1. Who is responsible for what
This is the most important thing in this document, so it comes first. There are two different relationships here, and they carry different responsibilities.
For the data your ministry holds about its members — contacts, donors, attendance, course progress, giving history — your ministry is the data controller. It decides what to collect, why, who may see it, and when it should go. Harvest is the data processor: we store and process that data on your instructions, in order to run the service you are paying for, and for nothing else. We do not sell it, we do not rent it, we do not use it to build advertising profiles, and we do not use one ministry's member data to serve another.
For the data about your ministry's own relationship with Harvest — the administrator who signed up, billing records, support conversations, and the analytics of this marketing site — Harvest is the controller, because those are our decisions rather than yours.
That split is why a member who wants their record corrected or removed should ask their church, and why a church that wants us to delete a workspace can simply tell us to.
2. What we hold as controller
For our own relationship with your ministry we hold:
- Account details — the name, email address and workspace details of the people who administer your Harvest workspace.
- Billing records — plan, billing period, payment status and invoices. Card details are held by our payment providers, not by us.
- Support and enquiry messages — anything you send us through the contact form on this site, so we can reply and keep track of the conversation.
- Aggregated page-view analytics for this marketing site, which tell us which pages are read. They count visits; they are not used to identify you.
3. What we process on your ministry's behalf
Everything your ministry puts into its workspace, we hold as processor. Depending on which parts of Harvest you use, that can include:
- Contact and member records, including the names of children checked in where your ministry uses check-in that way.
- Donor records and giving history.
- Attendance and check-in records.
- Course enrolments and progress.
- Content your ministry creates — posts, sermon notes, courses, documents and uploaded files.
- Messages your ministry sends through Harvest, and the records of them.
We process it to provide the service, to keep it secure, to back it up, and to support you when you ask. If your ministry checks children in, the records that creates are treated exactly like any other data you control: held on your instructions, visible to the people you give access to, and deleted when you tell us to delete them.
4. Where the data lives, and who else touches it
Harvest runs on infrastructure operated by other companies. Workspace data is stored in Firestore on Google Cloud; files and media are stored in Cloudflare R2; the site and application are served from Vercel.
These are our sub-processors — the parties that handle data in the course of us running the service:
- Google Cloud (Firebase and Firestore) — the database and authentication behind every workspace.
- Cloudflare — file and media storage (R2), and network delivery.
- Vercel — hosting for this site and the Harvest application, and aggregated page-view analytics.
- Stripe — subscription payments, and the Stripe Connect rails your ministry uses to take gifts.
- Dodo Payments — subscription payment processing.
- Resend — transactional email, such as sign-in links, receipts of our own billing, and notifications.
- Upstash — queues, caching and rate limiting.
Each of them handles the data for the purpose named above and no other. We do not share your ministry's data with anyone else, and we do not disclose it to third parties for their own purposes.
5. Payments and giving
Subscription fees cover access to the Harvest software. Congregational giving and donation features connect directly through third-party payment rails (Stripe Connect); Harvest does not hold, control or forward donation funds, and charges a 0% platform fee on them.
Practically, that means donor payment details are handled by Stripe under your ministry's own Stripe account, and Harvest never holds a card number. What Harvest stores is the record of the gift — amount, date, donor as your ministry recorded them — because your CRM, your receipting and your giving statements are built on it.
Card details for your own Harvest subscription are handled by our payment providers in the same way: entered with them, held by them, never stored by us.
6. Email and SMS
Transactional email that Harvest sends on your behalf — notifications, sign-in links, confirmations — goes through Resend.
Bulk newsletters are sent from your ministry's own Mailchimp account, and SMS from your ministry's own Twilio account. Where that is how you have set things up, the contact details involved reach Mailchimp or Twilio under your agreements with them, and their privacy terms apply to what they do with them.
7. How long we keep it
While your subscription is active, we keep your workspace data for as long as you want it. You can delete records yourself at any time, and a deletion you make in the app is a real deletion.
If you cancel, your data is retained for 12 months and then deleted. We do not spring that on you: we email a notice at 11 months, and a second notice at 11.5 months, before anything is removed. Within that window you can export everything, or resubscribe and pick up where you left off. Export is never gated behind a payment.
If you ask us to delete a workspace sooner than that, we will delete it. Backups age out on their own cycle shortly afterwards.
8. Security
Data travels over encrypted connections, and our infrastructure providers encrypt it at rest. Access to a workspace is controlled by the roles your ministry assigns, so a volunteer sees only the part of the workspace you have given them.
Access by the Harvest team to a ministry's workspace data is limited to what is needed to operate the service and to support you when you ask for help.
No system is perfect. If a breach affects your ministry's data, we will tell you what happened, what was affected, and what we are doing about it.
9. Making a request
If you are a member of a church that uses Harvest and you want to see, correct or remove your record, ask your church. They control that data, and they can act on it directly in their workspace. If they need our help to answer you, we will help them.
If you administer a Harvest workspace and want to see, correct or export what we hold about you, or want your workspace deleted, contact us and we will do it.
10. Changes to this policy
When this policy changes, the updated version is published here and the date at the top changes with it. Where a change materially affects how we handle data, we will email workspace owners.
11. Contact
The quickest way to reach us is the contact form at theharvest.site/contact. It goes straight to the Harvest team, and we answer every message.