Privacy Policy

This Policy explains what Home Manual (the “Service”) collects, how we use and share it, and the choices you have. It works alongside our Terms & Conditions; where the two differ on data handling, this Policy controls.

1. What we collect

• Account data — your email address, used for passwordless sign-in.
• Your Content — the home data you enter or upload: address and property details, systems, appliances, projects, contacts, photos, and the original documents you import (e.g. inspection reports, invoices, insurance policies), including files you forward by email to your home’s own address, plus the structured records the Service derives from them.
• Sharing settings — whether a share link is enabled, the tokens for your share, guest and listing links, which sections you have chosen to share on the share link (the guest link and the listing link each always show their own fixed set), and which individual documents you have marked as shared. It also covers the private links you make for neighbors (a card for one neighbor, a request to have a job done on the same day or to share one, and a street’s emergency plan): the name you gave each neighbor, what you chose to show them, and how many times each card was opened and when it last was. We never record who opened it.
• What neighbors send back — a neighbor can answer one of those links without an account. What they enter is stored with your home: their names, a phone number, their address and a note, and depending on the link, whether they hold your key, how many stories their house has, whether they would like to be checked on first in an emergency, where their shut-offs are, and what they have that could help.
• Other people’s email addresses you give us — the address of someone you invite to co-own a home, and of a contractor you write to through the Service. We use them only to send the email you asked us to send, and, for an invitation nobody has answered, one reminder.
• Operational data — basic logs and error reports generated when the Service runs (for reliability and security), plus a first-party record, tied to your account, of which AI operations you run (this is what enforces your plan’s AI allowance), of your progress through setup, and of how you use the Service: which of its pages you open, whether a search in the ask box found something, whether you open the manual’s This week card, and when a link in one of our emails brings you back. We record that these happened, not what you typed. We also time a sample of page loads, including pages opened from a shared link: how quickly the page appeared and answered, the kind of page it was (a home’s manual, say), and whether the screen was phone-sized — never who you are, which home it was, or the address of the link. We do not use third-party advertising trackers.
• Phone notifications — if you allow notifications in our iPhone app, the device token Apple issues for that phone, so we can send it an urgent notice about your home and, if you turn that on separately, a note when your forwarded mail has something ready to keep.
• Payment data — only if you buy Pro or closing gifts. We keep which plan you are on, when a year of Pro you bought ends, how many closing gifts you bought and which homes each one was used for, and a record of each payment notice Stripe sends us (its identifier, its kind, and your account). Your card details go to Stripe, not to us; we never receive or store them.
• Printed book requests — only if you ask for a printed copy of a manual. We keep the name and postal address you give us for delivery, which may be your own or that of the person you are giving the book to, a phone number for the carrier, how many copies you asked for, the date you need it by, any note you add, the book’s printable files, and where the request has got to.
• Stored in your browser — small first-party cookies, which are sent back to us with each request:
  • hm-lang — the language you have chosen, so a page can render in it before you have signed in.
  • hm-tz — the time zone and date format your browser reports, so a page that greets you by time of day is right when it first renders instead of correcting itself a moment later.
  • hm-remember — whether you asked us to keep you signed in, which is what sets how long a sign-in lasts.
  • hm-src — if you arrived from a manual someone shared with you, which of our two share links you followed. It is set only on arrival from such a link, it holds nothing about you or about their home, and it is used once: to record that a home you go on to create began with somebody else’s manual. If you sign in on the web while it is set, the same value is kept on your account for thirty days, so that a home you go on to add in our iPhone app is recorded the same way.
  • hm-app — set only inside our apps, so their pages know they are open in an app. It holds nothing about you.
  • your sign-in tokens, set by Supabase (their names begin sb-), which are what keep you signed in.

  None of these are advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. We also keep some things in your browser’s own local storage — which sections you have open, drafts you have begun but not saved, and whether you have seen the product tour. That stays on your device and is not sent to us, except that opening the This week card is counted, as described above. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes all of the above, and signs you out.

