A personal promise from the founder of Bible Anvil, to the people who use it. This document is still open to additions, deletions, and may be changed in any way UNTIL the first client is using the app. That date will be recorded here: NOT ACTIVE YET. Only once a date is inserted will the document become a standing promise. Until that time this document represents what we PLAN to promise.
Why This Document Exists
Most Bible software is optimised for things that have nothing to do with Scripture — engagement, retention, conversion, lifetime value. Those are the goals of the shareholders who fund those products, not the goals of the person reading the Word.
I built Bible Anvil because I wanted to read Scripture without being measured. These promises exist so you can hold me to them. If I break one, you have every right to point at it and name what I’ve done.
The Promises
1. We will never sell, rent, trade, or share your data.
Your notes, tags, stars, annotations, sermons, highlights, reading history, and every other piece of data you create inside Bible Anvil belong to you. We will not sell it to advertisers. We will not share it with “partners.” We will not license it to researchers. We will not use it to train AI models. We will not hand it over to acquirers.
We will never participate in data brokerages, affiliate tracking networks, or any scheme in which your behaviour becomes an asset we sell.
2. We will never show you advertising.
Not banner ads. Not sponsored content. Not “recommended partners.” Not affiliate links dressed as recommendations. Not native advertising disguised as study material. Not “sponsored verses.” Not anything that takes money from a third party in exchange for your attention.
This prohibition includes our own cross-promotion. Bible Anvil will not interrupt your reading to tell you about a new Bible Anvil feature, course, product, or campaign. Feature announcements live in the About screen and in release notes — never as interstitials, popups, or in-reading interruptions.
3. We will never let AI interpret Scripture for you.
This is the theologically load-bearing commitment.
What AI is permitted to do inside Bible Anvil:
- Surface patterns in the text (concordances, word frequencies, cross-references, parallel passages, thematic clusters)
- Help you search your own notes, your own tags, your own annotations
- Assist with language mechanics (transliteration, basic parsing of Greek/Hebrew forms where a published lexicon already provides the answer)
- Improve accessibility (voice-to-text, text-to-voice, search auto-complete)
What AI is prohibited from doing inside Bible Anvil:
- Telling you what a verse means
- Recommending a doctrinal position, theological framework, or hermeneutical stance
- Writing devotional reflections, sermon outlines, exegesis, commentary, application points, or prayer content
- Answering “what does this passage teach about X?”
- Summarising Scripture in a way that substitutes for reading it
- Producing any text that presents itself as a reading of Scripture rather than a feature of Scripture
The line is this: AI may show you what is already there. AI may not tell you what is meant by it.
4. We will never manipulate you into staying.
No streaks. No badges. No leaderboards. No social guilt. No “you haven’t opened Bible Anvil in 7 days” notifications framed as spiritual concern. No win-back campaigns that dress re-engagement in piety. No friend graphs designed to create accountability-as-pressure. No share prompts that shame you into broadcasting your reading.
Reading Scripture is a spiritual practice. It cannot be gamified without cheapening it. A user who returns to Bible Anvil because they missed it is a success. A user who returns because they were nagged has been manipulated, and Bible Anvil’s product has failed at something more important than retention.
Reflection tools are permitted. A user who wants to see their own reading pattern in a calendar heatmap — private, unshared, unrewarded — is reflecting, not competing. The distinction: heatmaps show you to yourself; streaks show you to the system. We will ship the former and never the latter.
5. We will never track you.
No analytics. No telemetry. No crash-reporting service that bundles usage patterns with crashes. No third-party SDKs phoning home. No fingerprinting. No session recording. No heatmaps of user behaviour for our own product-development purposes. No A/B testing of the Reading View.
If we need to understand how the product is used, we will ask users directly and voluntarily, in clearly-labelled research invitations with clear opt-in, and we will publish the questions we asked and the answers we received.
- Telemetry is prohibited here because it creates a data asset whose existence tempts future decisions. The only way to guarantee we never abuse usage data is to never collect it.
6. We will never claim copyright in your work.
Your notes are yours. Your sermons are yours. Your tag systems are yours. Your curated canons are yours. Your highlighted patterns are yours. Your study notebooks are yours. Your arrows in the quiver are yours.
Bible Anvil retains no licence, no sublicensing right, no derivative-work claim, no perpetual usage right, no “we may feature your content” carve-out, and no training-data claim over anything you create inside the product. You may quote your own notes, publish your own sermons, sell your own study guides, teach from your own tag system — without asking us, and without paying us, and without crediting us.
We claim copyright only over Bible Anvil’s software, our original design assets, and content Bible Anvil itself has produced (such as the BA-curated starter Quivers or reference tag sets, which are licensed to you for personal use under terms published with each).
7. We will never trap your data inside Bible Anvil.
At any time, without justification and without friction, you may export:
- Every note you have written, in plain markdown
- Every tag you have created, in plain JSON
- Every annotation, star, highlight, and cross-reference you have made, in plain machine-readable format
- Every sermon you have drafted, in portable format (Markdown + optional PDF + DOCX)
- Every piece of reading history we have recorded on your device
Export is free. Export is unlimited. Export is not behind the premium tier. Export does not degrade in quality over time. Export works offline.
