Security and your data

← Back to the site Terms and privacy Ask us something

What we hold, where it sits, and who can reach it. Written for anyone who has to answer to someone else before they can use this.

Draft. This page describes what we intend to run. Confirm each line against the live service before you rely on it, and have a lawyer read it alongside the terms.

The short version

Your bids are encrypted in transit and at rest
We never see or store card details. The payment provider handles those end to end
Your projects and comparisons are yours alone. We do not sell or share them
The pooled price record carries no names, addresses, contractors or documents
A small named list of subprocessors, published below and updated when it changes
Vendor questionnaires and DPAs answered directly, not through a sales process

Where your data lives

Everything runs on infrastructure in the United States. Uploads and comparisons are encrypted in transit with TLS and encrypted at rest by the storage provider. Access to the production environment is limited to people who need it, protected by multi factor authentication, and logged.

What we hold, and for how long

Your bid documentsHeld so you can open a saved comparison and check it. Deleted with your account.

Comparisons, questions and notesHeld for as long as your account exists, including after you cancel.

Contact details on a bidRead from the bid itself so we can build your contractor list. Yours, not shared.

Account detailsName and email. That is all we ask for.

Payment detailsNever held by us. There is nowhere in this software to type a card number.

What you have boughtYour plan, or for a one-off purchase the date you bought it, the date it runs out, and Stripe's own reference for the payment. That reference is how we know a payment has been counted once. No card details, ever.

A code somebody gave youIf you were handed a code, we hold the code, the name written on it when it was made, the date you redeemed it, and which account redeemed it. The name is whatever we wrote down when we created the code, so that we know who we gave it to. Nothing about a code is ever put in an email.

Anonymized price rowsTrade, wording of the line, amount, month, zip code. Kept indefinitely. See below.

Corrections you make in the viewerWhat we read, and what you changed it to. Deleted with the comparison. See below.

Messages you send usContact messages and the reason you give if you cancel, with your reply address. Kept so we can answer and so we can fix what you told us about.

Usage countsHow many comparisons, how many bids, which trade. No names, no addresses, no amounts.

The pooled price record

Every comparison contributes rows to a pooled record of what work costs. A row holds the trade, the wording of the line, the amount, the month, the zip code, the size of the job if you stated one, how many bids it was priced against, and which bid you chose.

It carries no name, no street address, no contractor, no project, no file, and nothing that ties a row back to you. You can see your own running count in Settings. This is what will one day let the software say what a line usually runs in your area, and it only works because everyone contributes to it.

Corrections, and why we keep them

When you open a line in the viewer we record what we read and what you changed it to. If you look at a line and leave it alone, we record that too, as a confirmation that we got it right. Both are how the software stops making the same mistake, and there is no other way to find out: nothing else tells us which of our readings were wrong.

A correction holds the wording of one line, before and after. It carries no contractor, no address and no file, and it is deleted when you delete the comparison it came from. That is the difference between it and the pooled price record above, which is anonymous and is kept.

What we count

We count how the product is used: comparisons run, bids per comparison, trade, how many questions came out, whether you chose someone. It is tied to an account number we generated, not to your email, and the list of things that may be counted is fixed in the code rather than left open. No contractor name, no address, no contact detail, no dollar figure from a bid, and no part of a document is ever included.

Email

One email a week, and only when you have questions still open on a comparison you are still working on. If nothing is open, or a comparison has sat untouched for three months, you will not hear from us. It gives counts and the name of your own project, never a contractor or a price, because email is not a confidential channel. Every one carries a one-click unsubscribe that needs no login, and you can turn it off in Settings.

Who else touches it

We use a small number of subprocessors, and we will name them here as the service goes live: a cloud host, a database and storage provider, a payment provider, an email provider, a product analytics provider, and an AI provider that reads the documents. Each is bound by its own data processing terms. If you need the current list in writing, ask and we will send it.

If you need a DPA

The operator of this service, and the party you would sign with, is Certo LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, of 1309 Coffeen Ave Ste 3143, Sheridan, WY 82801. If you are a business putting your clients' documents into this service, you are the controller and we are the processor. We will sign a data processing agreement. Write to us and we will send our standard one.

If your company needs more than this

Some businesses have to clear a vendor review before they can use anything. If that is you, write to us. We will fill in your questionnaire, sign a DPA, name every subprocessor, and answer whatever else your team needs, directly and without a sales process.

Telling us about a problem

If you find a security issue, write to us through the contact form and mark it urgent. We would rather hear it from you than read about it. We will not pursue anyone who reports a genuine issue in good faith and gives us a reasonable chance to fix it.

Ask a security question