Your rounds stay yours.

Effective September 30, 2026

The short version

• Your rounds live on your phone. Scores, cards, signatures and settings are stored on your device, not on our servers.
• No account, no ads, no analytics. We don't track how you use the app, and nothing is sold or shared for advertising.
• One optional exception. If you turn on automatic card emails, your email address and your finished cards pass through our service to be delivered to you, and nothing more.

Who we are

Short Pencil is made by DM Solutions and Development LLC ("we", "us"). You can reach us any time at hello@shortpencilcards.com.

What stays on your phone

Your rounds, scores, putts and fairways, signatures, the courses you've used, your name and your settings are kept in the app on your device. They're included in your phone's own backups (iCloud or Google) under Apple's or Google's terms, and in any backup file you choose to save yourself. Delete a round in the app and it's gone; delete the app and everything goes with it.

Finding a course

When you search for a course, the app sends your search to our scorecard service, which looks it up in public course directories (OpenGolfAPI, built on OpenStreetMap data, and OpenStreetMap's own services). The service keeps a shared, anonymous copy of the answers so the next golfer's search is quicker. If our service can't be reached, your phone asks those directories directly.

If you choose to find courses near you, the app uses your phone's location for that search, with your permission. Your location is rounded to about a kilometre before it leaves our service, isn't linked to you, and the answer is cached for a day. Short Pencil never uses your location for anything else, and never in the background.

Reading a club's scorecard

If we can't find a course's scorecard in the directories, we look for it on the club's own website and, to the best of our ability, add it ourselves. Only the course's public information is involved, never anything about you, and the card is then shared with every golfer who plays there.

Automatic card emails (optional)

If you turn on "Email me every finished card", we send a six-digit code to confirm the address is yours. After that, each card you sign is emailed to you: your email address, the card image and a one-line summary of the round pass through our service to our email provider, Resend, to be delivered.

• We don't keep a list of email addresses. Each email is sent and then forgotten by our service.
• Resend keeps a record of sent emails for 30 days, as part of delivering them.
• Emails come from cards@shortpencilcards.com and only ever go to the address you confirmed.
• Turn it off any time in Settings; anything still waiting to send is cancelled.

Emailing or sharing a card yourself

When you tap Email scorecard or Save or share, your phone's own mail app or share sheet handles it. We aren't involved and don't see it.

Our servers

Like any website, our service sees your device's internet (IP) address when the app contacts it. We use it only to keep the service from being abused, and our hosting provider keeps routine server logs for a short time. Our service runs on Railway in the United States; this website is served by Cloudflare.

Children

Short Pencil isn't directed to children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their personal information.

Your choices

Everything on your phone is yours to keep or delete. For anything else, such as a question about an email we sent, write to us and we'll help. Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access or delete personal information; because we keep almost nothing, most of those requests are already answered, but we'll respond to every one.

Changes

If this policy changes, we'll update the date above, and for meaningful changes we'll say so in the app.

Contact

DM Solutions and Development LLC
hello@shortpencilcards.com