The mechanical difficulty of another tool receiving a topology export does not count as a lock-in mechanism. A user who has built their study graph in Bible Anvil has invested in a methodology, and that investment naturally creates switching cost. That is honest. What we prohibit is artificial switching cost — proprietary formats, incomplete exports, paywalls on portability, degraded-by-design export files, or any design choice that exists specifically to raise the cost of leaving.
8. We will never hold your sermon preparation hostage.
This commitment is for pastors specifically, and it exists because Bible study software has historically used pastors’ own sermons as retention leverage — “stop paying, lose access to fifteen years of your own work.”
If you cancel your Bible Anvil subscription, your sermons remain readable, deliverable, and exportable forever on any device where they are stored. You may keep preaching every sermon you have already prepared — delivery keeps working, with the media you locked during preparation — and you may export them all in portable formats, free, unlimited, offline, at any time.
What ends with the subscription is the workshop, not the library: creating new sermons and editing existing ones are subscriber features, and translations or reference works licensed to subscribers pause with the subscription. Access to what you have already prepared — reading it, preaching it, taking it with you — is not, and never will be, contingent on continued payment.
9. We will never move a feature behind a paywall after you have paid for it.
If you purchased access to Bible Anvil, or purchased a specific feature within it, that feature remains yours at the access level you paid for. Subscriptions may unlock new features. They will never reclaim features you already own. The only thing that can reduce your access is your own decision to delete the app.
10. We will never force you to upgrade to continue using features you already have.
If you paid for a feature, it remains accessible in the version you paid for. Bible Anvil will not silently remove working features from existing installs on the OS versions where that install was released, require a Bible Anvil upgrade to retain functionality you previously had, or ship an “update” that is functionally a new product wearing the old product’s name.
Every version of Bible Anvil we have ever released remains permanently available for download from bibleanvil.com or a published mirror. If a new version changes something you relied on, you may return to any prior version at any time — no justification required. When Bible Anvil ceases development entirely, we will publish the final version as a permanent download so that users on supported hardware can continue using it indefinitely.
11. We will never treat any region of the Church as a second-class market.
Bible Anvil is built in South Africa. We know what it feels like to be served last by software that assumes the US as the default market.
From day one, Bible Anvil commits to:
- Purchasing Power Parity pricing globally, reviewed annually
- Feature parity across platforms and regions — no “this feature is only available in the US edition”
- Language parity — every UI string is translatable, and we fund translation of Bible Anvil’s interface into African, Asian, and Latin American languages alongside European ones
- Offline-first design specifically because much of the global Church reads Scripture where connectivity is expensive, intermittent, or absent
- Low-device-spec support — if Bible Anvil runs beautifully on a $2,000 iPad but stutters on a $150 Samsung A-series, we have failed our mission
The Global South is not a future market. It is part of the present Church. Our design decisions reflect that.
12. We will never change these promises in secret.
This document is versioned, dated, and stored in a publicly-readable repository. Every change — including typo corrections, clarifications, and substantive amendments — is logged with a date, the nature of the change, and the reason.
We reserve the right to add commitments to this list. We do not reserve the right to remove them. This asymmetry is deliberate: the promise can grow stronger. It cannot be quietly weakened.
13. We will never silently alter the translation text you are reading.
If a publisher releases a revised edition of a translation, we will not replace your current edition without your explicit consent. You will be notified, shown what changed on a per-verse basis, and given the choice to pin your current edition or move to the new one. We will never substitute one edition for another behind your back. If a translation is de-licensed and must be removed, we will give you 90 days’ notice and a full export of any markup you made against it.
14. We will never place any content between you and the Scripture text.
The Reading View contains the translation text — including the publisher’s footnotes, cross-references, and section headings that ship with the translation — and your own markup. Nothing else. No editorial inserts authored by us. No bracketed additions beyond what the translator supplied. No “insights” overlaid on verses. No cards between chapters. No “recommended content.” No Verse of the Day framing that alters what the verse says. If it did not come from the translation text or from your own hand, it will not appear in your reading surface.
15. We will never charge you to read the Scriptures.
Reading the Bible in Bible Anvil is free — for everyone, forever. No account. No sign-up. No payment. From the first verse, fully offline, on the day you install it.
Bible Anvil ships with a core library of translations that no rights-holder can withdraw, and that core will never move behind a subscription, a registration wall, or a charge of any kind. Where a publisher’s licence binds a particular commercial translation to subscription terms, that is the publisher’s licence at work — the free core, and free reading, stand untouched.
What you pay for in Bible Anvil is the workshop — the study tooling built around the text. The price is on the tools, never on the Word.
16. Lastly:
I will not let Bible Anvil become zombie software extracting residual value from captive users. I will not sell it to a buyer who would quietly walk back these promises.
How To Report a Violation
If you think Bible Anvil has broken one of the promises above, tell me. Accountability only works if I hear from you.
- Public channel: Post the alleged violation on any public forum — Reddit, Twitter/X, a blog, a journal. I subscribe to alerts for “@BibleAnvil” and “Bible Anvil” mentions and commit to a public written response within 14 days.
- Direct channel: Email covenant@bibleanvil.com. You will receive acknowledgement within 72 hours and a written response within 14 days.
Every reported violation is a first-class claim on my attention. It matters more than a feature release.
— The Founder
Bible Anvil — Where Scripture shapes you.