AI at PennaPay

There is AI in this product, and you can see the word on our pricing page. That tends to be the point where a freelancer starts wondering what exactly is being done with their work and their clients' details.

So here is the whole list: every place AI runs, what stays switched off, what never happens with your data, and where the switches are.

What AI does here today

This is every AI feature that can actually run today. Two are on by default but only ever run when you click something. Two are off entirely until you decide otherwise.

If you are on Studio you may also see a switch for custom template generation. That one is ahead of itself: the switch exists, the feature behind it does not yet.

What we haven't shipped, and why

PennaAid, the AI writing assistant — the one that would draft your client emails, proposals and project briefs from scratch — is built and sitting in beta. It is not released. The pages exist, but they are not in the app's navigation, and we do not sell it. The brief polish above is the one piece of it that has shipped.

The reason is narrow. Writing in your voice, to your client, is the place where a mediocre draft actually costs you something. An awkward invoice layout is an annoyance. An email that reads like a machine wrote it, sent to a client you spent two years earning, is a different kind of damage. We would rather ship that late than ship it thin.

Three other things are absent by design, not by backlog:

• No AI touches your actual work. Not your images, not your audio, not your portfolio pieces. The AI here handles paperwork.
• No AI sends anything. Every output is a draft on your screen. You review, edit and send — or you don't.
• No AI decisions. Nothing is auto-priced, auto-approved or auto-chased. In GDPR terms, these features produce suggestions, not automated decisions.

What never happens

• Your data is never used to train models. Under Anthropic's Commercial API Terms, your inputs and outputs are not training data.
• Retention is short, and it isn't ours. Anthropic retains inputs and outputs for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring and safety classification, then deletes them.
• Nothing runs in the background. There is no ambient scanning of your invoices, messages or files. AI runs on an action you take, and not otherwise.
• Only what you submitted goes out. The specific invoice, message or receipt in front of you — not your client list, not your account credentials, not unrelated data.
• When in doubt, it refuses. The permission check sits in one place that every AI call has to pass through, and anything it doesn't recognise is denied rather than allowed.

The off switch

Every AI feature has its own switch, in Settings → AI & Privacy. Turn off the ones you don't want, or all of them. Nothing else changes when you do — invoicing, payments, bookings and the rest work exactly the same with every AI feature switched off.

You can also switch AI off for one client rather than everywhere. Open that client and turn it off there — useful when a contract forbids AI processing on their material, and you don't want to give up the feature for everyone else.

There is a shorter answer in the FAQ, and the formal version — what is sent, to whom, and on what legal basis — is section 5.1 of the privacy policy.

AI for the paperwork. Never for the craft.