Effective October 15, 2026
Boardcall ("the app," "we," "us") is a surf-briefing app for iPhone and iPad, built and maintained by an independent developer, Zach Weston. This policy describes, plainly, what the app does with data — what stays on your phone, what leaves it, who it goes to, and why. There is no legal team behind this app and no reason to hide anything, so this is meant to be read, not skimmed past.
Different parts of the app handle data differently. Rather than a single blanket statement, here is exactly what happens in each case:
Boardcall keeps private files on your device — ones only Boardcall can read — containing: your surfer profile (skill level, weight, height, and your reminder times), the boards in your quiver (nickname, brand/model, dimensions, volume, type, and fin setup), up to three saved surf spots (chosen from our built-in catalog — never your GPS coordinates), any sessions you log (the date, spot, board, the conditions at the time, your rating, and any notes you type), any coaching notes Boardcall Pro has written for you, whether you've completed onboarding and accepted the Terms, a randomly generated device identifier (explained below), and counts of the AI-written briefings you've used. Boardcall also caches recent wave, wind, tide and buoy data on your device, along with the most recent briefing text for each spot, purely to avoid re-fetching and re-generating it needlessly. It also keeps a small record comparing forecast wave heights with nearby buoy readings, which never leaves your device.
If you add the Boardcall widget, the app keeps a copy of your profile, boards, sessions and home spot in a storage area on your device shared only between the app and its widget, so the widget can show today's call without opening the app. Share cards (a Boardcall Pro feature) are drawn on your device and go only where you choose to send them.
None of this is uploaded to iCloud or synced anywhere by us. (If you use Apple's own device backup features, that backup is between you and Apple, not something Boardcall controls.) Deleting the app deletes all of it, permanently, from your device.
When you check the forecast — on Today, Forecast, the Map, or the widget — the app sends our own small server (built on Supabase, a cloud-hosting platform) the coordinates of a spot from the built-in catalog and which kind of data it needs (waves or wind). Our server fetches that from Open-Meteo using our own paid access, and keeps a copy of the result for up to a day so that everyone checking the same spot shares one request. That copy is forecast data for a map coordinate. It contains nothing about you, no device ID, and no record of who asked.
Nothing is sent until you tap Get AI briefing on Today. When you do, the app sends a request to our server containing the day's surf conditions at your chosen spot (wave size, swell period, wind, tide, temperature), your skill level and weight, your boards as ranked by the app's own on-device physics engine, and your phone's preferred language and the units you've chosen (feet or metres, °F or °C), so the briefing can be written in that language with those measurements. Our server forwards this to Anthropic's Claude — a third-party AI service — to write the plain-English briefing, and returns the result to the app. That content is not written to any database by our server, and on failure our server only logs a generic error code, never the data itself.
Per Anthropic's own API terms, this data is not used to train their models. Anthropic does hold the request and the briefing on their own systems for up to 30 days as an anti-abuse measure, and longer if a request is flagged for review under their usage policies. That retention is theirs, not ours — we never write it to a database and we have no access to what they hold.
Worth knowing: if you give a board a nickname, that nickname is part of what gets sent, because it's how the briefing refers to the board. It's free text you typed, so it's the one field in the request that could contain anything you put there — a plain description like "the yellow one" is all it's designed for.
If you subscribe to Boardcall Pro and have logged at least three sessions, the app asks our server for a coaching note when you open Today — at most one note a week, and if a request fails, the app tries again no sooner than a day later. The request contains your skill level, how many sessions you've logged, a short summary of the patterns that repeat in them, and your three most recent session notes, word for word. For each board and kind of conditions you've logged at least three times, the summary gives the board's name (including any nickname you gave it), a plain description such as "small, clean days," how many sessions that covers, and your median rating. It does not include the dates or which spots you surfed. If nothing repeats often enough yet, nothing is sent.
Our server forwards the request to Anthropic's Claude to write the note and returns the result. As with the briefing request, it is not written to any database by our server, only generic error codes are logged, and Anthropic's handling is the same as described above.
Session notes are free text you typed, so anything you write in them can end up in this request — if there's something you'd rather not send, leave it out of your notes.
Alongside an AI briefing or coaching-note request, the app sends a random identifier that was generated on your device the first time you opened Boardcall — not your Apple ID, name, email address, advertising ID, or any other identifier Apple or anyone else assigns you. Our server stores that random ID together with the date and a count — one record for briefings and a separate one for coaching notes — and nothing else at the application level, purely to enforce daily limits and prevent abuse of the AI features. These counters are the only application-level records about app users that our infrastructure retains. We delete them once they are more than 30 days old. They cannot be linked back to you as a person — they identify a device-generated random number, not an individual.
