Own your golf data

A standard pattern in software: the company that holds your data makes it easy to put data in and hard to get it out. Round histories sit inside an app that does not provide a meaningful export. Years of scoring becomes hostage to one company's continued goodwill.

Chalk does not work this way. Your data is yours. If you want to leave, you can take it with you. If you want to keep a copy, you can keep one. The export is not a feature we will add later; it is part of how the product is built.

What "yours" actually means

A few specifics, because the word "yours" is doing a lot of work in product copy across the industry.

Your rounds are yours. The hole-by-hole scores, fairways hit, greens in regulation, putts — all of it can be exported in a standard format.

Your voice notes are yours. The transcribed sentences you said about each hole are part of the round record. They come with the export.

Your course notes are yours. The observations you saved about a particular hole at a particular course are bundled with the rest.

Your account history is yours. The list of rounds, the dates, the playing partners you tagged.

What is not in the export is anything that was never about you. We do not have ad-targeting profiles, behavioural-tracking data, or shadow records. There is nothing to withhold because there is nothing of that kind in the first place.

Why we treat this as structural

A product that is confident in its own value does not need lock-in to retain users. If we are good enough at being your scorecard, you will keep using us because we are useful, not because leaving is painful. If we stop being useful, you should be able to walk out the door without losing four years of rounds.

That is the structural version of the argument. The cynical version is more pointed: lock-in is a tax on trust. The moment you decide a product is hard to leave, you start trusting it less, even if the product has not changed. Confidence in your ability to leave is what makes you willing to stay.

We would rather earn the next round than charge a switching cost on the last one.

What we delete and what we keep

The flip side of the export commitment is the deletion commitment, and the two work together.

If you delete your account from Settings inside the app, every round, shot, note, practice session, course note, scorecard photo, and profile row we hold for you is permanently removed from our systems. Not anonymised. Not flagged "do not show". Removed.

The exception is a narrow set of records we are legally required to retain — for example, marketing consent records under UK and EU consumer law. Those are the only things that survive a deletion, and our privacy policy lists exactly what they are.

What this lets you do

Three concrete things, in order of how often we hear them.

One, run your numbers your way. Some players want to pivot their rounds in a spreadsheet that the app does not produce. With the export, you can. (If you want shortcut tools that do the WHS maths without a spreadsheet, our calculators cover Stableford, Course Handicap, Score Differential, and Net Double Bogey.)

Two, archive a season. The end-of-year backup is a habit some players keep across decades. Chalk supports it without making you screenshot anything.

Three, switch apps without losing history. If a better scorecard app comes along and we cannot match it, you should be able to take your rounds with you. We would rather you stay because we are good. Not because leaving is hard.

What this means for trust

We think the export commitment is one of the most important quiet decisions in the whole product. Most of what makes an app feel like a long-term home is invisible: the things the company does not do, the data they do not collect, the lock-in they do not engineer. You only notice these decisions when you try to leave and find out it is easy.

Our privacy policy is the legal version of this commitment. A scorecard with no ads, no public feed, no nag is the design version. This essay is the data version.

If you have years of golf data inside an app that does not let you out, ask yourself why. The answer is usually that the lock-in is part of the value they are offering the next investor, not the value they are offering you.

Your data is yours. We are happy to hand it back.