Privacy

Beta policy, effective July 13, 2026; updated August 26, 2026 (the Setup Check order form: where your answers are stored, who else touches the order, how long we keep it, and the one technical record we keep when the form is submitted). A fuller policy (attorney-reviewed) ships with our newsletter feature.

This site sets no cookies and keeps no personal profiles. No accounts, no sign-up, no cross-site tracking. The checker and quiz run entirely in your browser and send us nothing about you. Our host (Microsoft Azure) keeps standard, short-lived server logs (IP addresses, requests) to operate the service, as every website's host does.

Traffic measurement. We use Plausible Analytics, a privacy-first service, to count visits in aggregate: which pages are viewed, the referring site, and coarse browser, device type, and country data. It uses no cookies and no persistent identifiers, and cannot follow you across other sites; we see counts, not people. Details in Plausible's data policy.

Unverified search terms. When you search our site — the home page, the checker, or the guides — for something we haven't verified, we record the search term itself, stripped to letters and numbers, capped in length, with anything resembling an email address or phone number discarded in your browser before it's sent. It tells us what to research next, which is the point. In the checker we also record which ecosystems were selected at the time — research context, not an identifier. Searches that find what you were looking for record nothing beyond the ordinary page view. None of it is tied to you, and no other input you type is retained.

Setup Check (our paid report). If you order one, you answer about nine questions on our order form — what you already own, what runs your home, and what you want it to do. None of them are questions about you: no name, no address, no photos. Your answers go straight into a private store held by our cloud provider, Microsoft Azure, in the United States, where the only thing that reads them is the work of writing your report. Three other companies touch the order and nothing else: Cloudflare Turnstile, the bot check on the form, which sees your IP address but none of your answers; Stripe, which takes the payment — card details go to Stripe and never reach this site or our systems; and Resend, which delivers the email confirming your order arrived, and so handles your email address and that short message — not your answers, and not your report.

We use your answers only to research and write your report — never to build a profile, never sold, never shared. What you send is more than a shopping list; it describes your house. So we keep it for exactly as long as producing the report and honoring our promises takes, and then delete it:

One technical record, and only when you press send. Browsing the site produces none of this — it applies to the moment the order form submits. We keep a short record of that request so we can tell when an order fails and fix it: whether it succeeded, how long it took, and the approximate area it came from — a city and region, worked out from your internet address by Microsoft before the address itself is thrown away (it's stored as 0.0.0.0, not as you). It is a rough area, not a street and not a name. That record never contains your answers or your email, only we can read it, and it's deleted after 30 days. We'd rather tell you it exists than have you find it in a policy footnote.

General product facts we learn while researching may be published in our public library; nothing about you, your home, or your list ever is. Ask at any point and we'll delete everything sooner — contact us.

One coming feature will change this in a disclosed, minimal way: an optional email newsletter (double opt-in, one-click unsubscribe, never sold or shared — stored with our email provider, nowhere else). This page will be updated before it launches.

Questions or deletion requests: contact us.