Privacy Policy

• We collect what you give us and what's needed to run the app — nothing sold, ever.
• Your stats and essays are yours. We never share them with dental schools.
• To generate AI features, we send relevant content to third-party AI providers under contract.
• You can export or permanently delete everything from your account at any time.

Account information. Your email address and an authentication credential, handled through our authentication provider. A display name if you set one.

Application profile. The information you enter to use the product: GPA (cumulative and science), DAT section scores, state of residency, application cycle, school preferences, and similar academic details.

Experiences and materials. Your activities and experiences, your school list and tracker entries, and the essays and drafts you write or paste in — including your personal statement and secondary essays, which may contain sensitive personal narrative.

Information about others. If you use the letters feature, the names, relationships, and email addresses of the recommenders you add. Only add people you are permitted to. We use this solely to help you draft and track your requests; we do not email your recommenders on your behalf unless a future feature clearly offers that and you turn it on.

Interview and advisor content. Your practice interview answers and the messages you send to the AI advisor.

Payment information. If you subscribe, our payment processor (Stripe) collects and processes your payment details. Merit never sees or stores your full card number — we store only a customer/subscription reference and status.

Technical information. Basic session cookies needed to keep you logged in, and standard server logs (such as request timestamps and error information) used to operate and secure the service.

• To provide the core features — generate your school list, review essays, run application audits, produce interview questions and feedback, and draft recommendation emails;
• To save your work and show it back to you across sessions and devices;
• To operate, secure, debug, and improve the service;
• To process subscriptions and prevent abuse; and
• To communicate with you about your account or important service changes.

We do not use your essays or profile to train our own models, and we do not sell your data.

Merit’s AI features work by sending the relevant parts of your content — for example, your essay text, profile stats, or experience descriptions — to third-party AI providers (such as Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google) that run the models generating your output. This transmission happens only when you trigger a feature that needs it.

We use these providers under their business/API terms, which generally provide that submitted content is not used to train their models. We share the minimum content needed for the feature to work. We also rely on other processors to run the app, including:

• A hosting and database provider that stores your account and content;
• Stripe for payment processing; and
• Infrastructure and logging tools used to keep the service running and secure.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share your stats, essays, or other content with dental schools, ADEA, or AADSAS. We only disclose information to the service providers above (to run the product), if required by law or valid legal process, or to protect the rights and safety of our users and the service. If Merit is ever involved in a merger or acquisition, we will require the successor to honor this policy and will notify you.

We keep your information for as long as your account is active. You can permanently delete your account and its data at any time from your settings; deletion removes your content from our active systems, and we will not retain it except where the law requires (for example, limited billing records). You may also request a copy of your data by contacting us.

We use reputable infrastructure providers, encrypted connections, and access controls (including database-level row security so each account can only reach its own data). No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your information and to limit what each part of the system can access.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, export, or delete your personal information, and to object to or restrict certain processing. You can exercise the core of these directly in the app (edit your profile, export, or delete your account) or by contacting us. We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.

Merit is intended for dental-school applicants and is not directed to children under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it.

We may update this policy as the product evolves. When we make material changes, we will update the date above and, where appropriate, notify you. Please review it periodically.

Questions or requests about your privacy? Contact us through your account settings and we’ll get back to you.