Privacy Policy

Ask the Summa is operated by Adder Analytics (“we”, “us”). This policy describes what we collect when you use Ask the Summa at askthesumma.com, and what we do with it.

Ask the Summa is a free study tool. You ask questions and an AI answers in the voice of Thomas Aquinas, using only passages from the Summa Theologiae. It is not Thomas Aquinas, and its answers can be wrong.

Account information. You need an account to ask questions. If you sign up with email, we store your name, email address, and your password as a salted hash (never the password itself). If you sign in with Google, we store your name, email address, profile picture, and your Google account ID instead of a password.

Sign-in sessions. To keep you signed in, we store a session record that includes the IP address and browser type you signed in from.

Your questions. When you ask a question, it is sent to our server along with the recent turns of your conversation so we can generate an answer. We do not save your conversations to a database. They stay in your browser tab and are gone when you close or reload it.

Question logs. For each question, our server writes one log entry to our hosting provider’s logs. It contains your account ID (not your name or email), the question you asked, which Summa passages were retrieved, the results of our automatic citation checks, and how many tokens the answer used and what it cost. We use these logs to check answer quality and to spot abuse.

Usage counters. To enforce the daily question allowance and rate limits, we keep counters keyed by your account ID and by a hashed (not readable) form of your IP address. These counters expire automatically after about two days.

We use your information to run the service: to sign you in, answer your questions, enforce fair-use limits, keep the service secure, and improve the quality of answers. We do not sell your personal information, we do not show ads, and we do not send marketing email.

We use these service providers to run Ask the Summa:

• Vercel — hosts the application and its logs, and runs the AI Gateway that sends your questions to the AI model providers below.
• Neon — a managed Postgres database that stores accounts and sessions, and the text of the Summa.
• Upstash — a managed Redis database that stores the usage counters and rate limits.
• Google — handles Google sign-in if you choose it, and provides the AI model that writes the answers.
• Voyage AI — turns your question into a search vector so we can find the relevant passages of the Summa.

We use essential cookies to keep you signed in. Non-essential cookies and scripts (such as analytics) run only with your consent, which is managed by the in-app consent manager. Today Ask the Summa sets no non-essential cookies.

Answers are written by a large language model. To generate an answer, we send your question, the recent turns of your conversation, and the Summa passages we retrieved through the Vercel AI Gateway to the model provider (Google). Your question alone is also sent to Voyage AI to search the Summa. These requests are used to generate the answer you asked for and are not used by us to train models.

Please don’t put personal information — yours or anyone else’s — in your questions. Ask the Summa works best with questions about Aquinas’s ideas.

Many people who use Ask the Summa are students, and some may be under 18. We do not verify ages and have no parental controls, so we collect only what is listed above. If you are a parent or guardian and want a child’s account deleted, email support@adder.dev and we will delete it.

We keep your account for as long as it exists. Conversations are not stored. Question logs are kept for a limited period by our hosting provider, and usage counters expire after about two days. Email support@adder.dev to request a copy of your account data or to delete your account.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, export, or delete your personal information, and to object to certain processing. Contact us and we will honor these requests as required by applicable law.

If we make material changes we will update the date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, tell you in the product.

Questions about this policy? Email support@adder.dev.