Privacy Policy

What We Collect

Directly from you:

• Account info: name, email address, and a bcrypt-hashed password (we never store your actual password)
• Content you add: vehicles, home items, tasks, service logs, uploaded photos and PDFs
• Communications, e.g. if you email us for support
• If you share a vehicle or home item with someone, the email address you invite - even if they don't have an account yet, until they sign up or you cancel the invite

Automatically: basic technical data needed to operate the Service (e.g. request metadata used for rate-limiting and abuse prevention). We don't use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

How We Use It, And Why

We use your information for these purposes and no others:

• To provide what you signed up for - storing your vehicles and home items, running AI lookups you request, sending reminder emails you've enabled, and processing your subscription
• To keep the Service working and secure - rate-limiting sign-in and signup attempts, preventing abuse, and receiving automatic error reports when something breaks
• To meet legal and accounting obligations - for example, retaining payment records where the law requires it

We don't sell your personal information, we don't share it for advertising, and we don't use it to build profiles about you.

Sharing With Other Users

You can choose to share an individual vehicle or home item with another person - a household member, or someone like a handyman or mechanic managing it for you - by inviting their email from that item's "Share" button. Nothing is visible to them until they accept the invite; once accepted, that person can see and manage the item's tasks, logs, and readings, and can see your email address (and you can see theirs). This is entirely your choice on both sides - nothing is shared unless you invite someone and they agree, you can remove their access at any time, and they can leave a shared item themselves whenever they'd like.

Third Parties We Use

We share the minimum data needed with these processors to run the Service:

• Anthropic - processes text, photos, and PDFs you submit to AI features (Auto-Fill Schedule, Photo Lookup, manual extraction, Ask AI Buddy, Quick Log, Diagnose an Issue)
• Stripe - handles subscription payments; we never see or store your card details
• Resend - sends account and reminder emails on our behalf
• Vercel - hosts the app, runs scheduled reminder emails, and stores uploaded files (Blob storage)
• Neon - hosts our Postgres database
• Sentry - receives automatic error reports when something breaks, so we can find and fix it. These include technical details like the page you were on and your IP address; we don't configure it to send your account or maintenance data

Where Your Data Is Stored

House & Garage is operated from the United States, and every processor listed above stores and processes data on servers in the United States. If you use the Service from outside the US - including from the UK, the EU, or anywhere else - your information is transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy laws differ from those where you live. By using the Service you understand that this transfer takes place.

Data Retention & Deletion

We keep your data as long as your account is active. Deleting your account from Settings permanently and immediately removes your account and all associated data (vehicles, tasks, logs, uploaded files) from our database and our file storage, and revokes anyone else's shared access to your items; this can't be undone.

Two things work on their own clocks: the short-lived security records used for rate-limiting sign-in attempts are deleted automatically within about a day, and Stripe retains payment records independently of us for its own legal and accounting obligations.

Your Rights

You can do all of these yourself, right now, without asking us:

• Access and export - download a full JSON copy of your data anytime from Settings
• Correction - edit anything directly in the app
• Deletion - permanently delete your account, and everything in it, from Settings
• Opt out of emails - turn reminder and check-in emails off in Settings (we'll still send essential account emails like password resets)
• Change your email address - from Settings, confirmed via the new address

Depending on where you live - for example in the UK, the EU, or California - you may also have the right to object to or restrict how we use your information, to receive it in a portable format, or to ask us not to sell it (we don't sell it, to anyone, ever). Email support@garage-and-home.com to exercise any of these and we'll action it. We won't degrade your service or charge you differently for asking.

If you're in the UK or EU and you think we've mishandled your information, you also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

Cookies

We use a small number of strictly necessary cookies (via NextAuth) to keep you signed in and to protect sign-in forms against cross-site request forgery. We also store your theme and colour choices locally in your browser, which never reaches our servers. No advertising, analytics, or cross-site tracking cookies.

Security

Passwords are hashed with bcrypt, sensitive endpoints are rate-limited, and access to your data is scoped to your account and anyone you've explicitly shared an item with. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable measures to protect your information.

Children's Privacy

The Service isn't directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect data from them.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Continued use of the Service after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data? Email support@garage-and-home.com.