Privacy Policy

1. Data we collect

• Account data: your email address, an optional display name, your role if you choose to tell us during setup, and your plan.
• Stores you add: the website of your own store (optional) and the websites of the competitors you follow.
• Your settings: which alerts you want, an optional different address to send them to, your briefing time and time zone, and a Slack webhook address if you connect Slack.
• Store data: the public product catalogs (product names, prices, discounts, stock and image links) and a few public pages (such as the homepage, sale page and store policies) of the stores you add, the changes (“moves”) we detect, and short explanations we write about them. This is information about businesses, not about you, and it’s shared by everyone who follows the same store.
• Homepage competitor finder: the company name or website you type in, to suggest competitors.
• Billing data: Trailwatch is free during the beta. When paid plans launch, payments will be handled by Paddle, our payment provider. We will receive your plan status and a customer reference, but we will not see or store your full card details.
• Basic technical data: standard logs needed to operate and secure the service, and usage counts (such as how many checks and AI requests each store and account uses) so we can keep costs and abuse in check.

We only fetch public, non-authenticated pages, we respect robots.txt, and we do not attempt to collect or store personal data found on the stores we track.

2. How we use your data

• To provide the service: checking the stores you follow and detecting launches, price changes, sales, stock changes and page changes.
• To compare your competitors’ products and prices with your own store’s, if you add it.
• To send your instant alerts (by email, or to Slack if you connect it), your Monday briefing, and essential service messages.
• To write short plain-English explanations of moves and your weekly briefing.
• To manage your plan and its limits.
• To keep the service secure and prevent abuse (for example, by refusing throwaway email addresses at sign-up), debug issues, and comply with the law.
• To understand who uses Trailwatch during the beta, using the role you give us.

We do not sell your data, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.

3. Service providers we share data with

We rely on a small set of trusted providers (sub-processors) to run Trailwatch. They only process data on our behalf to deliver their part of the service:

• Supabase — database and authentication (stores your account, settings and the store data).
• Vercel and Cloudflare — hosting, delivery, and security of the application.
• Resend — sending your alerts, Monday briefing and account emails.
• Groq, and Anthropic if we enable it — writing explanations and your briefing. We send them the moves we detected (public store data) and, for your briefing, the names and prices of your own comparable products. We do not send them your email address. Under their API terms, they do not use this data to train their models.
• Exa — powering the homepage “find your competitors” suggestions. When you use that tool, the company name or website you enter is sent to Exa to search the public web for likely competitors.
• Slack — only if you connect it: we post your alerts to the Slack webhook you give us.
• Paddle — payment processing as merchant of record, once paid plans launch.

4. How long we keep it

We keep your account data for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account, we permanently delete your account, your settings, the list of stores you follow, and your alerts and briefings — this is immediate and cannot be undone. Store data (public catalogs, pages and the moves detected on them) is not about you and is shared by everyone who follows the same store, so it is kept while others still follow that store. Residual copies may persist in encrypted backups for a short period (up to around 30 days) before those backups roll over. We may retain limited records where we are legally required to.

5. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, and to object to or restrict certain processing. You can update your display name and delete your account directly from your settings, or email us at [email protected] to exercise any of these rights. We will not discriminate against you for exercising them.

6. Cookies

We use only essential cookies and similar local storage — to keep you signed in, to remember the competitors you pick on the homepage before you sign up, and to operate the service securely. We do not use analytics, third-party advertising, or cross-site tracking cookies, so we do not need a cookie-consent banner. Our payment provider (Paddle) may set its own cookies during checkout, governed by its own privacy policy.

7. International transfers & security

Our providers may process data in countries other than yours. We take reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your data, but no method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

8. Children

Trailwatch is not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect data from children.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the service evolves. When we make material changes we will update the date above and, where appropriate, notify you by email.

10. Contact

Questions or requests about your privacy? Email us at [email protected].