No legal jargon maze. No 47-page wall of text designed to confuse you into agreeing to something terrible. Just a plain breakdown of what we do and don't do with your data. Last updated: August 9, 2026.
If you read nothing else on this page, read this.
Exactly what happens from the moment you hit Generate to the moment your file is deleted.
Encrypted HTTPS request sent with your text and voice settings.
FastAPI receives text. No logging. Passes directly to TTS engine.
MP3 saved to temp folder with random UUID filename. Inaccessible to others.
Browser fetches and plays your audio. You download the file.
Background task deletes all files older than 1 hour. Automatically. No exceptions.
GDPR, CCPA, and similar laws give you rights over your personal data. Here's how each one applies to FreeTTS.
What data do we collect about you?
Can you request deletion of your data?
Can you stop us from selling your data?
Can you export your data?
Will we treat you differently if you exercise rights?
For users in the EU, California, and anywhere else with strong privacy laws.
The full details, still written in plain English. No legal maze.
FreeTTS does not require you to create an account, provide an email address, or hand over any personal information. You can use the entire tool without telling us a single thing about yourself.
If you contact us at [email protected], we'll have your email from that exchange. We use it only to respond. We don't add it to a mailing list or share it with anyone.
When you convert text, that text is sent to our server for processing. It's received, used to generate audio, and automatically deleted within one hour. We don't log it, read it, or analyze it.
Like every website, our server logs basic connection info: IP address, page requested, browser type, and visit time. These are standard security logs, rotated regularly, not analyzed to identify individual users.
FreeTTS uses essential cookies, plus the analytics and advertising cookies described below:
Essential cookies on the website. These are required for the site to function. They remember your dark/light mode preference, your authentication session if you sign in to a PRO account, and security tokens that protect against cross-site request forgery. You cannot disable essential cookies without breaking core functionality.
First-visit cookie. On your first page view we store a small first-party cookie (ft_trace, 30 days) and a matching browser-storage entry holding the page you landed on, the site that linked you here if any, and any utm tags in the address. If you later create an account, that is saved with it so we can see which sources bring people who actually use FreeTTS. It holds a path and a hostname, no personal data, and it is not shared with anyone.
Affiliate link cookie.If you arrive through an affiliate partner's link (an address ending in ?via= and a name), we keep that name and the time of the click in a first-party cookie (ft_via, 90 days) so the partner is credited if you buy. Nothing about your browsing is recorded, and it is only read when you pay. If you do buy, your payment record notes which partner referred it; the partner sees the plan and the amount of the sale in their dashboard, never your name or email address.
Affiliate partners. If you join the affiliate program, we keep your name, email address, the username you choose and your referred sales, to run the program and pay you. If you save payout details on your Affiliate page (a Wise email, a bank account for ACH or wire, or a USDT wallet address), they are stored encrypted, shown only to you and to the FreeTTS owner, and used only to send you your commissions. You can change them at any time; they are deleted with your account.
Analytics cookies. The FreeTTS website uses Google Analytics to understand aggregate, largely anonymized usage (which pages are visited, broad device and region) so we can improve the product. It is not used to build advertising profiles of you.
Advertising cookies (Google AdSense).The website may display ads served by Google AdSense to free users. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites, and Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve personalized ads. You can opt out of personalized advertising in Google Ads Settings, review how Google uses data from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites, and opt out of additional third-party vendors at aboutads.info. The text you convert, your uploaded files, and your generated audio are never shared with advertisers or used to target ads. PRO and Creator subscribers see an ad-free experience.
Browser extension storage. The FreeTTS Chrome extension does not use cookies at all. It stores preferences (selected voice, playback speed, install ID, listen queue, recent generations, optional auth token if you sign in for PRO) locally via chrome.storage.local. This data never leaves your device except for the explicit API calls described in the “Browser Extension” section below.
If you do not wish to accept any cookies at all, most browsers allow you to block cookies entirely through your browser settings. Note that doing so may prevent parts of FreeTTS from working correctly, particularly the account sign-in flow.
Our own servers are in the EU. Most of the specialist services we depend on are not, so here is the full list rather than a summary. Where processing happens outside the EU or EEA, it is covered by the standard contractual clauses each provider publishes.
In plain terms: text you submit for speech leaves the EU. It goes to OpenAI for the safety check and then to the provider that owns the voice you chose, and those calls are served mainly from the United States. If that is not acceptable for your material, please do not submit it.
