the sunset quality score is computed

Vesper computes sunset quality scores locally using live atmospheric data returned by the weather provider (cloud cover, cloud altitude, humidity, visibility, and related fields). The scoring math runs on your device or in the app’s own backend — no additional data is sent to third-party sunset forecasting services, because there is no such dependency in the architecture.

Third-party services

Vesper uses third-party weather data providers to generate forecasts. These providers receive only the anonymous location coordinates required to return weather data. They do not receive email addresses, device identifiers, usernames, or any other personal data. Current providers include Apple WeatherKit on iOS and a blend of NWS and Open-Meteo data for other platforms.

Vesper may use third-party services for essential app operations such as crash reporting and release distribution. Where used, these services receive only anonymous diagnostic data and are chosen specifically for their privacy-respecting defaults.

Subscriptions and purchases

Vesper is a paid app with a 3-day free trial. Subscriptions and one-time purchases are processed by Apple’s App Store. Vesper does not see, store, or transmit your credit card number, billing address, or any other payment details — Apple handles the full payment flow on its own infrastructure.

To deliver accurate entitlement state across your devices (so that a purchase made on your iPhone unlocks Vesper on your iPad signed into the same Apple ID), Vesper uses RevenueCat as the subscription-state broker. RevenueCat receives an anonymous per-device user ID, the purchase receipt Apple issues, and the product identifier (e.g. com.v.annual.3daytrial). If you answer the optional “Where did you hear about Vesper?” question in the app, RevenueCat also keeps your answer (for example, “TikTok”) with that anonymous ID, so we can see which channels lead to subscriptions. Skipping it changes nothing. RevenueCat does not receive your name, email, phone, location, or any weather data. Otherwise RevenueCat’s only purpose in the Vesper architecture is to answer the question “is this device entitled to paid features” and deliver that answer back to the app.

You can cancel a subscription at any time in the iOS Settings app under your Apple ID → Subscriptions. Refund requests go through Apple’s standard process. Vesper does not retain or process refund information beyond what the App Store reports back through the entitlement state.

Children’s privacy

Vesper does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. The app requires no account, collects no personal data, and does not advertise to users of any age. Parents can use Vesper with their children without any data collection concerns.

Your rights

You have the right to delete all locally stored app data at any time by uninstalling Vesper. You have the right to request removal of your email address from the waitlist. You have the right to ask us exactly what data we hold about you — the answer, for most users, is genuinely "none beyond the waitlist email you provided."

Users in the European Union have the additional rights granted by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) including access, rectification, erasure, and portability. Users in California have the rights granted by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) including the right to know, the right to delete, and the right to opt out of sale — though Vesper does not sell user data so the opt-out is moot by default.

Changes to this policy

When this policy is updated, the “Last updated” date at the top of the hero changes. Material changes that affect how data is handled will be communicated via an in-app notice on next launch. Your continued use of the app after updates constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

Contact

For any privacy-related questions, concerns, or data requests, email brief@vespersky.ai. We respond within 48 hours on weekdays and handle requests in the order received. If your request is urgent, include “Privacy Urgent” in the subject line.