Privacy Policy
Effective August 4, 2026
We audit other companies' privacy policies for a living. It would be absurd to have a bad one.
This document answers the same eleven questions we ask of every tool in our Index, in plain language, without the hedging that makes most policies unreadable. If anything here is vague, tell us at privacy@dialedcontractor.com and we will fix it.
The short version
We collect what you tell us: your email, your business, and what software you run. What you write is private by default. You decide, review by review, whether a comment gets published anonymously, published with your name, or never published at all. We publish aggregate numbers either way. We do not sell your data, share it with vendors, or use it to train AI models. One email deletes everything.
What we collect
If you only read the site
Nothing that identifies you. We use Plausible Analytics, which is cookieless and stores no personal data. It tells us how many people read a page. It cannot tell us who you are and it does not follow you anywhere else.
There is no cookie banner because there are no cookies that would require one.
If you subscribe to the newsletter
Your email address and the page you subscribed from.
If you register your stack
This is the panel. It is the most information we hold about anyone, so it gets the most detail.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Name, company, work email | Verification. One real person, one account. |
| Trade and secondary trades | Segmentation. A painter and a roofer are not comparable. |
| Revenue band | Segmentation. Five broad bands, never an exact figure. |
| Crew count, state | Optional. Segmentation only. |
| Which tools you use, and when you started with each | The retention data. This is the point. |
| Quarterly confirmations | Whether you are still using each tool |
| Monthly cost per tool | Optional |
| Written comments | Optional |
If you fund the work
Stripe processes the payment. We receive your email, name, and amount. We never see or store your card details.
If you submit a nomination, tip, correction, or pitch
Whatever you type into that form. Each form says at the point of submission what gets published and what does not.
What we publish
This matters more than what we collect, so it gets its own section.
Always published, never identifying
Aggregate figures from the panel. Retention counts, adoption patterns, cost medians, stack composition, segmented by trade and revenue band.
Nothing below a sample of five is ever shown. Your individual stack is never displayed.
Published only if you choose it
Every written comment carries one of three settings, chosen by you, per review:
| Setting | What happens |
|---|---|
| Counted | Your status feeds the numbers. Nothing you wrote is published. This is the default. |
| Shared | Your comment is published as "A painting contractor, $1M–$5M." No name, no company. |
| Signed | Your comment is published with your name and company. |
You can change any review's setting at any time from your account. Moving a review to Counted removes the published comment immediately.
Your retention status counts either way. Staying private costs the data nothing.
Never published
Your email address. Your exact revenue. Your individual stack. Your reported costs. Your quarterly responses. Off-the-record tips. Contributor pitches. Anything you send us marked confidential.
Nominations
We publish that a company received a number of nominations and the mix of trades. We never tell a vendor who nominated them. Not on request, not under pressure, not ever.
What we do with what we learn
We publish aggregate numbers from the panel, and we use what we learn from it to decide what to cover, what to test, and what to talk about on the show.
We never publish your name, your company, or your individual stack without asking you first. If we want to quote something you wrote or tell a story that could identify your business, we email you and wait for a yes.
Who we process it with
Five service providers. All of them named, because a policy that says "we may share with service providers" without naming them is hiding something.
| Provider | What they process | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Accounts, stack data, submissions | Database |
| beehiiv | Email addresses | Newsletter and panel emails |
| Stripe | Payment details | Reader funding |
| Vercel | Request logs | Hosting |
| Plausible | Anonymous page views | Analytics |
That is the complete list. If it changes, we update this page and note the date.
We do not sell your data. We do not license it. We do not share it with advertisers, data brokers, or software vendors. There is no aggregated-and-anonymized exception hiding in here, because there is no carve-out at all.
We do not use your data to train AI models, ours or anyone else's. We use AI tools to research public information about software companies. Your submissions are not fed into them.
One thing worth saying plainly
Software companies we cover will ask us who is saying what about them. The answer is no. No vendor gets member identities, contact details, or individual stack data, under any circumstances, at any price.
Where it lives
United States. Supabase and Vercel host in US regions. beehiiv and Stripe operate in the US. We do not transfer your data internationally.
How long we keep it
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Newsletter subscription | Until you unsubscribe, plus 30 days |
| Member account and stack | Until you delete it |
| Quarterly confirmations | Kept as history while your account is active |
| Published comments | Until you change the setting or delete your account |
| Form submissions | Three years, or until you ask |
| Funding records | Seven years, for tax purposes |
If you stop responding to quarterly emails, your records are marked stale and drop out of the published numbers. We do not keep counting you as a user of something we can no longer confirm.
Deleting your data
Email privacy@dialedcontractor.com from the address you want removed. We delete everything within 30 days and confirm when it is done.
You do not need to give a reason. We will not ask for one and we will not send you a retention offer.
Full detail at dialedcontractor.com/data-deletion.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or port your data, and to opt out of its sale. We do not sell data, so that one is already settled.
We honor these requests from everyone, not only residents of states that require it. One email covers all of it.
If something goes wrong
If we discover a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify affected people by email within 72 hours of confirming it, and post a public notice on this site.
We commit to that in writing because most of the policies we read do not.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy, we update the date at the top and post a note on the site. For any material change, we email members and subscribers before it takes effect.
Continued use of the site does not constitute your consent to a new policy. That is a trick, and we are not going to use it.
Contact
privacy@dialedcontractor.com
DIALED Contractor is published by AC Media Group LLC.
This policy covers dialedcontractor.com. It does not cover the practices of any company we write about. Their policies are their own, which is rather the point of what we do here.