Separately, our hosting provider may retain standard technical request logs (such as IP address) for a limited time as part of normal server operation, the way any web server does. We don't access or use those logs for anything beyond troubleshooting an outage.
If you subscribe to Boardcall Pro, the purchase, payment, and ongoing subscription management happen entirely through Apple's StoreKit system. We never see your card number, billing address, or Apple ID. To determine whether Pro features should be unlocked, the app asks Apple's own StoreKit APIs, live, whether you currently hold an active entitlement — we do not keep our own record of your purchase or subscription status on any server we control.
| Who | What they receive | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Open-Meteo reached through our server |
A fixed catalog spot's coordinates and the wave or wind variables our server requests — sent from our server, never directly from your phone. | Marine and weather forecast data, used under Open-Meteo's CC BY 4.0 license on a paid commercial plan. |
| NOAA CO-OPS api.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov |
A fixed tide-station ID and a date range, plus a static application-identifier parameter that NOAA requires of every API caller to identify the calling app (it still reads our old internal code name, "Quiver," from before the app was renamed to Boardcall) — not you. | Free tide-prediction data from the U.S. government. |
| NOAA National Data Buoy Center www.ndbc.noaa.gov |
A request for NOAA's public file of the latest buoy readings. It's the same file for everyone, with nothing about you or your spots in the request. | Measured offshore wave data, shown next to the forecast. |
| Anthropic Claude API, a third-party AI service |
For an AI briefing: the day's conditions, your skill level and weight, your ranked boards, and your language and unit settings. For a Pro coaching note: your skill level, a summary of patterns in your logged sessions, and your three most recent session notes. Both are sent only from our own server, never directly from your phone. | Writes the plain-English briefing and board-pick explanation on Today, and the weekly coaching note. |
| Apple / StoreKit | Standard StoreKit purchase and entitlement traffic, handled entirely by Apple's own framework. | Processes Boardcall Pro subscription purchases and confirms your active entitlement. |
One more note for completeness: opening the Map tab fetches live conditions for the spots in our built-in catalog — wave and wind data through our server from Open-Meteo, and tides from NOAA — the same way described above, using each spot's fixed catalog coordinates, never your device's location, and without including any of your profile, board or session data in those requests.
Boardcall does not use Core Location, does not request location permission, and has no way to know where your device physically is. Every surf spot in the app — on Today, Forecast, or the Map tab — is a fixed point chosen from a built-in catalog, never a GPS reading.
Boardcall is a surf-forecasting tool for surfers and is not designed for or directed to children. Our Terms of Use ask that you be at least 13 to use it. The app contains no objectionable content, and no account, sign-up, or personal information is required to use any feature — the app has no accounts and no sign-in of any kind. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us information beyond what's described in this policy, contact us at the email below and we'll delete it.
Because almost everything Boardcall touches lives only on your device, deleting the app deletes your profile, your boards, your saved spots, your logged sessions and coaching notes, and all cached data completely — there is no separate server-side copy of any of that to request or delete.
The only records about you on our server are the anonymous rate-limit counters described above: a random device ID, a date, and a count. We have no way to trace those records back to you as a person, and we delete them once they are more than 30 days old, whether or not you ask.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. There are no advertisers, data brokers, or analytics companies involved in this app at all.
If you still have questions or concerns about your data, email us — see Contact below.
All network requests the app makes, to every service listed above, use HTTPS encryption in transit. The rate-limit and forecast-cache tables described above are not readable by the public: they are reachable only by our own server functions, using credentials that never leave them.
Boardcall is run from the United States. Our server runs in a US data center, and the AI provider is a US company. If you use the app from outside the US, the forecast, briefing and coaching-note requests described above go to our server there. The forecast, tide and buoy sources receive only a fixed spot's coordinates, a tide-station ID, or nothing at all — never your profile, boards or sessions. Given how little is involved — no account, no name, no email, no location, and a random ID rather than an identifier tied to you — this is the whole of the international picture.
If Boardcall's data practices change, we'll update this page and change the effective date at the top to match. Because the app has no accounts, email addresses, or push notifications tied to a server, there is no separate mechanism for notifying you of changes beyond this page itself — material changes will be described here directly.
Questions about this policy or how Boardcall handles data: zachweston5@gmail.com.