Privacy Policy

This policy explains what Fret Beam™ collects, why, who processes it on our behalf, and how you can see, correct, or delete it. We’ve tried to write it in plain English and to describe what the product and this website actually do, not generic boilerplate.

Who we are

Fret Beam is a product of Fret Beam LLC, a New York limited liability company. Fret Beam LLC is the data controller and the seller of record for every account, subscription, license, and purchase. It is who you contract with when you buy or use Fret Beam.

Questions, requests, or complaints about your data go to support@fretbeam.com.

Account and billing

When you start a trial, subscribe, or buy from us, we collect the information needed to create your account and license, your email address, the plan you chose, and basic subscription state (trial dates, whether a plan is active, past due, or canceled).

Payments are processed by Stripe and PayPal. Your card or bank details go directly to those processors. Fret Beam LLC never sees or stores full card numbers on its own servers. We keep only a processor reference (so we can match a charge to your account), the amount, and the status of the payment. Charges from us appear on your card statement under the descriptor FRET BEAM LLC.

Marketing, attribution, and analytics

We measure how people find Fret Beam so we can spend our marketing budget honestly. When you arrive from an ad, a search result, or a link, we may record:

• UTM parameters and referrer, the campaign, source, and medium in a link you followed.
• Ad click identifiers, Google’s gclid, Meta’s fbclid, and TikTok’s ttclid, when present in the URL.
• First-touch and last-touch attribution, stored in cookies on your browser so we can connect a later signup back to the campaign that first brought you in. See our Cookie Policy for the specific cookies and their lifetimes.

Against that context we record a small set of standard conversion events, including PageView, Lead (you gave us your email in exchange for something), StartTrial, Purchase, and Subscribe. Some of these are recorded on our own servers as they happen; we also forward them server-to-server to our analytics and advertising platforms, Google Analytics 4 (via the Measurement Protocol), Meta’s Conversions API, and TikTok’s Events API. When an event includes your email address, it is hashed with SHA-256 before it is sent, so the platform receives a fingerprint used only for matching, never your address in the clear. On a recurring schedule we also roll these events up into a simple multi-touch attribution summary for accounts that converted, so we can understand which channels earn their keep.

In regions that require prior consent (see “Your choices about tracking” below), these analytics and advertising tags do not load in your browser until you grant consent. Separately, when you complete a conversion (for example an opt-in or a purchase), our servers may send that conversion event, with your email address SHA-256-hashed as described above, to the advertising platforms to measure which campaigns work. This server-side reporting happens for completed conversions regardless of the cookie banner, because it runs from our payment and signup systems rather than your browser.

Embedded video

Some pages on our website play video through a third-party player rather than a plain video file. When you press play, the provider hosting that video receives your IP address, browser and device information, and the page the video is on; if you press play, it also receives playback data (for example, that you started or finished watching).

• Vimeo hosts every video on the site: the home page hero, the /obs-kit page hero, the OBS Kit course videos, and the demo videos on /videos and /about. Every Vimeo embed runs in do-not-track mode, so Vimeo sets no cookies and records no analytics. On most pages and most screens nothing is sent to Vimeo until you press play; on a phone-sized screen, every Vimeo-hosted video loads Vimeo’s player already on the page, paused, so Vimeo receives your IP address and the page URL when the page loads rather than when you press play. See Vimeo’s Privacy Policy.
• YouTube, a Google service, is used only as a fallback player for the demo videos on /videos and /about, embedded from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced domain (youtube-nocookie.com) and reached only if Vimeo can’t play. On every visit to those pages, though, the videos’ resting poster image is fetched from YouTube’s image host (i.ytimg.com), which sends Google your IP address and the page URL when the page loads. What Google stores from the fallback player, if you ever reach it, is governed by Google’s Privacy Policy.

We use these providers to deliver video, not to advertise or to measure marketing campaigns; see our Cookie Policy for more detail on when each one is contacted.

