The grown-up page. Everything, plainly.

Genesis makes a short, illustrated storybook for one child: they type a word (dragon, astronaut, a shy fox), pick their age, and a story arrives in which a hero practices a virtue — kindness, courage, patience — rather than being told about it. Every story becomes a chapter in that child's one Story Book, with a badge for each virtue practiced.

Before any of that, your child builds a creator — a figure of clay they paint with choices: hair, favorite color, what they love. That figure is the only “face” in the app. There are no photo uploads, on purpose. The about page has the longer version.

It is for ages roughly 1 to 12 today, in four age bands, with a grown-up nearby for the youngest. A teen edition is planned but does not exist yet.

The words are written by an AI model (Claude, from Anthropic) working inside a story engine we wrote: the arc is fixed, the age band sets the vocabulary and what stakes are allowed, and the virtue has to be shown by what the hero does. The pictures are painted by an image model (Flux, via Replicate) from one locked character sheet, so the hero looks the same on every page. Every book says so under “The End” — one line, with a fold-out that names exactly what AI did in that book.

“Checked” means this, and nothing more:

• Before anything reaches the model, what your child typed is cleaned: invisible characters stripped, length capped, and any email address, phone number or street address removed — so a house number a parent typed to “set the story at home” can never be printed into a keepsake. (It happened once, in our own testing, on September 2nd; that is why the rule exists.)
• The model is told that what the child typed is story material, never an instruction, and what each age band may and may not contain — real stakes from 7 up, never gore, cruelty or despair.
• Every change to the app runs about 480 automated checks across ten offline test suites before it can ship (npm run eval): story structure, age-band word counts, the input guard, every API route's refusals, the on-device fallback stories, and the phone layout.
• A hostile test set is posted at the live app — 35 deliberately bad requests: profanity, “ignore your instructions”, hidden characters, a request to kill the companion, a request for bleak realism at 10–12. In the most recent runs (September 2–3), every structurally broken request was refused without a story being written, and zero returned books broke a safety rule. The books that came back scored a mean of 94–99 out of 100 on our structural rubric.
• What is not done yet: a second AI does not grade every book for warmth and tone — that harness is built and tested but has not run on real books. No human reads each story before your child does. And at the oldest band with the longest books, about a third of requests currently come back incomplete; when that happens Genesis writes the book itself from its own template shelf, marks it as not-AI-written, and your child still gets a whole story — just a plainer one, without the painted pages.

If a page is wrong, the “Something's off?” link under it sends the page and your note to an editor pass that fixes only what you flagged.

On your device, and only there: the creator profile (name, age band, the hair/color/interest choices, and the painted portrait), every saved story with its pictures, the Story Book cover design, the Word Lab progress, and which nights a story was read. All of it lives in your browser's own storage for this site. Unless a grown-up signs in, there is no account, no server copy, and no way for us to look at it.

If a grown-up signs in (to keep the Story Book when the phone changes): the sign-in works by a link sent to the parent's email — the child never types one. That email address is used to send the link (through Resend, our email provider) and to derive an account id; the address itself is not stored on our servers. From then on the Story Book — the creator profile, the saved stories and their pictures — is also kept on our hosting provider's storage (Vercel) under that account id, so it can be pulled down on another device. “Delete everything” on the account page removes all of it at once.

What leaves the device, and to whom: to write a story, the words your child typed — the first name, the character word, a companion, a virtue, any “adjustment” note — go to Anthropic's API (after the cleaning above). To paint a page, the page's scene description goes to Replicate. To read aloud, the page's text goes to ElevenLabs when that voice is turned on (see below). Those three are the only companies that ever see the child's words and pictures, they see only what is needed to do the job, and each is bound by its own terms about how long it keeps API inputs. Two more see something only when a grown-up acts: Resend receives the parent's email address to deliver a sign-in link, and, once payments open, Stripe's own page collects the grown-up's payment details — we never see a card number.

What never leaves: photos — there is nowhere to upload one. The portrait is painted from the choices, not from a face. Nothing is sent to any social network, ad network or analytics service.

We looked, so you do not have to: as of September 4th, 2026, the app's source code contains no Google Analytics, Meta pixel, Segment, Mixpanel, Hotjar, Sentry, PostHog or any other tracker, no third-party script tags, and no advertising code. The fonts are bundled with the app at build time, so your browser does not contact Google to fetch them. The complete list of outside servers the app talks to is: Anthropic, Replicate, ElevenLabs, Vercel (our hosting and, for signed-in families, the Story Book's storage), Resend (sign-in email, only when a grown-up asks for one), Stripe (payments, once open, on Stripe's own page) — and, once the print shop opens, a link you tap to a Shopify storefront, behind a grown-ups-only gate.

Server logs: our hosting keeps ordinary request logs for a short time. When you use the “Something's off?” link, the story's title, the page number and your note are logged so the problem can be fixed; the child's inputs are not.

Read-aloud has two sources. When we have turned on the ElevenLabs voice, a page's words are sent to ElevenLabs and come back as a warm recorded voice, then cached on your device so re-reading costs nothing and sends nothing. When that voice is not configured, or is resting, or a book has used up its narration allowance, your phone's own built-in voice reads instead — offline, free, and nothing leaves the device. The app tells you once when it switches.

Nothing, today. There is no price, no subscription, no in-app purchase and no advertising. Genesis pays the AI costs of every story. A printed hardcover Story Book and a paid edition are being prepared; when they arrive they will be clearly labelled, will open only behind the grown-ups gate, and nothing your child does alone will cost you money.

Because everything is on your device, deletion is yours to do and it is complete when you do it.

1. One story: open the Story Book, and use the small × beside a chapter (“Take this story out of the book”). It asks once, then it is gone for good.
2. Everything, including the creator: clear this site's data in your browser. On iPhone: Settings → Safari → Advanced → Website Data → find this site → Delete. On Android Chrome: the padlock or tune icon in the address bar → Cookies and site data → Manage → delete. On a computer: your browser's “clear site data” for this site. That removes the creator, every story, the cover, the badges and the cached voice clips together.

There is no copy anywhere else to ask us to delete. If you have written to us with a question, we will delete that message on request. When accounts arrive, a “delete my account and everything in it” button will arrive with them.

Genesis is made by Blaise, one person, with care and with the help of the automated checks above. Questions, worries, a story that landed wrong: hello@genesisstorybook.com. You will get a person, not a form.

This page describes what the app does as of September 4th, 2026. It is written to be understood, not to be a contract, and it is not legal advice. The dated drafts at /privacy and /terms are the formal versions and will be reviewed before the app is submitted to any store.