Privacy and data

Your idea is the most valuable thing you bring to Buildpad, so it is fair to ask where it goes. This page explains in plain words what Buildpad stores, where it lives, who can see it, how it is protected, and how to take it with you or delete it. It is a guide, not the legal text. The privacy policy and the terms of service are what count.

What Buildpad stores

• Your account: your email, preferred name and timezone, your email preferences, and your subscription details. Card payments are handled by a payment provider. Buildpad keeps only a label for your payment method, such as the card brand and its last four digits. It also records the network address and browser you last signed in from.
• Your projects: the chat in every phase, the notes, frames, documents and research reports on the canvas, the files you attach to a chat, the interviews you set up, and the websites Buildpad builds for you with their source and their database.
• Interview responses: the transcript of each conversation, the answers pulled from it, and the respondent's email if they chose to give it.
• Website data: whatever your published website collects, such as form submissions, lives in that website's own database on Buildpad.
• Usage records: which actions used credits, shown in the Usage tab of your settings, and a log of account events such as payments and plan changes.

Where it lives and how it is protected

Your data is stored and processed primarily on servers in the European Union, in Germany. The content of your chats, notes, documents, research and interview transcripts is encrypted before it is written to the database.

To answer you, Buildpad sends the relevant parts of your project to AI providers in the United States, under data processing agreements with the safeguards the policy describes. Those providers do not use what you send to train their models. Buildpad does not use your content to train models either, and projects are isolated: Buildpad works only from your own project's content and from web research, never from other customers' projects.

Backups exist for disaster recovery only. They are kept for up to 12 months and are never opened for any other purpose.

Who can see your project

Members

JJo

Can edit

SSam

Can edit

Anyone with the public canvas link

View only

• You, the owner.
• Collaborators you invite. People who join through your invite link, when the share menu is set to Collaborate, can see and edit everything in the project, including the chats. You can remove anyone from the members list, and switching back to Only me stops the link from working. See Collaboration.
• Anyone with the public canvas link, but only if you turn on Public canvas in the share menu. They get a view-only canvas: notes, frames, documents, research, interview responses with their transcripts, and website previews. They cannot see the chats or change anything, and turning the toggle off stops the link from working.
• Buildpad's team opens a project only to operate the service, to help you when you ask for support, to investigate abuse, or when the law requires it. That is what the terms allow, and nothing more.

Nobody else. Buildpad does not publish, share or sell your content.

What is public by design

Three things are meant for other people, and you decide when to create them:

• A published website is on the open internet at its address.
• A public canvas is readable by anyone who has the link.
• An interview link can be opened by anyone you send it to. The interview page shows the title and introduction you wrote.

Interview respondents

The people you interview see a short notice before they start: their voice is never stored, with a link to the privacy policy. During the interview their speech is sent to a voice provider to be turned into text. Buildpad keeps the text transcript, the answers extracted from it, and their email if they typed it in when asked. They can Skip that question. The recording itself is not kept. The transcript and the email are shared with you as the creator of the interview, and respondents who never say anything are removed once their time is up.

Emails and tracking

Buildpad emails you about your account no matter what: sign-in codes, trial and billing reminders, receipts. Tips and product updates are optional, and the Emails from Buildpad toggle in Account settings or the unsubscribe link in any such email turns them off. Emails go out through a delivery service with servers in the EU, and Buildpad records whether an email was opened.

Buildpad's pages run a visitor counter hosted on Buildpad's own domain and, for visitors outside the European Economic Area, an advertising pixel that measures Buildpad's ads. The pixel never loads for visitors in the EEA, and where it runs, your email is hashed before it is sent.

Getting your data out

Everything you make in Buildpad is yours, and you can download it at any time. From a project, Export downloads the whole canvas as a zip with your notes and documents in Word, PDF, text or Markdown, every interview's answers and transcripts, and every website's source and built files. Single notes, documents, interviews and websites download from their own menu, and website data tables export as CSV. Export has the details.

There is no single button for your account as a whole. For a copy of the personal information Buildpad holds about you, email hello@buildpad.io.

Deleting

Deleting a project removes its chats, canvas, files and websites from Buildpad's live systems immediately. Deleting your account, from Settings → Danger zone, does the same for every project you own and keeps only anonymized billing and usage records that no longer contain your content. Deleted content disappears from backups as they expire. Account settings walks through the steps.

Questions

Write to hello@buildpad.io for anything about privacy, including requests to access, correct or delete your personal information. The full policy is at buildpad.io/privacy.