The Fret Beam app and your voice audio

This is the most important disclosure for a music app, so we want it to be unambiguous. Fret Beam uses your spoken and typed commands (“replace the last four notes with five D, seven G”, “show me a G minor chord”, and similar) to drive voice correction and chart generation. How that request is handled depends on whether you use our included AI or your own OpenAI key.

Included AI (the default, no key needed). With an active membership, your voice clips and typed commands are sent to Fret Beam LLC’s own servers at fretbeam.com and relayed to OpenAI as our service provider, solely to transcribe your speech and understand your command. We do not store the audio or the transcript text on our servers. It passes through and is discarded. We log only usage metadata (how many requests, how long they ran, and an internal license identifier) for billing and abuse-monitoring purposes; we never log what you said or played.

OpenAI does not use API data sent through our service to train its models, and retains it only for a limited time (up to 30 days) for abuse-monitoring purposes, per OpenAI’s own API data usage policy. See openai.com/policies for OpenAI’s current published terms.

Bring your own key (optional). If you provide your own OpenAI API key in Settings, your voice audio goes directly from your computer to OpenAI for transcription, authenticated with your own credentials, and your key stays saved only on your computer. The transcribed text of your command (and typed commands) is then routed through Fret Beam LLC’s servers at fretbeam.com to be understood, the same pass-through-and-discard handling as the included AI above, except the OpenAI call is made with your own key, so the usage is billed to you and is never counted against our included-AI limits. Your key is used for that one call and is never stored or logged on our servers. OpenAI’s handling of data sent under your key is governed by your own agreement with OpenAI.

License checks

So your subscription stays in sync across launches and so your account area can show “your computers,” the Fret Beam app contacts our license API. The only information it sends is:

• Your license key, an opaque string; it is the credential for the check.
• The app version you’re running.
• A stable, anonymous machine identifier the app generates for seat counting, not a hardware serial and not anything hardware-identifying. Optional extras the app may include for your own device list are your operating system version and a machine name you set; nothing hardware-identifying leaves your computer.

These calls carry no cookies and no login session, and our license responses never contain a name, email address, or payment detail. Seat counting is bookkeeping only. It never disables anything on your computer. Your license key is also the credential the app presents when it uses our included AI (see above); the same key authenticates both.

Email

We send two kinds of email. Transactional messages, license delivery, receipts, trial and billing reminders, account notices, are part of the service and go to every customer. Marketing messages, onboarding sequences, tips, and occasional offers, are separate, and you can leave them at any time.

Our email is delivered by Resend, which processes your address on our behalf to send and to report delivery. Every marketing email carries a one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058 List-Unsubscribe) and a link to your email preferences, where you can opt out of a single sequence or of all marketing. If a message hard-bounces or you mark it as spam, we automatically suppress your address so we stop mailing you.

Your choices about tracking

We use Google’s Consent Mode v2. If you visit from the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, or from a US state with a comprehensive privacy law, you’ll see a consent banner, and analytics and advertising cookies and tags stay off by default until you grant them. Outside those regions, analytics and advertising tags are allowed by default, and you can opt out through your browser settings. Essential cookies needed to sign in and to remember your consent choice are always set, because the site can’t function without them.

Your rights and deleting your data

You can review or update your account details, and manage your email preferences, self-serve from your account. For anything else, a copy of your data, corrections, or full deletion, email support@fretbeam.com and we’ll take care of it.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights under the EU/UK GDPR (access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection, and the right to withdraw consent) or under US state privacy laws (to know, to access, to delete, to correct, and to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information and of targeted advertising). Fret Beam LLC does not sell your personal information for money. To exercise any of these rights, contact us at the address above; we may need to verify your identity before acting on a request, and we won’t discriminate against you for exercising them.

Changes to this policy

If we make a material change, we’ll update the “last updated” date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, tell you by email. Questions any time: support@fretbeam.com.