This page is written in plain English, not legalese — it’s the short, honest version of how simpletel handles your data and what you can expect from it.
What simpletel is
simpletel is an OpenTelemetry-native trace, log, and metric store. Your app sends OpenTelemetry data; simpletel stores it and lets you query it from the terminal or the browser.
What simpletel stores
- Telemetry you send. Traces (spans, events, links), logs, and metrics that your app exports, grouped under a team. The contents are whatever your instrumentation sends — service name, span names, attributes.
- Team scoping. Everything is keyed to the team id your app
sends as the
x-simpletel-teamheader (or gRPC metadata) — the ingest key. A signed-in user sees only the teams they own, never anyone else’s. - Sign-in data. When you sign in with GitHub we store your GitHub login and numeric id. Your user token is stored only as a hash — the raw token is shown once, when it’s minted — and signing out revokes it server-side.
- Retention. Each team has a retention window (30 days by default); records older than it are deleted automatically.
Who can see your data
- You. Only the signed-in owner can read a team’s data. The browser dashboard and the query API both enforce that per-team scoping.
- The operator. simpletel is run by a small operator who may access data when needed to keep the service running, enforce acceptable use, respond to abuse, or honour deletion requests. Your data is not shared, sold, or used to advertise to you.
Site analytics
The public pages of this site load Ahrefs Web Analytics, a
cookie-free analytics script, so the operator can see which pages are found and
used. It sets no cookies and keeps no persistent identifier: per
the
vendor’s description it records the page URL, the referrer, a user
agent, a language preference and a city-level location, discards raw IP
addresses, and counts visitors with a hash re-salted every 24 hours. The
signed-in surfaces (/traces, /account) load
no third-party scripts at all — your telemetry is never
handed to an analytics vendor.
Service posture
simpletel is an early-stage service run by a small operator, with a free tier and paid plans. There is no SLA: things may change, slow down, or go away. It’s meant to be genuinely useful — treat it accordingly.
Paid plans
Paid plans are billed by Stripe; simpletel never sees or stores your card details. Refunds are 14 days, on request, no questions asked. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period — you keep the plan until then.
Downgrading re-applies the lower plan’s retention window. Nothing is deleted at the moment of the change: older records simply age out through the normal retention worker. Questions about billing go to support@simpletel.dev.
Acceptable use
Don’t use simpletel for anything harmful: illegal content, spam, or attacking third parties. The operator may disable teams that are used unreasonably.
Deleting your data
Email support@simpletel.dev to delete an account or purge a team’s data. The operator’s runbook covers account deletion and acceptable-use enforcement; backups are kept for a ~72-hour carve-out, and data is purged on request after that.
Questions
Reach the operator at support@simpletel.dev.