When you commission a portrait, you give us your name, your email address, your relationship to the person who died, and the details you choose to share about their life: names, dates, places, family relationships, and the memories and stories you write in your own words. If you elect to include a cause of death, we collect that too. Payment is handled by Stripe; we never see or store your card number.

Your information is used to write the portraits and to deliver them to you. We never sell it, we never rent it, and we never hand it to anyone for their own purposes. The only thing we look at in aggregate is how people find and move through this site, so we can run the business and know which of our ads are worth running. That is about patterns and traffic. The details you share about the person are read only to write, check, and improve their portraits, never for anything else.

Delivering this service means a small number of companies handle your information on our behalf:

• Anthropic, for the AI that drafts the portraits. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, this data is not used to train their models.
• Stripe, for payment.
• Resend, for the emails we send you.
• Airtable, for storing your order.
• Vercel, for hosting this site and your delivery page.

They act on our instructions and for no other purpose.

The portraits are drafted with AI inside a writing system I built specifically for Epitaphy. Its sense of how an obituary should read comes from my own prose and narrative style, and from intuition earned over decades of writing, professionally and personally. Before anything reaches you, a human reviewer, most often me, reads all three, checks them against the details you gave us, corrects anything that is wrong or does not ring true, and adds a human hand to the work. That reading is the point.

The system was also built to get better over time. Your portraits, and any feedback you send, may help refine how the next ones are written. Anything used that way is handled exactly as everything else here is: privately, by one person, never sold and never shared. If you would rather your family's portraits were not used that way, tell us and they will not be.

We keep your order and your portraits for as long as we operate, so that we can help you if you come back to us later. We do not delete them on a schedule. You can ask us to delete them at any time, and we will.

Your portraits live at a private web address that only you have. It is not listed anywhere, it is not indexed by search engines, and it cannot be guessed. You are welcome to share that address with your family. Anyone who has it can read the portraits, so share it as you would share anything private.

Write to drafts@epitaphy.com and ask. We will delete your order, your portraits, and the record of the emails we sent you, and we will tell you when it is done.

We measure, in aggregate, how people find this site, including through Google's advertising tools, so we know which of our ads are worth running. This uses cookies. It tells us that an order came from a particular ad. It tells advertisers nothing about the person you are writing about.

drafts@epitaphy.com