Blog & Updates

Data ownership means owning the decision to leave, too. We’ve shipped a Danger Zone section in the Advanced tab of your pod dashboard. Clicking Delete my account opens a three-step flow:

• Step 1 — Choose a reason (we use this to improve the product, never to market to you).
• Step 2 — Optionally tell us more in your own words.
• Step 3 — Review the consequences, confirm, and submit.

After confirming, your account enters a 30-day pending deletion window. During that time you can contact support to reverse the decision. After 30 days your pod data is permanently removed. Pro subscribers have their Stripe subscription cancelled with cancel_at_period_end so you keep access until the end of your billing period.

We also added a pod data export before we removed the in-dashboard delete button — so whatever you decide, you can always take your data with you first.

Pod Drive

Pod Drive is a file manager backed entirely by your pod at yourname.privatedatapod.com. Upload, organise, and access files from any browser on any device. Because the files live in your pod, they’re accessible to any other Solid app with your permission — no more file import/export between tools.

Pod Resume

Pod Resume lets you build a professional resume that lives in your pod. Export as PDF, share a link, or make sections selectively public — all without surrendering your career history to a third-party platform that might gate-keep it, change pricing, or disappear.

Both apps are free to use with any pod plan.

We built the Developer Center because the Solid ecosystem needs more apps. The standard is powerful — but building and hosting an app from scratch still involves too many steps for most developers. Developer Center removes the infrastructure friction:

• Download a starter template (React + Solid auth, pre-wired)
• Build your app locally
• Upload a ZIP to deploy to a global CDN with HTTPS included

Free pod users can host 1 app. Pro users get 5. We provide the hosting at yourapp.apps.privatedatapod.com — you own the app and all user data stays in each user’s own pod.

There are two ways to build a “personal data vault” service. The first is to create a proprietary system optimised for your use case — you control the format, the API, the roadmap. The second is to implement an open standard that others are also building towards. The first gives you more short-term control. The second gives your users something much more valuable: genuine data portability.

We chose Solid — the W3C standard created by Tim Berners-Lee — because we wanted to mean it when we said “you own your data.” With a proprietary system, locking you in is a business option we could exercise at any time. With Solid, we can’t: if we tried to lock you in, you could self-host or move to another provider, and every app you use would keep working.

That constraint is intentional. It forces us to compete on service quality, not switching costs. We think that’s how it should work.

Every major cloud storage provider today — Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, OneDrive — operates on the same underlying premise: your files live on their infrastructure, under their terms, accessible to their systems. You get convenience. They get your data.

We think that trade-off is bad for users in the long run. Data locked to a platform can’t easily move. Data subject to a vendor’s terms can be analysed, mined, or restricted. Data on a proprietary system can only work with apps that provider approves.

Private Data Pod is a hosted Solid pod service. Your pod is hosted on our servers, but it follows the Solid open standard — which means you can move it, self-host it, or use any Solid-compatible app with it. The standard, not us, defines what your pod can do.

Free tier is 1 GB. Pro is $9.99/month for 10 GB with daily backups. No credit card required to start.