2. How we use it

We process your data only to operate and improve the Service for you — specifically to:

• build and display your home manual and keep it current;
• use AI to extract structured facts from the documents and photos you provide, to read an uploaded floor plan, and to draft the things you ask for and review — a project scope, a message to a contractor, a check of a quote, an illustrative render;
• render read-only share links according to your per-section choices;
• show a neighbor the card or request you made for them, show you what they send back, and, on a street’s emergency plan, show each home that has joined what the others wrote;
• send an urgent notice about your home to your phone, if you turned alerts on, and a note when your forwarded mail has something ready to keep, if you turned that on;
• email a person you invite to co-own a home, and remind them once if they have not answered after three days;
• send a message you write to a contractor, with your own address to reply to;
• keep the files you forward to your home’s own email address, by hand or by a filter in your own mailbox, until you read them into your record or remove them; a PDF among them is read when it arrives, by the same reader as a document you upload, and what it finds waits beside it — nothing goes on your record until you keep it; mail that did not come from or through a member’s own mailbox is discarded;
• if a professional prepared a home manual for you, email you the private link to claim it, at the address you gave them;
• when you claim a home manual a professional prepared for you, tell that professional: we keep the home’s address and the day you claimed it in their account, and email them a receipt — nothing about what you do with the manual afterwards;
• if you ask for a printed book, make it from your manual and have it printed and delivered to the address you gave us;
• if you buy Pro, take the payment, record which plan you are on and until when, and remind you before a year you bought, or were given with a home, ends;
• if you are a professional who buys closing gifts, take the payment and record how many gifts you bought and which homes they were used for;
• secure the Service, prevent abuse, and diagnose problems.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use Your Content to train our own models. Our AI providers are used on paid API tiers, whose terms do not permit training on what we send them — on a free tier at least one of them reserves the right to, so this rests on the commercial account we hold rather than on anything the software can enforce. If that ever changes for a provider, we will say so here before it takes effect.

3. Service providers we share with

We use a small set of processors to run the Service. They act on our instructions and only for the purposes above:

