Last updated 17 August 2026
Short version: The Thinkery stores what you do inside the app so it can coach you and so we can make the coaching better. We do not sell anything about you, we do not run ads, and we never ask for a password. Everything below is the long version, in plain words.
The Thinkery is a small independent product, run by one person, at thethinkery.io. Questions about this page, your data, or anything else: brain@thethinkery.io.
You sign in with Google or LinkedIn. We never see or store a password, because we never ask for one. From whichever you choose we keep your verified email address and a display name, which starts as your first name and which you can change. Both providers also send a full name and profile picture during sign in; we read them, use neither, and store neither. Your account is keyed on the verified email, so signing in with Google one day and LinkedIn the next reaches the same account.
Before you sign in, a cookie counts the free questions you have tried so the sign-in prompt appears at the right moment. It holds a count and nothing that identifies you.
Your session is a random token in a cookie. It is not used for tracking or advertising and it expires after thirty days.
Every attempt you make on a question: which question, whether you finished it, how long it took, how many hints you opened, whether you asked for the answer to be revealed, and when. This is what the progress view is computed from, and it is also how we tell whether a question is harder or easier than we labelled it.
Whether a hint was useful when you tell us, and any question you flag as broken or unhelpful, along with what you wrote in the flag.
The one that deserves plain language. When you type a question into the free-form ask box, what you type is stored word for word, and it is readable by the person who runs The Thinkery in the admin tools. That is deliberate: reading what students actually ask is how the coaching gets less generic. It means you should treat that box as a message to a real person, and not put anything private in it.
When you use the free-form ask box, the text of your question and the problem you are working on is sent to Anthropic's API, which generates the reply. That request is subject to Anthropic's own terms. Nothing else you do in The Thinkery is sent to a model provider, because the coaching on each question is written in advance rather than generated live.
The site runs on Render, which hosts the app and the database. Backups are stored in Dropbox. Those providers hold the data because they run the infrastructure; nobody there is doing anything with it.
We do not sell your data, we do not share it with advertisers, and there are no ad or analytics trackers on this site.
Your account and everything attached to it can be deleted on request, and the delete control will live in your account settings. Until that page ships, email brain@thethinkery.io from the address you signed in with and it gets done.
One exception, and it is small: anonymous counts of how often a question was answered correctly are used to calibrate how hard that question is. Those counts carry no identifier and stay after deletion, because removing them would corrupt the difficulty of the question for everyone else.
The Thinkery is built for adults preparing for graduate admissions tests and is not directed at children. If we add tests taken by under-eighteens, this page changes first.
If this page changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes and anyone with an account gets an email. Small wording fixes just get the date.