Legal
Privacy Policy
Please read this first. This is a starting draft, written by going through what the Aster software actually does rather than from a template. A lawyer has not reviewed it yet, and that review needs to happen before Aster is generally available. If something here matters to you, ask us and we’ll give you a straight answer.
Aster is booking and payment software for independent beauty and wellness professionals. It is operated by Innovative Studios LLC, a California company, and “we” on this page means that company. This policy explains what Aster holds about you, why, and what you can ask us to do about it.
Two kinds of people use Aster
It matters which one you are, because the answer to “who decides what happens to your information” is different.
- Providers create an Aster account to run their own business. Your client list is yours. You decide what to record about a client, how long to keep it, and what to do when they ask you to remove it. Aster holds and processes it on your behalf, following your instructions — we do not use your clients’ details for our own purposes.
- Clients book appointments with a provider. The provider is the business that holds your record; Aster is the software they use to do it. If you want your details changed or removed, your provider is the fastest route — but you can email us too and we will help.
For the provider’s own account — their login, their business settings — Aster is the one making the decisions.
What we collect
If you book an appointment
| What | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Your first name, and optionally your last name, phone number and email address. One of a phone number or an email address is required, so we can send you the confirmation. | You type it into the booking page — or your provider enters it, or imports it from a client list they already keep. |
| Your appointments: the service, the date and time, whether it happened, was cancelled or was a no-show, and whether you booked it yourself or your provider did. | Created as you book and as your provider works — or, for visits before your provider moved to Aster, brought across from the booking system she used before. |
| Notes your provider writes about you. This is a free-text field — whatever your provider chooses to record is up to them. | Written by your provider. An import from her previous booking system also leaves its own lines here, saying what it could and could not bring across. |
| Payment records: the amount, any tip, whether it succeeded, failed or was refunded, and the reference numbers Stripe gives us. Not your card number. | Created when a payment is taken, and kept in step with Stripe. |
| A log of the messages sent to you: which phone number or email address they went to, when, and whether sending succeeded or failed. For text messages the log also holds the text that was sent; for emails, only the subject line. | Created when a confirmation, reminder, cancellation or receipt is sent. |
| A note of when you agreed to be texted, and on what basis — either that you were shown the notice on the booking page, or that your provider confirmed you were already her client when she moved her book to Aster. | Recorded once, the first time either happens. It exists so we can answer a phone carrier or a regulator who asks; nothing in the product reads it. |
If you sign up as a provider
- Your email address and a password. The password is stored only as an Argon2 hash — we cannot read it, and neither can anyone who obtains the database.
- Your display name, your business name, the handle your booking page lives at, and your time zone. When you sign up in the iPhone app, the time zone is read from your device so appointment times are right.
- Your business settings: services, prices, working hours, deposits, cancellation window, no-show fee.
- Identifiers for the Stripe account you connect. Your bank details, tax identifiers and identity documents go to Stripe directly during their onboarding — they never pass through Aster and we never see them.
Aster does not ask providers for a phone number, a home address, or a date of birth.
What we do not collect
- No card numbers. Card details are typed into Stripe’s own payment form, or read by the card hardware in the provider’s iPhone. They do not pass through Aster’s servers and are not stored there — not the number, not the security code, not the expiry, not even the last four digits.
- No advertising or tracking. Aster contains no analytics SDK of our own, no advertising identifier, no marketing pixel and no cross-app or cross-site tracking. The iPhone app has exactly one third-party component — Stripe’s card reader library — and that library reports its own usage analytics to Stripe: how the reader is used, not who the client is. Nothing is used for advertising or cross-app tracking.
- No cookies from us. Aster’s own pages set no cookies at all. Stripe’s payment form, which runs inside the booking page when a deposit is due, is Stripe’s own and is covered by their policy.
- No health or identity documents, no date of birth, no address, no government ID. There is nowhere in Aster to enter them — though a provider could of course type anything into their own notes field, which is why we treat notes as sensitive.