• Supabase — database, authentication, and file storage.
• Vercel — application hosting.
• Anthropic — reading your documents and photos into structured records; this also covers an uploaded floor plan. It drafts the text you ask for (a project scope, a message to a contractor, a check of a quote), and facts from your manual are sent with those requests so the draft is specific to your home.
• OpenAI — searching the web when you ask it to find farmers markets near your home, or local contractors for a project: your home’s address, or its map position, is sent, and for contractors the project’s description too. If OpenAI cannot search, Anthropic searches instead. It also compares two to four contractors’ quotes for one project when you ask it to: the quotes, any scope you kept for the project, and facts from your manual are sent, and if OpenAI cannot compare them, Anthropic does. It also sorts the photographs you add into those taken inside your home and those taken outside it: each photograph is sent, made smaller, and if OpenAI cannot sort them, Anthropic does. It also writes a short caption for each photograph it finds in a document you upload, such as an inspection report; those photographs are sent, made smaller, and if OpenAI cannot caption them, Anthropic does. In an inspection report, it also picks out the photographs of equipment rating plates and reads the model and serial number on each one, as a second check on Anthropic’s reading: the report’s photographs are sent, made smaller, to find the plates, and each plate photograph is sent again to be read. If OpenAI cannot find the plates, Anthropic does; if it cannot read a plate, no number from that plate is kept. It also turns what you say during a walkthrough of your home into entries for your record: your words, and the names of the rooms, systems and appliances already on it, are sent, and if OpenAI cannot, Anthropic does. OpenAI also handles AI generation of illustrative project renders, except a repaint of your home’s exterior, which Google makes. A render made from one of your own photographs of that space, a photo already stored in your manual, sends that photograph with the project’s description and, for some renders, a few other photographs of the same home so the render can match its real materials. A render sketched from a description alone sends only the text, and a change to a render you already have sends that render, the change you ask for, and the same few photographs.
• Google (Gemini) — answering what you type into the Ask box: your question is sent to Google together with your home’s record, so the answer can come from it, and the whole record goes with every question, not only the part a question needs. That record is your home’s address and map position; its systems and appliances, with their model and serial numbers; its tasks, projects and service history, including who did the work and what it cost; its contacts and shut-offs; its recurring services and their prices; your home insurance policy — the insurer, policy number, coverage limits, deductible, premium and your agent’s phone number; your property tax and typical utility bills; and the names of the documents on file. When you ask about a document, passages from it are sent too. It never includes the guest card’s private details, such as your Wi-Fi password, your neighbors, or your belongings. If Google cannot answer, Anthropic answers instead, from the same facts. Google also lays out a drawing of your yard from your description of it: what you type or say about the yard, and facts from your manual, are sent, and if Google cannot draw it, Anthropic does. It also writes the short summary of where your home stands today, when you ask for one: facts from your manual and your home’s public-record history are sent, and if Google cannot write it, Anthropic does. Google also handles AI generation of an illustrated cover for your manual if you ask for one. A cover is drawn from a photograph you choose, which is sent with the request. We offer it only for a photograph your record identifies as the building itself, and it refuses a photograph of people. A render that repaints your home’s exterior from one of your photographs, or a change to one, is made by Google, and the photographs are sent to Google. If OpenAI cannot complete a render, we make it with Google instead, and the same text and pictures are sent to Google.
• Stripe — payments, only if you buy Pro or closing gifts. You pay on Stripe’s own checkout page. We send it your email address and an account identifier so the payment can be matched to your account; your card details go to Stripe rather than to us. Stripe keeps its own record of the payment under its own privacy policy.
• Resend — delivery of our emails: sign-in codes; the reminder before a year of Pro you bought ends, or one you were given with a home; invitations to co-own a home, and one reminder of an invitation nobody has answered; messages you write to a contractor; the email you forward to your home’s own address, which Resend receives and we keep for you to read, and a short note back when we could not keep it, and the code Gmail sends when you set it to forward there; the private link to a home manual a professional prepared for you, and a receipt to that professional when you claim it; a note to a professional when a printed book they asked for has shipped; and, if you asked for it when you claimed that home, a monthly update about it sent in that professional’s name.
• Lulu — printing and delivery of a printed book, only if you ask for one. We send Lulu the book’s pages and cover, which are made from your manual, together with the delivery name, address and phone number you gave us. The pages follow your share settings, just as a downloaded copy of your manual does, and the back cover carries a code that opens your manual online. Lulu keeps its own record of the order under its own privacy policy.
• Apple Push Notification service — delivery of notices to our iPhone app, only if you turn notifications on. Apple receives the device token, the notice’s title and text, and your home’s name.
• Cloudflare — encrypted off-site backups of our database and of the files you store with us, kept as described in section 6. Cloudflare also runs the check that tells a person from an automated script when you sign in, sign up, claim a home or accept an invitation, on the web and in our iPhone app: the screen loads it from Cloudflare, which sees your IP address and information about your browser and device in order to make that check. It never receives your email address or anything from your manual.

Building your manual also looks facts up from public sources. We send them the property address or its coordinates — never your name, email, or anything you have marked private:

• Geocoders and public records — the US Census geocoder, OpenStreetMap (Nominatim and Overpass), FEMA, USGS, USDA, and county, city and state record services, to turn an address into a location and to find aerial imagery, flood zone, seismic, parcel, and permit records.
• Rentcast and Regrid — a home’s address goes to Rentcast when the home is added, and again when you ask to fill in its property facts, to read its property record: the year built, the size of the home and the lot, the bedrooms and bathrooms, and building details such as the roof. Regrid supplies parcel boundaries. Each only where configured.
• Apple WeatherKit and AirNow (US EPA) — the seven-day forecast, the hour-by-hour detail and the UV reading on your manual’s “This week” card come from Apple; the air-quality reading comes from AirNow, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s service. Your browser talks only to us: it sends your home’s coordinates to our server, and our server asks Apple and AirNow — so neither of them sees your IP address. On a share link: the shared copy carries your home’s location only to within about a kilometer, which is the precision the forecast is looked up at anyway. A reader’s browser asks our server for the weather in that area and never receives your exact coordinates. Separately, our own scheduled job sends your home’s coordinates to the same forecast service, and to the US National Weather Service for official warnings in your area, from our server, on a regular schedule and whether or not you open your manual, so that a weather warning can be prepared for you. That request carries your coordinates but no IP address of yours.

If your browser offers dictation in our text fields, that audio goes to your browser or operating system vendor (Google or Apple), not to us.

When you import a document or photo, its contents are sent to the relevant AI provider to be read.

