Effective September 17, 2026
Margin holds a record of how your children are educated. That isn't ordinary customer data, and we wrote this policy with that in mind.
Margin is a homeschool planner. This policy covers marginplanner.com, the Margin app on any device, and any email we send you about your account. When it says we or us, it means Margin Planner LLC, the company that runs Margin. When it says you, it means the adult who holds the account.
If you’d rather ask a person than read fourteen sections, write to hello@marginplanner.com and a person will answer.
A name to call you, an email address, and a password. We store the password only as a one-way hash. It’s never kept in a form anyone here could read, so nobody at Margin can tell you what your password is. And we will never ask you for it.
When you choose a password we check that it has not already leaked from somewhere else. Your password is scrambled first, and only the first five characters of the scrambled version go to the service that keeps the list of leaked passwords, Have I Been Pwned. Those five characters are shared by many thousands of passwords, so they can’t reveal which one was checked or who asked. Your email and your name are never sent.
A second parent. If you invite another adult to your planner, we keep the email address you gave us so we can send the invite and know it is theirs when they arrive. Once they join they have an account of their own, and they can see your family’s planner with whatever access you chose. You can take them off at any time, and they can leave.
If you sign in with Google, Google tells us your name and your email address so we can make your account. It doesn’t give us your Google password or anything else in your Google account.
Your school year: the children you are teaching and what you call them, subjects, curricula, books, lessons, field trips, activities, co-op days, days off, what was finished and when, grades you give, and any notes you write. This is the heart of it, and it’s the part we treat most carefully.
You decide how much of it is identifying. Margin works perfectly well if a child is entered as a first name or a nickname, and nothing in the product asks for a last name, a birth date, an address, a photograph or a school district.
Past school years. When you finish a year and start the next one, the finished year is kept in your account as its own record, the same way the year you are in is kept. It stays for as long as your account is open.
On the Books tab you can scan a book’s barcode with your camera. Margin asks for the camera only when you tap Scan, and turns it off when you are done. The picture never leaves your phone. The barcode is read on the phone itself.
What leaves is the book’s ISBN, the number under the barcode. It comes to our server, and our server asks Open Library for the title and author. If Open Library does not have it, we ask Google Books. They see our server asking, not you, and nothing about your family goes with the number. We do not keep a list of what you scanned, though like any request it can sit briefly in the technical logs described above. The title is saved only if you add the book to your planner.
Margin keeps one list of curricula that every family can pick from. When you add a book that is not on it, its name, company, grade, subject, number of lessons and minutes per lesson go on that list for other families to use. When you save a subject using a book from the list, its lesson count and minutes are counted too, so the list shows the numbers most families use. Nothing about you or your children goes with a book, and the list does not record who added it.
If you subscribe, payment is handled by our payment processor. We never see or store your card number. What comes back to us is whether a subscription is active, when it renews, the last four digits, and the billing information the processor needs to keep on file — typically a name, an email address and a postal code.
When you use Margin our servers record the ordinary things a web service records: an IP address, the kind of device and browser, the pages requested, and the time. We keep error reports when something breaks, because that is how it gets fixed. We keep these records briefly and use them to run and repair the service, not to build a profile of you.
If you use the contact form or email us, we keep the message and your address so we can answer and so we remember the conversation if you write again.
If you leave your email on our Coming soon page, we keep it so we can tell you when Margin opens. We also note the rough area you were in and the page that sent you. The area is something like a city and state, worked out from your internet connection. It’s never your exact location. It helps us see which posts are reaching people. We do not share the list with anyone, and you can ask to be taken off it anytime by writing to us.
This is the section worth reading twice.
Margin is a service for parents and other adults responsible for a child's education. It is not directed to children, and children do not have accounts. We do not knowingly let a child under 13 create an account or give us anything directly. Everything Margin holds about a child is there because you, the parent or guardian, entered it on their behalf and for your own record keeping.
We treat that information as yours to control. You can change it, export it, or remove it at any time, and removing a child from your planner removes what was attached to them. We do not use it to advertise anything to anyone, we do not build profiles of children, and we do not share it with schools, districts, curriculum vendors, or any other family.
If you think a child has given us information directly in some way we didn’t expect, write to hello@marginplanner.com and we will delete it.
