Updated September 2026. Written by the Threadfall team.
Recording a table full of people raises one question before any other: where does the audio go, and does any of it train a model somewhere. Short answer: no, never, not by Threadfall and not by any vendor that touches it. The rest of this page is the mechanism behind that answer, not just the reassurance.
These aren't the same guarantee wearing different clothes. Pick the one that matches how your table actually plays.
| Mode | Where the audio goes | Closed laptop or dead tab | What's kept after |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discord Bot | Streamed by our bot, a server-side process, straight to AssemblyAI | Keeps recording, the bot's connection doesn't depend on your device | Transcript only |
| Browser Audio (mic plus system audio, in-app, online tables) | Streamed from your browser tab straight to AssemblyAI | Recording stops, the tab is the connection | Transcript only |
| In Person (device mic) | Same as Browser Audio | Recording stops, same reason | Transcript only |
Only Discord Bot mode survives a closed laptop, because it's the only one of the three that never depended on a device at your table. Telling you otherwise would be exactly the confident overreach this page exists to avoid.
The mechanism behind "we never receive the audio," for Browser Audio and In Person: your browser gets a short-lived AssemblyAI token, good for about five minutes and only for opening the connection, then it talks to AssemblyAI directly for the rest of the session. Discord Bot mode never even passes through your browser; the bot itself holds the vendor credential server-side. Either way, nothing about a breach on Threadfall's end could hand anyone your audio, because it was never Threadfall's to lose. A breach at AssemblyAI's own end is a fair question too: your transcript lives in our database regardless, a separate store from anything AssemblyAI holds, so a vendor incident there wouldn't touch your session's record, only audio they'd already processed and were contractually barred from keeping past that.
Almost everything Threadfall keeps is the transcript, not the audio, and those are two different strengths of promise, not one line.
It's your campaign's record, not Threadfall's, which is the whole reason you can export it or delete it whenever you want, covered further down this page.
Live audio: we never receive it at all. It streams from your bot connection or browser straight to AssemblyAI, and touches Threadfall's servers exactly never.
A recording that does briefly reach us: only one path, and it's automatic. When a live browser recording can't reach AssemblyAI, the session's own captured audio falls back to OpenAI's Whisper, in memory, whatever the length (long files are chunked internally, never turned away), with nothing written to disk. There's no separate self-serve upload today for a recording made entirely outside Threadfall, on a phone or another recorder. If you've got one, email us and we'll run it through by hand.
AssemblyAI is barred from training on it by contract; the model APIs don't train on it by default.
Nothing you record trains an AI model. That's two separately checkable claims, not one slogan, so here they are apart:
Campaign members, and no one outside the campaign, full stop.
During a live session, everyone in the campaign watches the same transcript come in as it's recorded, GM and players alike. That access carries forward afterward too: the finished recap, the codex, and the session record itself stay open to the whole campaign, not gated to the GM.
A GM can publish a campaign's chronicle to a public page. Off by default, and it's an explicit, reversible action. Any player can also switch themselves off every public page from their own profile, and the GM can't override that.
One more honest note: an administrator can reach the database, so a transcript can be read if that is what it takes to fix a bug or answer a support request. Today the admin is one person, the founder and CEO. There is no dashboard built for browsing campaign content, and it is not read routinely.
A session you delete is gone at once, a closed account clears within 30 days, and neither one has an undo.
Players and hand-tracking stay free forever. The paywall sits only on the AI, priced close to what it actually costs to run.
What costs money, and what doesn't, in plain terms.
Players are always free, on every campaign, forever. A GM can track a campaign by hand for free, forever, with no card. What costs money is the AI: recording, transcription, and the recap and codex it produces, somewhere around $3.50 to $5.60 a session in transcription and AI processing by our own vendor bills. Your first two full sessions are free. After that, GM plans start at $10/month. I'm one person running this, and I'm not profitable yet.
No. Not by Threadfall, and not by any vendor that touches the audio or the transcript.
No, though the strength of that "no" depends on the mode: live audio never reaches Threadfall at all; a browser recording's own automatic Whisper fallback receives the file briefly and deletes it once the transcript is produced.
The transcript is what we hold, on our own servers, regardless. A breach at AssemblyAI could only expose audio already processed and contractually barred from further retention, never your stored transcript.
Yes, either one, any time, from inside the app. A session you delete is gone at once. Closing your account clears everything within 30 days.
Yes. Before recording starts, everyone present has to accept a screen with this text, and anyone joining a session already underway gets the same screen before they can stay:
Voice-based speaker identification may be treated as biometric data depending on where you live (for example, Illinois, Texas, Washington, or under the EU/UK GDPR). By continuing, you consent to your voice being recorded and processed this way.
More: the safety tools guide · what makes a good session recap · picking a microphone for the table · all Threadfall guides