Cloudflare— We use Cloudflare as our content delivery network and security layer. Cloudflare may process your IP address and request data as part of delivering the site and protecting it from abuse. Cloudflare has its own privacy policy governing this processing.
Speech providers — Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and ElevenLabs— Text that you submit for speech synthesis is forwarded to whichever of these provides the voice you selected, only to generate the audio. Each processes the text solely to return audio and, under their enterprise terms, does not retain it or reuse it for training.
Supabase— If you choose to create a PRO account, authentication and account data are handled by Supabase under their privacy policy.
Stripe & Freemius— Paid checkout and subscription billing run on two rails. Card payments through our Stripe checkout are processed by Stripe, which acts as the merchant of record for those purchases and is responsible for charging and remitting any sales tax or VAT. Purchases made through the Freemius checkout, including when you choose to pay with PayPal there, are sold by Freemius, Inc., which acts as the merchant of record for those purchases and handles your payment details under its own privacy policy. Subscriptions bought directly through PayPal before 18 September 2026 continue to be billed by PayPal until they end. Purchases made before July 2026 were processed by Creem. FreeTTS never sees or stores your card details on any of these rails.
Resend— Transactional emails (welcome, payment confirmation, password reset) are delivered through Resend.
OpenAI — Used for two things. Safety screening:text you submit for speech generation is sent to OpenAI's moderation API before it is synthesised, so we can refuse content our speech providers and our payment partners prohibit. This applies to every generation route — the free tool, PRO and Creator generation, multi-voice dialogue, voice previews, the public API, audiobook batches and video voiceovers. Text longer than 8,000 characters is screened in slices. AI Summary:if you invoke that feature, the text you ask to summarise is forwarded to OpenAI to produce the summary. In both cases no user identifier (email, account ID, or IP) is sent with the request, and per OpenAI's API data-usage policy, API inputs are not used to train OpenAI models. Neither the submitted text nor the summary is retained by FreeTTS after delivery. If a request is refused, we record the policy category, the score, the time, the endpoint and the character count — never the text itself.
FreeTTS does not sell your personal information. The only parties that may receive your data are the third-party service providers listed above, each of which processes data solely to provide a service to FreeTTS (hosting, delivery, speech synthesis, AI summarisation, payment processing, authentication, email) and operates under its own privacy policy.
We may also disclose information if legally required to do so by a valid court order, subpoena, or law enforcement request. Given how little account data we collect, the amount we would be able to provide in response to such a request is minimal.
The most effective data security is not collecting data you don't need. We follow that principle seriously.
FreeTTS does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children under 13. Since we don't collect personal information from anyone (no accounts, no signups), the tool is safe for users of all ages. Parents: your kids can use this safely.
FreeTTS is used by people in over 100 countries. We apply the same privacy standards to everyone, regardless of location. EU users don't get better privacy protections than users in Asia or Africa. Everyone gets the same minimal data treatment. If your country has specific regulations not addressed here, email us and we'll work with you.
The FreeTTS Chrome extension is covered by this same privacy policy. This section spells out exactly what the extension does with your data, separately from the website.
What the extension does on your device. The extension stores the following locally via chrome.storage.localand never syncs anything across devices: your preferred voice, playback speed, most recent text, a randomly generated install ID, a 24-hour audio cache (so repeated text plays instantly), the Listen Queue (saved articles you want to hear later), recent AI Summary results, and — only if you sign in on freetts.org — a copy of your Supabase auth token and resolved plan (free / PRO / Creator / Lifetime). Uninstalling the extension clears all of this data automatically.
What leaves your device. The extension only sends data to the network when you explicitly invoke a Read, Theatre Mode, Summarise, or Download action. In those cases:
freetts.org/api/ttsfor speech synthesis. As with every generation route, it is screened by OpenAI's moderation API first (no user identifier attached). The text is processed in memory, the resulting MP3 is returned, and both are deleted within one hour.freetts.org/api/summaryand forwarded server-side to OpenAI to generate the summary. No user identifier (email, account ID, or IP) is sent to OpenAI with the text. The summary is returned to you and not retained.freetts.org/api/auth/me to verify your plan and unlock PRO features. The token is sent only to FreeTTS, never to any third party.What the extension does NOT do. No advertising. No analytics. No behavioral tracking. No tracking pixels. No Google Analytics, AdSense, or Mixpanel. No reading of pages other than the one you explicitly target via right-click or keyboard shortcut. No background scanning of your browsing history or open tabs. No data sold to anyone.