We don’t use any of it to make decisions about you automatically, and there’s no profiling of you or your children for any purpose.
Margin can publish the events you check — field trips, activities, co-op — so Google, Apple, or a calendar on the kitchen wall can fetch them on their own schedule. This is off unless you turn it on, and it’s the one part of Margin that puts anything at a web address a third party can reach.
Two things about it matter. Only what you have chosen is ever published, and no record of what was done is ever published — nothing in the feed says a lesson was finished. And the address is long and random, so it cannot be guessed, but anyone who has the address can read those events, which is what makes it work in a calendar app that has no account with us. It’s read-only. Nobody can use it to change anything.
Bookwork is its own choice, off unless you switch it on. Switched on, each school day is published as one all-day entry naming that day’s subjects for each child — never a lesson number, and never a mark saying it was done. Your calendar provider keeps whatever it’s sent, so it’s worth deciding on purpose. You can switch it back off and make a new address, which stops the old one working at once.
You can generate a new address at any time, which immediately stops the old one working, and turning the feed off deletes the published events outright.
Connecting Google Calendar. If you connect a Google account, Margin makes one calendar in it called Margin and puts your checked events there. The permission Google gives us reaches only that one calendar. We cannot see or change any other calendar on your account. We read the Margin calendar only to notice what you changed or deleted there, so we don’t undo your changes. Disconnect at any time and the permission ends.
When a new school year starts, last year’s events stay on your calendar. Margin stops updating them and they become ordinary events of your own.
A link you share. Margin can make a link that shows one child’s days to
somebody helping with school — a grandparent, a nanny. What that link shows is packed
inside the link itself, after the #, and a browser never sends that part to any
server. We never receive it and we keep no copy of it. It is scrambled with a password
you choose, and neither the days nor the password ever reach us.
It carries what you picked: that child’s lessons for those dates, and the co-op, activities and field trips they are part of, with times and addresses. Whoever opens it can read it and print it. They cannot change anything, and it gives them no way into your account. After the last date you chose, the page won’t open it.
Two limits are worth saying plainly, and Margin says both when you make a link. It can’t be called back once you’ve sent it, because there’s nothing here to delete. And anybody holding the link and the password can read those days. Send the password a different way than you send the link.
Your information is encrypted in transit and encrypted where it is stored. Passwords are hashed. Access to production systems is limited to the people who need it, protected by multi-factor authentication, and logged.
Nobody at Margin reads a family's planner as a matter of course. There are two narrow exceptions: when you ask us for help with a specific problem and looking is the only way to solve it, or when we have a genuine reason to believe someone is being harmed or the law is being broken.
No service can promise perfect security, and one that does isn’t telling you the truth. What we can promise is that if a breach affects your information, we will tell you promptly and plainly — what happened, what was involved, and what to do about it — and we won’t wait for a lawyer to find a way to phrase it so it sounds smaller.
If an account sits unused for a long time, we’ll email the account holder before anything is removed. We will not delete a family's year without warning them first.
Wherever you live, you can do all of these at any time, from inside Margin or by writing to us:
Depending on where you live — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas and a growing number of other states, along with the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area — you may also have the right to object to or restrict certain processing, to appeal a decision we make about a request, and to complain to a regulator. We give everyone the practical rights above rather than sorting families by address.
To exercise any of them, write to hello@marginplanner.com from the address on your account, or use the contact form. We answer within 45 days, usually far sooner, and we will tell you if we need longer. You may use an authorized agent. We will never charge you, degrade your service, or treat you differently for exercising any of this.
Our legal basis, for those who need the phrase: we process your information to provide a service you asked for, to meet our legal obligations, and for the narrow legitimate interest of keeping that service working and safe.
Margin is made for families in the United States. Prices are in US dollars, and this policy follows US law.
Margin is operated from the United States and your information is stored and processed here. If you use Margin from outside the United States, you’re asking us to bring it here, and the protections in this policy travel with it.
When this policy changes we will update the date at the top. If a change actually matters — a new category of information, a new company touching it, a new use — we’ll email you before it takes effect rather than counting on you to notice a date. We will not make a material change retroactive to information already collected without asking you.
Questions about this policy, or about anything we hold, go to hello@marginplanner.com or through the contact form. A person answers, usually the same day.
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