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Privacy

Festival Planner works without an account, sets no cookies, shows no ads and sells nothing to anyone. Signing in is optional. This page explains exactly what that means.

Your plan stays on your device

Your watchlist, your availability and the schedule you build are saved in your own browser’s local storage. The plan itself never leaves your device — there is nowhere for it to go. The single exception is the count described further down: adding a film tells us that one more person saved that film, and nothing about who.

Nothing is written until you do something. Open the site and look around and your browser storage stays empty; tick a film and that tick is saved so it survives a refresh. Clearing your browser data, or the “Reset all” button in the sidebar, erases it completely and we would have no way of recovering it.

The consequence worth knowing: without an account, a plan built on your laptop will not appear on your phone. Use the share button to move it — that puts your plan into the link itself, not onto a server — or sign in, below.

If you sign in

Signing in is optional and only adds things: your watchlists, plans and ticket ticks follow you to every device you sign in on. You sign in with Google. Google tells us your email address and an id that stays the same each time you sign in. It also sends your name and profile photo; we discard both as they arrive and never store them.

What we keep is that email address, the username you choose, and for each festival your watchlist, your plan and which tickets you ticked as bought. Only you can read your lists. Your username is the one thing other people can see. Staying signed in is handled in your browser’s local storage, not with a cookie.

Anyone signed in can find you by your username and ask to be friends. Once you accept, and only then, a friend who uses “Plan with a friend” can see which films are on your watchlist for that one festival, to build a plan from the films you both want; that plan is sent to you as well. Friends never see your plans, your other festivals or your email address. Removing a friend ends this at once.

With an account we may email you, and only about four things: a festival you follow has published its programme; tickets go on sale tomorrow for a festival on your lists; a screening in your saved plan has moved or been cancelled; a festival you planned is over, with your plan in numbers. Never more than one of each per festival, except a changed screening, which is told once for each change. One switch on your profile, or the link at the bottom of any of these emails, stops them all. They are sent through Resend, which receives your address only to deliver them.

This is stored for us by Supabase in Frankfurt, Germany. “Delete account” on the My festivals page removes your account and everything saved to it at once and for good; what is saved in your browser stays there until you clear it.

Visitor statistics

We use Umami to count visits, so we know whether anyone is using this. It is cookie-free by design. Each page view sends: the page address and title, the site that linked you here, your screen size, your browser language, and your country. That is the whole list.

There is no cookie and no advertising identifier, and nothing follows you to any other website. Your IP address reaches Umami’s servers, as it does with any website you open. It is used to derive your country and, together with your browser’s user-agent, to build a one-way hash that stands in for you. The secret that hash is made with is replaced at the start of every month: until then, the same device on the same network counts as the same visitor, which is how we can tell whether people come back; after it, as a stranger. The address itself is never stored.

This is also why there is no cookie banner. Consent is required for storing or reading things on your device; we do not do that for analytics, so there is nothing to ask you about. We would rather not have the popup than have your permission to track you.

How many people saved a film

A film card can show how many people have put that film on their watchlist. When you add one, we store a single row: which festival, which film, and a one-way hash of the random id your browser already keeps. No address, no name, nothing that identifies your browser to us, and nothing about the rest of your watchlist. A row records that one more person saved that film — never who.

You count once per film however many times you add it, and removing a film does not take the number back down: it says how many people saved that film, which stays true afterwards. The counts from before this existed come from the visitor statistics above, added up in bulk and then frozen; nobody was identifiable there either.

A message that several people report is hidden until it is reviewed, and each edition’s room is cleared when the next edition replaces it. The messages are held for us by Supabase in the European Union. Write to us at the address on the Contact button and we will delete anything you posted.

Film data

Programme information — titles, directors, running times, synopses and images — comes from each festival’s own published material, and every festival page links back to its official site. We are an independent project and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or partnered with any of the festivals listed. If you are a festival and want something changed or removed, contact us and it will be done. Where a festival has published no image for a title, a still may come from TMDB instead. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by TMDB.

What we never do

Questions

Anything at all, including a request to delete something: contact@festivalplanner.co. Without an account we hold no personal data about you, so there is usually nothing to delete; with one, “Delete account” removes it all. Ask anyway if you are unsure.

Festival Planner is made in Istanbul by Zahid Balta. It is an independent project with no festival, distributor or advertiser behind it.

Last updated 17 September 2026

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