I kept writing privacy policies the night before submission

I build small apps, and I have a consistent bad habit: the legal docs are the last thing I write. Code done, screenshots done, store listing done, and then, the night before submission, I am staring at a blank privacy policy trying to remember which data I collect and whether I need a cookie notice.

The failure I kept hitting was not that I could not find a template. Templates are everywhere. A generic template does not know my app. It does not know I use an analytics SDK, that I have a EULA for the desktop build, or that I ship to users in the EU and the UK as well as the US. Filling that in by hand, once, under time pressure, is how you end up with a policy describing a different product than the one you shipped.

So I built a tool that asks a few questions about your iOS, Android, or web app and generates the drafts: privacy policy, terms of service, EULA, and cookie policy. PolicyForge produces plain-English text, not legalese, structured toward what Apple and Google ask for at submission, with variants for US, EU, and UK.

The problem with a template that does not know your app

A privacy policy is mostly a list of facts about your product: what you collect, why, who you share it with, how long you keep it, and how a user reaches you. A template gives you the shape of those sentences with blanks in the middle. The blanks are the entire job.

What I wanted was to be asked the questions once, in order, and have the answers show up in all four documents consistently. If I say the app uses an analytics SDK, that fact should appear in the privacy policy and be consistent with the cookie policy. If I say there is a desktop build with a EULA, that should not be forgotten when I generate the terms. Wiring those answers across documents is tedious by hand and exactly the kind of thing I skip at midnight.

PolicyForge works from a short set of answers rather than a blank page. That is the whole idea: reduce the job from "write four legal documents" to "answer a few questions about what the app does." The output is a starting draft you can read in one sitting, because it is written in plain English.

What these documents are, and are not

Generated legal text invites a dangerous kind of trust, so let me be blunt. These are drafts. They are not legal advice, they are not a certification, and they are not a substitute for a review by someone qualified to advise you. The tool is decision-support: it turns your answers into readable documents. It does not verify your answers against your code, or check what your app does at runtime.

It is also not a live audit harness of your app's data flows. If you tell the tool you do not collect location data, it will write a policy consistent with that. It will not inspect your binary to find the location call you forgot. The accuracy of the output is bounded by the accuracy of your answers, the same way my hand-written policies were bounded by what I remembered at midnight, only faster and more consistent.

I would read every document before publishing it, especially the retention and third-party sharing sections. The point is to get you from nothing to a reviewable draft, not a finished legal position.

The trade-off

I could have made this a document template library, but a library still leaves you doing the cross-document consistency work. I could also have tried to inspect the app directly to auto-detect data collection. That would be a much larger and more fragile tool, and it would still miss the parts that live in your head, like why you collect something or how long you intend to keep it. Asking is the honest interface here.

The scope is deliberately small: four document types, a few answers, plain-English output, variants across three jurisdictions, and a structure aimed at store submission. That is the feature set. Within it, the tool saves me the worst part of the job, the blank page and the stale template. If your legal docs are currently a template you filled in once and never revisited, PolicyForge will at least make them describe the app you actually have.

FAQ

What is PolicyForge?

A tool that generates privacy policy, terms of service, EULA, and cookie policy drafts from a few answers about your iOS, Android, or web app, in plain English.

Are the documents ready to publish as-is?

They are reviewable drafts, not finished legal documents. Read them before publishing, especially retention and third-party sharing sections. The tool is not legal advice and not a certification.

Does it check what my app really collects?

No. It works from the answers you give. It does not inspect your code, your binary, or your runtime data flows, and it is not a live audit harness.

Which regions and platforms does it target?

The drafts are structured toward Apple and Google store submission and include variants for US, EU, and UK. That is a design target, not a guarantee of compliance.