Look-up services that receive your address

To describe your specific property, the Service looks your address up against public mapping and public-records sources. Your address, or the map coordinates derived from it, is sent to these when you finish typing it and when a home is created:

• Mapping & geocoding — the U.S. Census Bureau geocoder (checking an address and finding where it is), OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service (only when the Census cannot place an address), and the OpenStreetMap Overpass API and a community-run Overpass mirror (nearby streets and paths). While you type a home’s address, what you have typed so far is also sent to Google Maps (Google’s Places service) so it can suggest matching addresses; only the address text goes, never your name or email, and only where it is configured. The street map on your Neighborhood page is drawn by our own map renderer, which runs on Google Cloud and receives only your home’s coordinates — no third-party map provider is involved, and the picture is rendered once and stored with your manual rather than fetched each time someone opens it.
• Government hazard & environmental data — FEMA (flood zone), the U.S. Geological Survey (seismic), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (aerial imagery), the National Park Service (historic districts), NOAA (climate normals and frost dates, from the nearest weather station), and the EPA’s Water Quality Portal (water hardness, which receives your county). Your plant-hardiness zone comes from phzmapi.org, an independent community-run service rather than a government one, which receives your ZIP code.
• County, city and state records — the assessor, parcel, permit and GIS services for the jurisdiction your home is in. Which ones apply depends entirely on where you live.
• Property-data providers — where configured, commercial property and permit-history services.

Some of these are public bodies or volunteer-run projects rather than vendors we hold a contract with, and they will have their own terms and logging. We send them only what a look-up needs — an address, a coordinate or a county — never your documents, photos, or anything else from your manual. Two look-ups send something narrower still: the brand names of appliances, to check for product recalls with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission; and a contractor’s licence number you give us, to check it with the state that issued it (Oregon or Washington). If our AI provider performs a web search on your behalf, your address may form part of that search.

We otherwise disclose your data only as required by law or to protect the Service and its users.

4. Storage & security

Your data is stored with our providers and protected by row-level access controls so that, by default, only your account can read it. Original documents are kept in a private store that is not publicly accessible. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable measures to protect your data and limit access to it.

5. Sharing is your choice

Nothing is public unless you enable a share link. You control, section by section, what a link reveals: the sections of your manual are included on a link you enable, and you switch off the ones you don’t want a guest to see. A guest link is narrower still — it carries only the emergency and guest cards, no matter what else you have switched on.

A listing link is for people thinking of buying your house, and unlike your other links it is made to be posted where anyone can read it: on a listing, in an MLS remark or on an open-house sheet. Whatever you have switched on for your share link, it carries only a fixed set of sections: the Almanac, Home systems, Room by room, Outside, and History (the work already done to the house), with a dated history of that work that says what backs each fact without opening the documents behind it. So it never shows your contacts or guest card, your neighbors, the cover photograph, your documents, or your name or the name of anyone who prepared your manual, and costs and who did the work are stripped as on every link (below). You can turn it off at any time, and it stops working when the house is handed over to its next owner.

Two cards work the other way round: the “Prepared by” card, which names the professional who put your manual together, and your own signature, the “Kept by” line on the cover. Both are private by default. They always appear on your own view, and each is included on a share link only if you switch it on, because each publishes a person’s name.

Neighbor links are separate from your share link, and nothing reaches a neighbor unless you make a link for them. A neighbor card shows your address, your own phone numbers, the shut-offs and people to call from your emergency card, and what you choose to add for that neighbor. A same-day or shared-job request shows the job, the quotes and how many homes are in; what a neighbor enters there goes to you, and a request you send on to a contractor carries their address and note but not their name or number. On a street’s emergency plan, every home that joins sees what each joined home wrote — its address, names, a number, its shut-offs, what it has, any note, and whether it asked to be checked on first — and nobody who has not joined sees any of it. You can stop or delete any of these links, and a neighbor can withdraw what they sent.

Some things are never on a link at all, whatever you switch on. Your upkeep costs, insurance details and the value side of a sale are not part of the shared manual — they live on your own signed-in pages, which have no share link. And within the sections you do share, specific details are stripped: neighbors’ names, the brands and values of your furnishings, and service-provider account details and costs. Money figures are also blanked inside Home systems, Room by room, Outside, and History, including the vendor and total we record when you upload an invoice, which show on your own view only. That blanking is not universal. A figure you type into another section, such as a contact’s details or the house-sitter card, appears on a link exactly as you wrote it. If a figure should not be seen, take it out of the entry or switch that section off. Your original documents work the other way round — a file appears only if you mark that individual file as shared.

