Trust
Your manuscript is yours
You are handing an unpublished book to a piece of software. That deserves a straight answer about where it goes and who can read it. This page is that answer, and it describes what is true today rather than what we intend.
We do not train on your work
Maxwell does not train any model on your manuscript, and neither do the model providers we use. This is not only a promise in our terms — it is a property of how we buy the service. We use paid commercial API tiers whose terms exclude customer content from training, rather than consumer products that reserve the right to learn from what you type.
There is a second, quieter guarantee underneath it: Maxwell has no feature that writes prose for you. No rewrite button, no "improve this paragraph", no generate-a-version. The editor names what a passage needs and leaves every word to you. That is a decision about what the product is, and it is the reason your voice stays yours.
Who can see your manuscript
Four companies, including us. That list is short because we kept it short, and we would rather publish it than describe it vaguely.
| Company | What it does | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Stores your manuscript, your analyses, and your account record. | United States |
| Render | Runs the application your manuscript passes through. | United States |
| Anthropic | The editorial model that reads your manuscript and writes the notes. | United States |
| A second model used for specific passes, such as building the story bible. | United States |
Why these four
A short list is only worth something if you know what the companies on it have committed to. Each of the statements below is published by the company itself and you can check it.
- Supabase is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and ISO 27001 certified, which means an outside auditor examines its security practice rather than Supabase describing it. Its security page states that all customer data is encrypted at rest with AES-256 and in transit via TLS. It offers a GDPR data processing agreement.
- Render is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and ISO 27001 certified, offers a GDPR data processing agreement, and is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Your manuscript moves through Render on its way to and from the models. It is not stored there.
- Anthropic states plainly that "by default, we will not use your inputs or outputs from our commercial products (e.g. Claude for Work, Anthropic API, Claude Gov, etc.) to train our models." Maxwell runs on the Anthropic API, which is one of the commercial products that sentence covers. Consumer Claude, where the rules differ, is not part of this product.
- Google states in the Gemini API terms that on the paid tier "Google doesn't use your prompts (including associated system instructions, cached content, and files such as images, videos, or documents) or responses to improve our products." The free tier of that API carries no such term, which is exactly why we do not use it.
We would rather be honest about what this does and does not buy you. A certification says a company's security practice was audited on a date. It does not say your book is unreadable to anyone in any circumstance, and no company on this page could truthfully claim that. What it does mean is that the two companies holding your file are independently audited, that the two companies reading it have written down that they will not learn from it, and that the whole list is short enough to print.
Everyone else we rely on, none of whom see manuscript text
- Clerk — Sign-in and account security. Never sees manuscript text.
- Stripe — Payments. Never sees manuscript text, and we never see your card.
- Resend — Sends transactional email such as receipts. Never sees manuscript text.
- Fathom — Privacy-first website analytics on this marketing site only. No cookies, no cross-site tracking, and it does not run inside the application.
If we add a company to either list, we will update this page. If we add one that would see manuscript text, we will say so plainly rather than quietly extending a table.
Who at Maxwell can read it
Support access exists, because a person occasionally has to look at a real analysis to work out why it went wrong. It is restricted to administrators and every use of it is logged. We do not read manuscripts for any other reason — not to improve the product, not to build examples, not out of curiosity.
How it is protected
- Encrypted in transit and at rest.
- Sign-in is handled by a dedicated identity provider, not by us rolling our own.
- Payments go directly to Stripe. Card numbers never touch our servers.
- The database is backed up continuously, with point-in-time recovery.
Keeping it, and getting rid of it
Your manuscript and analyses stay until you ask us to remove them. Write to support@gomaxwell.org and we will delete your account and its contents, and confirm when it is done.
Reporting a problem
If you find a security issue, write to support@gomaxwell.org. We will acknowledge it, and we will tell you when it is fixed.