Earlier this year I talked to about a hundred people in Australia about the survey tool. The strongest reaction of the whole session came during question time, and it had nothing to do with facets or scoring modes. Someone asked where the answers actually go.
They go into your Google Drive. I never see them. There's no server of mine standing between a respondent's answer and your spreadsheet, because there's no server of mine at all.
That was already true of version 1. The tool has run entirely inside the user's own Drive since the first copy of the first sheet, and that part was never up for revision. What changed in version 2 is that you can now get there without me sitting on the other end of a phone.
A policy is a promise about access somebody already has
Most software asks you to trust a commitment. We could look at your data, and we choose not to, or we look only for these reasons, under this retention window, subject to change. Read enough of those and they're all the same claim with different amounts of generosity attached.
There's no commitment here to break. The statements you write, the answers your respondents give, the scoring formulas, the charts: all of it sits inside a spreadsheet you own, run by a script only you have authorized.
I couldn't build a version that let me look without turning it into different software, one with a server in the middle, which is the thing I set out to avoid.
The scoring is spreadsheet formulas, so you can audit the math yourself. Open the sheet, read the exact calculation that turned twenty answers into a result, and change it if you disagree with me.
The charts it produces are filed by row and timestamp. A folder of charts eventually gets shared with somebody, and a filename is a poor place to keep a person's identity.
The tool is licensed Apache 2.0. Version 1 shipped under Creative Commons, which reads well but was never intended for software, a point Creative Commons makes about their own licenses.
Apache adds a patent grant and clear redistribution terms. That matters most to the reader whose legal department has to sign off before anyone on staff can touch it, and it turns that review into a read rather than a meeting.
One limit worth naming out loud: Gmail caps a personal account at roughly a hundred sends a day. Run this in a room of a hundred and twenty and the last thirty people wait until tomorrow. Better to plan around it than discover it live.
Every privacy policy is a promise about access somebody already has. There is no promise here to break.
What version 2 does instead
Nothing gets pasted into a script editor, and no trigger gets built by hand. The wording for a result email lives on a config sheet and is read fresh every time a message goes out, so an edit takes effect immediately, with no deploy step and no held breath.
The menu is ordered as the journey you're actually on rather than alphabetically. The form is born closed and stays closed until Check Setup passes, so nobody can submit a response before the scoring behind it is ready to receive one.
Check Setup reads your configuration back to you in plain language: which statement it will treat as which rung, which field is still blank, what will break if you publish anyway. Authorization happens once, upfront, with everything the tool will ever need requested at the same time.
The larger change is what you're handed before you write a word. Version 2 ships with four AI writing prompts, each generated from your own sheet, so each one already knows your facets, your levels, your statements and which of them are reverse worded. They draft your statements, your result levels, your per facet messages and your email copy, in that order, sized to whatever you've already entered.
Two more prompts run earlier, while the sheet still knows nothing about your subject: one audits the material you already have, and the other turns that audit into a set of facets. Those two live on the web at coroin.app/#survey.
Six prompts covering the part that used to be entirely yours to solve alone, which was staring at an empty sheet and inventing an assessment from nothing.
Twenty minutes end to end, and you'll spend nearly all of it writing.
What you actually own
Nothing phones home. Every copy of the sheet carries its own bound Apps Script project with its own ID, which is why a version 1 install can't be upgraded in place and why moving to version 2 means copying the new template and rebuilding in it.
That's a real cost of the design, and it's the same property that makes the rest of it true. There's no update channel because there's no channel of any kind.
So there's nothing to subscribe to. There's no export request to file, because you were never given a copy of your own data in the first place. You have the original.
If I disappear tomorrow, or just stop answering email, your survey keeps scoring responses and your result emails keep going out.
Why most tools aren't built this way
I spend my working life on the other side of this question. Eight years advising private equity firms, 250+ diligence projects, a great many of them SaaS companies.
When I value one of those businesses, I'm looking for exactly the things I've just told you this tool doesn't have: recurring revenue, retained data, switching costs, an aggregate view nobody else can assemble. Those aren't dirty words. They're the assets. A company that gave all of it away wouldn't be a more virtuous company, it would be a shorter one.
So when an assessment tool holds your respondents' answers on somebody else's server, the reason usually has nothing to do with carelessness about your privacy. The answers are the product. Once a company has them, retention has a floor under it and the roadmap has somewhere to go.
A server also earns its place on the merits sometimes: shared state, real time collaboration, computation too heavy to run on the client, compliance somebody has to answer for. Plenty of software qualifies, and I've spent a career helping build it.
Twenty statements scored by spreadsheet formulas does not qualify. That work fits comfortably inside a tool you're already paying Google for, and every advantage I'd have gained by adding a server in the middle would have accrued to me.
A server earns its place when there is shared work for it to do. Mine would only have had my business model to do.
The tool is free and Apache 2.0 licensed at coroin.app/#survey. The demo and the full setup guide are at backstage.coroin.app.