You can disable or regenerate a link at any time. That stops the page and its pictures: images on a share link are served through a route that re-checks the link on every request, so revoking it takes effect immediately rather than leaving previously-issued picture addresses working. Two limits worth knowing. An image the browser is already fetching can finish for up to two minutes. And the per-request check asks “is this a photo of this home?”, not “is this photo on this link?” — so a photograph in a section you have switched off is still reachable by someone who knows its exact address. Those addresses are random identifiers that never appear in a shared page, so this is unguessable rather than merely unlinked.

On deleting a photograph specifically: removing one in the editor takes it out of your manual, and nothing on a link can reach it after that — but the stored file itself is removed when you delete the home it belonged to, and any left over from an earlier edit when you delete your account.

6. Retention

We keep Your Content for as long as your account and homes exist so the Service can function. When you delete a document, home, or your account, we delete the associated records and stored files (including originals and photos) on a best-effort basis, and any retention the law requires. We keep backups of the Service, which include your content, for up to 31 days: deleting something removes it from the Service straight away, and its copies in those backups are deleted as the backups expire. Two specifics worth stating: a photograph you removed from a home before deleting it is cleared when you delete your account rather than with that home; and the public-records data we retrieved about a property — assessor, parcel and permit facts, which are public records in their own right — is keyed to the property rather than to you and is not deleted with your home. What a neighbor sent you is deleted when they withdraw it, when you delete that link or plan, or when you delete the home. A printed-book request, with the delivery address on it and the book’s files, is kept until you delete the home it is for; Lulu keeps its own record of an order it has printed. If you have bought Pro or closing gifts, Stripe keeps its record of the payment as payment and tax rules require, and deleting your account does not delete it. Our record of the closing gifts you bought and used is deleted with your account. We also keep our record of which Stripe notices we acted on — each one’s identifier and kind, with no card details or amount — so that a repeated notice cannot be acted on twice; deleting your account removes your account identifier from it.

Your record keeps a dated history of how it changed, so that you can see what it said on a given day. When a system, an appliance, the outside of the house, its basic facts, a belonging or your insurance policy changes, the value it had before is kept with the change. Removing a value from your record does not remove it from that history, and everyone who shares the home with you can read it. The history is deleted when you delete the home. When the house passes to a new owner, the history of your belongings and insurance is deleted with them, and the rest of it goes with the house. To build that history, and to put your record back after a mistake, we also keep earlier copies of the whole record, which nobody can open through the Service: always the latest 20, and older ones until they are more than 90 days old and the record changes again. They are deleted with the home, and at a hand-over everything that stays with you is removed from them.

7. Your rights & choices

• Access & export — you can download everything your account holds about your homes as a JSON file: the homes and their records, their dated history, alerts, tenant cases, messages to and from contractors and neighbors, reminder and plan settings, the public records found for each address, and the text read from each document you uploaded. It leaves out links that would let someone else into your homes, and your uploaded photos and original document files; each home’s manual file carries its photos. It also leaves out printed-book requests: the gift page shows your latest one, and we will send you the full record if you ask. It leaves out the closing gifts you bought too: Stripe’s receipts are the record of each purchase, and the gift page shows how many you have left. The button is on the Ledger tab of any of your homes; with no homes yet there is nothing to export.
• Correction — edit your home’s data directly in the app.
• Deletion — delete individual documents or homes, or delete your entire account, which removes your homes, files, and settings.
• Email — unsubscribe from the monthly home update via any update email.

Depending on where you live (e.g. the EU/UK or California), you may have additional rights over your personal data; contact us to exercise them and we will honor applicable requests.

8. Children

The Service is not directed to children under 13 (or the minimum age in your jurisdiction), and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. A home’s records may mention household members; you are responsible for the personal data you choose to enter about others.

9. Changes

We may update this Policy as the Service evolves. We will revise the “Last updated” date above and, for material changes, take reasonable steps to notify you.

10. Contact

Questions or requests about your data? Contact us at support@thehomemanual.ai.

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