Last updated: 20 October 2026
The short version. The Hearald browser extension does not collect, transmit, sell, or share any of your data. It has no account, no server, and no analytics. Everything Hearald does — reading the page, generating the voice, remembering your place — happens on your own computer. There is exactly one exception, and only if you buy Hearald Pro: the licence key you paste in is sent to Gumroad to check that it is real. Nothing about your reading is involved, and if you never buy Pro this never happens at all.
Hearald Publisher is different. It is a WordPress plugin that a site owner installs to narrate their own published articles, and that narration is made on our audio service. What Publisher sends and keeps is described below.
This website counts visits. The Hearald pages on forgehouse.app keep an anonymous count of page views and clicks, so we can see which pages and designs help people. What the website counts is described below. The extension sends nothing to it.
To read a page aloud, Hearald reads the text of that page inside your browser and converts it to speech using a voice model that is bundled with the extension and runs locally. The page text is held in memory for as long as it is being read and is never written to a server, never logged, and never sent anywhere.
Two things are saved locally so the extension behaves the way you left it:
| Practice | Hearald |
|---|---|
| Collect or transmit the content of pages you read | Never |
| Collect or transmit your browsing history | Never |
| Require an account, email address, or sign-in | Never |
| Use analytics, telemetry, or crash reporting | Never |
| Use cookies or advertising identifiers | Never |
| Sell or share data with third parties | Never |
| Use your data for creditworthiness or lending | Never |
| Use your data to train any model | Never |
The voice model and all 28 voices ship inside the extension package, so ordinary use of Hearald requires no network connection at all — it works on a plane. The extension makes no requests to any server we operate. Hearald Publisher, described below, is the one Hearald product that uses our servers.
Hearald Pro is a one-time purchase. It is sold through Gumroad, which handles the payment. We never see or store your card details, and Hearald contains no payment code of any kind.
When you buy Pro, Gumroad issues you a licence key. Entering that key in Hearald's settings
sends the key alone to api.gumroad.com so it can confirm the purchase is real.
That request contains no page content, no browsing history, no email address and nothing about what
you read. It is repeated roughly once a month to notice refunds. If that check cannot be completed —
you are offline, or Gumroad is down — Pro stays switched on; it is never used as a reason to lock
you out of something you paid for.
Reading never touches any of this. The licence code is not part of the reader, and a free user's copy of Hearald makes no network requests at all. Your purchase is governed by Gumroad's own privacy policy for anything that happens on their side.
Since version 0.4.0, Hearald asks for no access to any website when you install it. It reads a page only when you ask it to — by clicking the Hearald icon, pressing Alt+R, or choosing Hearald from the right-click menu. At that moment Chrome grants access to that one tab, and the access ends when you leave the page. Hearald reads the text of the page you’re on so it can speak it. Nothing you read is stored or sent anywhere.
Reading a PDF happens the same way as reading a page: the file is opened inside the extension, its text is rebuilt in your browser, and it is read with the same local voice. The PDF is not uploaded anywhere.
Reading a Google Doc or Google Slides deck works the same way. Because Google draws those documents as pictures rather than text, Hearald fetches the document’s plain-text copy from Google using your own signed-in session, inside your browser, and reads it in Hearald’s own view. Only documents you already have permission to open can be read. The text is held briefly in Chrome’s session storage (memory only, cleared when Chrome closes) while the reading view opens, then deleted. It is never sent to us or to anyone else.
Everything above describes the Hearald browser extension. Hearald Publisher is a separate product: a WordPress plugin that a site owner installs to narrate their own published articles. It works differently, because the narration is made on the Hearald audio service (audio.forgehouse.app) rather than on a reader's computer. This section describes exactly what it handles.
What a site sends. Nothing is sent until the site owner enters a license key. When the site owner, or their auto-generate setting, asks for audio, the plugin sends the audio service the article's published text (title, headings, paragraphs, lists, quotes), the post ID and title, the chosen voice, a one-way hash identifying the site, and the site's license key. Testing the connection sends only the license key. Drafts, pending and private posts are never sent.
What the service keeps, and for how long.
Readers. Readers need no account. The player plays an ordinary MP3 served by the site itself, so listening never contacts Hearald. If the site owner turns on listen analytics, the reader's browser tells the site when an article is played or finished and how long it was heard, and the site forwards only that event and the post ID to the audio service. To stop abuse, the site keeps a salted one-way hash of the listener's IP address for one minute; that hash stays on the site and is never sent to Hearald. The plugin sets no cookies.
Where the service runs. The audio service is hosted on Railway, which provides the servers and, like any hosting provider, may keep standard request logs.
Payment and license checks. Publisher plans are sold through Gumroad, which handles payment; we never see card details. To confirm which plan a license key belongs to, the audio service sends that key and the Hearald Publisher product ID to Gumroad's license verification API. Answers are cached, so a key is checked a few times a day at most. No article content or site information is sent to Gumroad.
Deletion. Removing audio from a post in WordPress deletes that MP3 from the site. Uninstalling the plugin removes its settings and post data from WordPress; the MP3s stay in the site's Media Library because they belong to the site. To have job records or usage for a key deleted from the service sooner, email the address under Contact.
Everything above is about the Hearald extension and Hearald Publisher. The Hearald pages on forgehouse.app, this one included, keep a simple count of how they are used, so we can see which pages help people find what they need. Some pages come in more than one design, picked at random for each visitor, and the count shows which design works better.
Hearald is a general-purpose reading tool and is not directed at children under 13. The extension collects no data whatsoever, so it holds no information about any user, of any age. The website's visit counts described above are anonymous and are not linked to anyone's identity or age.
If the Hearald extension or Hearald Publisher ever changes what it stores or transmits, this page will be updated before that version ships, and the change will be described in its release notes. The date at the top of this page shows the current version.
Questions about privacy in Hearald can be sent to fatherearth2011@gmail.com.