Crash reporting. The extension includes Sentry to report its own crashes — a stack trace, the extension version, and which part of the extension failed. It never sends page content, page URLs, the text you convert, or your audio. On Chrome and Edge it is on by defaultand you can switch it off at any time in the extension's Settings under Privacy. On Firefox it is off by default and only runs if you turn it on.
What host access the extension asks for. The manifest declares one host permission: https://freetts.org/*, so the extension can reach our own API. To read a page, it uses activeTab together with scripting, which grant access to a single tab only at the moment you invoke the extension — via right-click, the toolbar button, or a keyboard shortcut — and not before. That access is what lets the service worker fetch audio on your behalf so playback still works on sites with a strict Content Security Policy, such as Wikipedia or banking portals, and what lets the Listen Queue open and read a saved article in a new tab. The extension never reads or transmits page contents in the background.
Audio output. The extension never injects audio advertisements into the speech it generates, and never modifies, sells, or transmits the audio it plays anywhere other than back to you.
If we change this policy, we'll update the “last updated” date at the top. For significant changes, we'll make it obvious on the website. We're not going to sneak changes past you. That would be a crummy thing to do.
Questions? Concerns? Want to verify we practice what we preach? Email us: [email protected]. We respond within 24 hours. A real person writes back. Every time.
The app (bundle org.freetts.app) uses the same account and the same servers as this website. This is what it sends and keeps.
No. FreeTTS does not require any signup or personal information to use. No name, no email, no phone number, nothing. You can use the entire tool completely anonymously. The only data that touches our server is the text you convert, and that gets deleted within one hour.
No, by default. Your text is sent to our server solely to generate the audio file. Both the text (in memory) and the temporary audio file are automatically and permanently deleted within one hour via a background cleanup task. We do not log, read, analyze, share, or use your text for AI training.
Optional history (signed-in users only): if you opt in via Dashboard → Privacy & data → "Save my generation history", we keep a short metadata row per generation (the first 500 characters of your text, voice, timestamp, and your IP) so you can replay items from the History tab. The toggle is OFF by default. You can flip it back at any time, and you can delete your existing history in one click from the same screen. We never enable history without your explicit opt-in.
Essential cookies (theme preference, your PRO sign-in session, anti-CSRF security tokens). The website also uses Google Analytics and may show Google AdSense ads to free users — see the Cookies section below for details and opt-out links; the text you convert is never used for ads, and PRO is ad-free. The browser extension does not use cookies at all — it stores its preferences locally via chrome.storage.local.
Our own servers are located in Germany (Hetzner, Falkenstein), and we apply GDPR protections to everyone regardless of where they are. Being straight about one thing: FreeTTS is not a closed EU system. To turn your text into speech we send it to specialist providers — Microsoft Azure, Google and ElevenLabs — and to OpenAI's moderation API for the safety check, and those run mainly in the United States. Our database (Supabase) is hosted in Singapore. So your text and account data are transferred outside the EU, under the standard contractual clauses each of those providers publishes. We collect minimal data, delete free and guest audio within about an hour, and answer data protection requests at [email protected].
No. FreeTTS does not sell your personal data. We work with standard third-party service providers — Cloudflare (delivery), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and ElevenLabs (speech), Supabase (accounts), Stripe and Freemius (payments; PayPal only for subscriptions bought before 18 September 2026), Resend (email), and OpenAI (safety screening of text submitted for speech, and the AI Summary feature; details below). Each operates under its own privacy policy and processes data only as needed to provide its service to FreeTTS. We do not sell customer lists, share personal information with data brokers, or transmit text outside of the speech-synthesis or summarisation pipelines.
Our own servers are hosted by Hetzner in Falkenstein, Germany, and every request reaches us there first. That is not the whole picture, though, so here it is in full. Your account, usage records and saved projects live in our database with Supabase, hosted in Singapore. Text you submit for speech is sent to OpenAI's moderation API for the safety check, then to whichever speech provider owns the voice you picked — Microsoft Azure, Google or ElevenLabs — and those calls are served mainly from the United States. Each provider processes it only to return the result, under the standard contractual clauses they publish for international transfers. Audio for free and guest generations is deleted about an hour after it is made.