Your games, and where they live

Your library sits in your own browser first. That is why a game opens instantly and why the engine runs on your machine rather than mine. Once you’re signed in with a verified email, the library also backs up to your account, so it survives a cleared browser and shows up on your other devices.

The backup is held in two places: a managed postgres database run by PlanetScale for your collections, repertoire and training history, and Cloudflare’s storage for the game files themselves. Both encrypt data at rest and everything travels over HTTPS. Neither of them is a company I built, which is the point. They keep databases alive for a living and I don’t.

The backup can’t be switched off. Your library lives in your account and the copy in your browser is a working cache of it. If you would rather nothing sat on a server, use FlexiChess signed out and everything stays on that device.

Me. I am the only person with access to the database, there are no staff and no contractors with a login, and I look at a library only when you write in about a problem with it. There is no dashboard where anyone browses through users’ games. If that ever changes, this page changes first.

Two things can make a game visible to other people, and both are yours to choose: a share link for a single game, and publishing a collection to Community databases. Nothing is public unless you make it so.

Nothing beyond keeping it backed up and showing it to you. Your games are not added to the public database, not used to train any model, not sold, and not read for product research. When you ask the coach a question, the position and your question go to the AI provider for that one answer, with no account identifier attached, and they don’t train on it either.

What I do look at is counts. How many games got imported, how many searches ran, whether a feature is used at all. Those are numbers about the product, not about any one person’s chess.

Every game in your library leaves as one PGN file, from Settings → Database → Export all games as PGN. PGN is the format every chess program reads, so the file works in ChessBase, Lichess, Chess.com, or whatever comes after all of them. There is also a full backup that includes your positions, training cards and settings, for restoring into FlexiChess itself.

Deleting your account deletes the synced collections and account records with it. The only thing that stays is the billing record the tax office requires, and that holds no chess.

If FlexiChess disappeared tomorrow, the export is what protects you. I’d rather you had that file sitting somewhere and never needed it.

Anything this page doesn’t cover, ask me directly at support@flexichess.com. I read every one.