Location
The Aster iPhone app asks for location permission. It asks for one reason: Apple and Stripe require a device accepting contactless card payments with Tap to Pay on iPhone to have location access enabled. The permission prompt says so — “Location access is required to accept payments.”
The app never sends a location to Aster, and there is no column anywhere in our database for one. Stripe’s card reader library reads the device’s approximate location itself during Tap to Pay, as Apple and Stripe require; that goes to Stripe under Stripe’s policy, not to us. It is a condition of taking a card payment, not a way of knowing where anyone is.
Why we use what we collect
- To show a provider’s availability and to hold and confirm appointments.
- To send appointment confirmations, reminders, cancellation notices and payment receipts. These are about a specific appointment. Aster sends no marketing.
- To take deposits and payments, issue refunds, and keep the books straight.
- To keep the service usable and safe: limiting how many bookings one person can hold, limiting how many messages a business sends in a day, and rate-limiting requests. This uses the IP address a request arrives from, held briefly in memory to count against those limits. It is not stored in the database and does not survive a restart.
- To fix things when they break, and to see that payments and messages went through. Our servers keep ordinary operational logs of the requests they handle: the address the request came from, the page or endpoint asked for, and whether it succeeded. Logs do not contain passwords or the contents of what you submit.
Who we share it with
Four companies, each for one job. Nobody else. We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and there is no code in Aster that sends personal information anywhere other than the services below.
| Who | What they get, and why |
|---|---|
| Stripe | Payments. When you pay a deposit or save a card, Stripe is given your name, and your email and phone number if you gave them, so it can create a customer record on your provider’s own Stripe account. A deposit charge is described to Stripe by the service and your provider’s name, and carries a reference to the booking. Card details go to Stripe directly rather than through us. Providers give Stripe their identity and bank information during Stripe’s own onboarding. From the iPhone app, Stripe’s card reader library also sends Stripe the device’s approximate location and its own reader-usage analytics. |
| Pingram | Delivering text messages, and nothing else — email no longer goes through them. Pingram is given the phone number the message is for and the message itself — which contains your first name, your provider’s name, the service, the date and time and, on a receipt, the amount. Texts go to United States numbers only; the software refuses anything else, and they come from Aster’s own number, +1 559 340 5888. That number is not read by a person: apart from STOP, START and HELP, which are answered automatically, a reply to a text reaches nobody. |
| Cloudflare | Network and denial-of-service protection in front of our servers. Both asterbooking.com and our API run behind Cloudflare, so every request to either passes through it first: Cloudflare sees your IP address and the ordinary details of the request — the address asked for, your browser’s user agent, the time. It does not reach our database, and nothing is sent to it for any purpose beyond getting the request to us and keeping the site up. |
| Hetzner | Hosting. Our servers and database run on hardware rented from Hetzner. They do not use the data; they host the machines it sits on. |
Email is not handed to any of them. Confirmations, reminders, cancellation notices and receipts leave from Aster’s own mail server, on the same machine as the rest of the service, addressed from [email protected]. Nobody reads that address either — but a reply is not lost: it is directed to your provider’s own email address, because someone answering “your appointment is tomorrow” is trying to reach her salon rather than us. A message we send to a provider about her own account replies to us instead.
A small number of Aster operators can see an internal, read-only dashboard used to check that the service is working — booking and payment totals, and the delivery status of messages, which includes the phone numbers and email addresses messages were sent to. It is restricted to specific network addresses as well as by account role. We may also disclose information if the law requires it.
Where your information is held
On one server in Ashburn, Virginia. That is where the database and the application live — a machine rented from Hetzner, who are a German company but run the datacenter it sits in. Backups are kept on the same machine. Cloudflare, which every request reaches first, is a worldwide network, so the address and request details it sees may be handled at whichever of its locations is nearest you.
