HACKER Q&A
📣 sergei_pch

How do you handle privacy policies for side projects?


I've been shipping side projects for a few years and every time I get to the "add a privacy policy" step, I hit the same wall.

Every generator I've tried (Termly, iubenda, TermsFeed) assumes I'm running a traditional stack with a legal department. None of them know what Supabase, PostHog, Vercel Analytics, or Lemon Squeezy are. I end up manually editing boilerplate to mention the actual services I use, and I'm never sure if I got it right.

The options seem to be: 1. Pay $10+/month for a subscription generator (for a document I generate once) 2. Copy someone else's policy and find-replace the company name 3. Spend hours reading legal guides and writing one from scratch 4. Ship without one and hope nobody notices

I'm considering building a generator specifically for developers — one that knows modern tech stacks, outputs markdown, no account required, one-time payment instead of subscription. Before I invest the time, I'm curious:

- How do you currently handle this? - Would tech-stack-aware presets (e.g. "I use Supabase + Stripe + Vercel") actually save you time? - What's your biggest frustration with existing tools?

Genuinely trying to understand if this is a real pain point or just my own annoyance.


  👤 coinfused Accepted Answer ✓
37signals has open sourced theirs here

https://github.com/basecamp/policies

It hasn’t been updated in a while but they are a good starting point.


👤 jacquesm
Simple: I don't collect data. Everything is stored locally, the site is 100% static, there are no analytics. Problem solved.

👤 nateb2022
I just use an LLM for the most part, give it a quick proofread, and publish it.