Support
How can we help?
Get help
I can’t sign in, or my sign-in link didn’t arrive
BirdStory signs you in with an emailed link, not a password. Check your spam or junk folder, make sure you used the same email address you signed up with, and request a fresh link from the sign-in page. If it still doesn’t work, send us a message using the email address on your account.
Something isn’t working
Please send us a message (choose Technical problem) and tell us what you were trying to do, what happened instead, the page address, and the device and browser you were using. A screenshot helps. Please don’t include sensitive details about your experiences.
Accounts & profiles
How do I manage my account and profiles?
Open your Account page from the profile menu. Account details, your guides and profiles, purchases and shared links are all there. Each account can have up to four profiles.
Can I make a profile for a child or another adult?
Yes, from your account. Profiles for a young person or child are for a parent or legal guardian to manage, and you’ll be asked to confirm that. A profile about another adult may need that adult to approve it by email first; they don’t need a BirdStory account. These options depend on where you live, so you may be asked to confirm your country.
How do I change my email or country?
Both are on your Account page. Your sign-in email is where we send sign-in links, so make sure you can receive mail there.
I can’t create an account or my profile is blocked
BirdStory accounts and personalised features aren’t currently offered in the UK or European Economic Area, though the public pages are open to everyone. Some profile options also depend on your country. If you think this is a mistake, send us a message.
Guides & purchases
What does the Guide Pack include, and what are the limits?
The Guide Pack is a one-time purchase for your whole account. It is not a subscription. It includes 12 guide creations or updates, shared across all your profiles, with no expiry. Creating or updating one Personal or Supporter Guide counts as one; creating both counts as two. Quick Reads are unlimited, and editing, viewing, downloading or sharing a guide you already have doesn’t use one. If you use them all, you can request four extra at no charge, once per account; after that, another Guide Pack adds 12 more. Your existing guides stay available. See Pricing for details; your remaining creations and updates show on your Account page.
How do I ask for more guide creations or updates?
Once you have used them all, send us a message and ask for more updates, writing from your account email. We can add four extra at no charge, once per account; we’ll confirm when they’re added. After that, you can buy another Guide Pack to add 12 more.
My guide won’t generate, or it stopped part-way
Starting a guide needs at least 12 saved Experiences. If generation fails, BirdStory retries once automatically and then pauses for a short while before you can try again. A technical failure like this doesn’t use up one of your guide creations or updates. If it keeps failing, send us a message with the profile name and roughly when it happened.
I paid but my Guide Pack isn’t unlocked
Payments can take a moment to confirm, so refresh after a minute. Then check Purchases in your account. If it isn’t there, send us a message using your account email, with your order number or the time of payment.
How do refunds work?
The Refund Policy explains when we refund, including unused packs, duplicate charges and technical problems. To ask for one, send us a message using your account email. Please contact us before disputing a charge with your bank.
How do I share, download or stop sharing a guide?
Your guides and Quick Reads are in your Guides, where you can create a private share link and download a PDF. Nothing is shared until you create a link. To switch a link off, go to Shared links in your account and revoke it.
Privacy & your data
Is my personal information safe?
BirdStory is independently run by one person, not a big company collecting data about you.
We keep things simple. To get started, you provide an email address and a nickname, along with your country and confirmation that you’re an adult. No real name or unnecessary personal details required.
Your Experiences, Sightings and Field Guide are yours to manage, and you decide what you share with others. We don’t sell your personal information or use it for advertising.
We’ve also built our privacy practices around principles found in the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including data minimisation, consent controls and the ability to access or delete your information. Personalised accounts aren’t yet available in the UK or EEA while we complete the requirements for operating there, including local representation where required.
Your privacy matters, and we aim to collect and retain only what’s needed to make BirdStory work.
For more details, including how information is stored, protected and processed by essential service providers, please read our Privacy Policy.
How do I delete a profile or my account?
Delete a profile from My guides in your account. To delete your whole account, use Delete account; we’ll email you a link to confirm. Deletion is permanent and can’t be undone.
How do I withdraw my consent?
You can withdraw consent for a profile at any time from Sensitive data consent in your account. Withdrawing deletes that profile and its guides. If someone created a profile about you and you don’t have an account, you can withdraw from the adult consent page.
How do I ask for a copy of my information, or correct it?
You can edit most details yourself in your account. To ask for access to, or correction of, your personal information, send us a message and choose Privacy as the topic. There isn’t a self-service data download yet. See the Privacy Policy for what we collect and why.
Other questions
Where do I start?
How BirdStory works explains the basics, and The BirdStory Method goes deeper. Once you’re signed in, your Field Guide is the place to begin.
Is BirdStory a diagnosis or therapy?
No. BirdStory is a self-reflection tool that helps you notice patterns. It doesn’t diagnose anything and isn’t a substitute for a doctor, therapist or other professional. Guides are suggestions, not facts.
I need accessibility support
If something on BirdStory is hard to use, or you need information in a different form, send us a message and tell us what would help. We’ll do our best to work with you.
About BirdStory
Who built BirdStory?
That would be me, Nigel McHardy. I’m a designer and developer based in Northland, New Zealand, with over 20 years of experience designing websites, interfaces and digital products.
BirdStory is an independent passion project that’s grown from a personal curiosity into something considerably larger than I originally intended. I’ve spent the last couple of years researching, designing, building and generally disappearing down rabbit holes.
It’s largely a one-person operation, with plenty of help from AI along the way. No big team, no corporate backing. Just a designer with a persistent idea, a fascination with how people work, and apparently a rather poor understanding of when to stop adding features.
Who is Alison Harlow? Is she real?
Not exactly. Alison Harlow is a fictional character, but the experiences behind her stories have roots in real life.
She began with an archive of personal writing that was shared with me many years ago. Those stories helped shape her early personality and voice, which I’ve since developed with the help of AI into a broader fictional narrator for BirdStory.
The challenge was finding a way to tell stories across hundreds of very different experiences. No single person could realistically have lived them all, and I didn’t want every entry to sound like it had been written by an instruction manual.
Alison provides a consistent storytelling voice, bringing everyday situations to life with a mixture of curiosity, reflection and humour. Her stories draw on the kinds of experiences people describe and discuss, turning them into fictional first-person accounts of how those moments might unfold in everyday life.
So Alison isn’t a real person, and she doesn’t speak for everyone who shares an experience. She’s a character we’ve created to help tell stories that might otherwise be difficult to put into words.
Fictional storyteller. Familiar experiences. That’s Alison.
How much of BirdStory was made with AI?
Quite a lot, actually. Without AI, BirdStory probably wouldn’t exist.
AI has helped with everything from researching and organising hundreds of experiences to developing content, exploring ideas and creating illustrations. It’s made it possible for one person to build something that would otherwise have been well beyond my available time and resources.
But AI hasn’t been left to run the show. The concept, direction, design decisions and editorial judgement are mine. There’s been plenty of reviewing, rewriting, refining and occasionally telling AI that no, that’s absolutely not what I meant.
The artwork is AI-assisted too. I’m a designer and illustrator myself, and I’d love to introduce more of my own hand-drawn work over time. That’s on the list, alongside approximately a hundred other things I’m working through.
There’s one more use worth knowing about. AI also helps write the personalised guides and Quick Reads you can generate from the Experiences you save. That’s separate from how I built the site, and the Privacy Policy explains it, including what is and isn’t sent. Your name, your email address and anything you type in your own words aren’t sent to the AI service.
For me, AI has been an extraordinarily useful creative tool. It’s helped turn an idea I’d been carrying around into something real, while leaving me responsible for what BirdStory ultimately puts into the world.