Aster is offered in the United States only. Text messages are sent to US numbers only, and Stripe accounts are created in the US. Aster is not offered in the European Union, the EEA or the United Kingdom, and this policy does not claim compliance with the GDPR. If you are visiting from outside the US, you can still read these pages, but the service itself isn’t offered to you.
How long we keep it
Honestly: longer than most policies imply, because there is no automatic clean-up yet.
- Client records, appointments, payment records and the message log are kept indefinitely. There is no scheduled deletion. A provider needs their history — but that is a reason, not a retention schedule, and writing one is on our list.
- A booking abandoned part-way through payment is released automatically about a day later, so the time goes back on the calendar. That marks the booking cancelled; it does not erase it, and the client record created along the way stays.
- The database is backed up nightly and the fourteen most recent backups are kept, so a copy of anything deleted persists for roughly two weeks afterwards.
- Request logs — the web server’s record of each page and API call, including the address it came from — are rotated nightly and kept for fourteen days, then deleted. Cloudflare keeps its own record of the traffic it passes to us, under their policy rather than ours.
- The application’s own logs are capped by size rather than by time: roughly 250 MB per service, oldest lines dropped as new ones arrive. That means we cannot promise a number of days for them — a quiet week keeps a log line longer than a busy one — and we would rather say so than quote a schedule that does not exist. Those logs hold the same request details, not the contents of what you submit.
- Deletion requests are carried out by hand today — there is no delete button in the app. That is a real limitation and we would rather tell you than imply otherwise. It does not change your right to ask; it changes how quickly we can confirm it is done.
Your California privacy rights
California residents have rights under the CCPA, as amended by the CPRA. Aster honours these for everyone, wherever they live.
- Know and access. Ask what we hold about you and get a copy of it.
- Delete. Ask us to erase it. Some records — a completed payment, for instance — may need to be kept for accounting or legal reasons; we will tell you what we kept and why.
- Correct. Ask us to fix anything wrong.
- Opt out of sale or sharing. There is nothing to opt out of: Aster does not sell personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have not done so in the past twelve months.
- Limit the use of sensitive information. Aster does not ask for the categories that carry this right — no precise location, no government ID, no health data, no account credentials beyond your own login.
- No retaliation. Exercising any of these will not get you worse service or a worse price.
How to exercise them. If you are a client, your provider holds your record, and asking them is usually quickest — they can change or clear your details themselves. You can also email [email protected] and we will act on it, and pass it to your provider where the record is theirs. If you are a provider, email the same address. We will ask for enough information to be sure who you are before acting — usually the phone number or email address the booking was made with. An authorised agent may make a request for you, with proof.
Messages, and stopping them
Confirmations, reminders and receipts are transactional — they are about your appointment, not advertising. Reply STOP to any text and we stop texting that number straight away; reply START to begin again, or HELP for our contact details. STOP applies to the number itself rather than to one business, so if you see more than one practitioner who uses Aster, it stops all of them. Email has no self-service unsubscribe: to stop those, ask your provider — they can turn reminders off for their business, and they can remove your phone number or email address from your record — or email us and we will make sure it happens.
Keeping it safe
Traffic to Aster is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored as Argon2 hashes and sign-in tokens are stored hashed rather than in the clear, with short-lived access tokens that rotate. The link in your confirmation is a secret belonging to that one appointment rather than an identifier used anywhere else, and it is carried in the part of a web address that browsers never send to a server — so opening it does not write it into any of our logs, and a single appointment’s link can be revoked on its own. Each business’s data is scoped to that business throughout the software, and the internal operator dashboard is restricted by network address as well as by role. No system is perfectly secure, and we would rather say that than promise otherwise.
Children
Aster is not directed at children. Providers must be adults. We do not knowingly collect information from a child under 13; if you believe we have, email us and we will remove it.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app or by email before it takes effect, and the date at the top of this page will change.
Contact
Aster is operated by Innovative Studios LLC. Email [email protected] — for anything on this page, including access, correction and deletion requests. Our Terms of Service cover the rest.