Privacy Policy — Steadmere

Privacy Policy1. What this coversThis policy describes what information Steadmere collects, why, and how it's used, for both shop staff who sign in to the dashboard and customers who interact with an estimate through a share link.2. Information we collectDepending on how you use Steadmere, we collect:

Customer contact information entered by the shop: name, phone, email, and address.

Vehicle information: year, make, model, color, and VIN.

Job photos (before/after, damage, and notes) uploaded by shop staff.

For insurance-related jobs: insurer name, claim number, and adjuster contact info.

Payment records logged by the shop (amount, method, and date) — Steadmere does not process card payments and does not collect card numbers.

A typed name and drawn signature image when a customer approves an estimate.

Shop staff account information: email address, name, and a password if one is set.

Basic technical data needed to operate the service, such as session cookies used to keep staff signed in. We don't use third-party advertising trackers.

3. How we use this informationWe use this information to operate the service: creating and managing jobs, generating estimates and invoices, scheduling, tracking payments, sending sign-in emails, and displaying job and customer information back to the shop and, through a share link that requires no login, to whoever holds that link — which after signing includes the drawn signature image.A Steadmere administrator can also open a read-only view of a shop's account to answer a support question. Customer names and contact details are replaced with placeholders before that data leaves our server, VINs, service addresses, signatures and internal notes are not included in it at all, nothing can be changed while the view is open, and each use is recorded. Section 5 of the Terms of Service describes the same thing from the shop's side.4. AI-assisted processingCertain features can send text you enter or photos you upload to a third-party AI service to extract structured information — turning a messy note or a damage photo into job fields, or interpreting a typed command that edits a job. This happens only when you use those specific features, and never in the background.No AI provider is configured on the live service, so nothing you type or upload is sent to one. To be precise about what that means: this is a setting we have chosen not to turn on, not a capability removed from the software, and what keeps it that way is the commitment at the end of this section rather than the architecture. The reason is deliberate: the free tier of the provider we would otherwise use states that content sent to it may be used to improve that company's products, which is not an acceptable arrangement for a shop's job notes and a customer's vehicle photographs. These features stay off until they run on terms that forbid it. When they are switched on, this section will say which provider and on what terms, before rather than after.5. Service providers we rely onSteadmere runs on a small number of third-party providers, each of which handles some of the information described above:

Vercel — runs the service itself and stores uploaded photographs. Photographs are stored privately rather than at a public web address: reading one requires a link we generate on the spot that stops working after an hour, so a copied image link does not stay readable forever. When a photo is deleted, the deletion is confirmed by the storage system rather than assumed. Vercel also counts page views on the public pages, as described in section 16 — no cookie, no profile, no identifier that follows you anywhere.

Neon — hosts our database, where the records described in section 2 are stored.

Brevo — delivers sign-in emails to shop staff, and receives staff email addresses for that purpose.

Twilio — sends and receives the text messages described in section 17, and so receives the recipient's mobile number and the contents of the message. Only numbers whose owner has agreed to be texted are ever sent to it.

NHTSA (the U.S. vehicle-safety agency) — receives only a VIN when a vehicle is looked up through its public vPIC decoding service.

Google — only if a shop connects Google Calendar, which is off unless they switch it on. In that case Google receives the date, time, job number, customer name, vehicle description and service address for each job the shop schedules. Steadmere creates its own calendar in the shop's account and can reach nothing else in it: it cannot read, change or delete the shop's other appointments, and it never sees what they are. It also asks when the shop is busy, which returns times only and no contents. We use this data solely to provide the calendar feature — never for advertising, never to build a profile, never to train any model, and we do not sell or share it. A shop can disconnect at any time in Settings, which withdraws our access at Google rather than merely forgetting it here.

An AI provider — none is configured at present, as section 4 explains. If that changes, the provider will be named here and the terms it operates under stated plainly, including whether it may retain or train on what it receives.

6. Insurance claim informationInsurer name, claim number, and adjuster contact information entered for an insurance job are used only to service that claim and are shared only as needed with the insurer or adjuster identified on the job — for example, when the shop sends or discusses the estimate with them.7. PhotosPhotos are stored as uploaded, at a private address rather than a public one — see section 5. If your device embeds location or other metadata in photo files, that metadata may be stored along with the photo. Consider your camera's location settings if that's a concern.8. Sharing estimates with customersA customer estimate or invoice can be shared through a link that doesn't require the customer to create an account. That link is intended only for the customer it was created for — treat it like you would any document containing your contact and vehicle information, and don't forward it to anyone you don't want to see it. Links expire after 30 days and can be reissued by the shop if needed.9. Data securityWe use encrypted connections and access-controlled accounts to protect information handled by Steadmere. No system is perfectly secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security.10. Children's privacySteadmere isn't directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect information from children.11. Accessing or correcting your informationIf information the shop holds about you is incorrect, contact the shop directly and ask them to correct it — shop staff can update client, vehicle, and job records directly in the system.12. Deleting your informationYou can ask the shop to permanently delete the information it holds about you — contact the shop using the details on your estimate or invoice. On a verified request, shop staff will permanently delete your contact record, your vehicles, and any estimates, along with their photos and pricing details.Two limits on this, so we don't over-promise:

Invoices are business records. Completed invoices — including their line items, payment records, approval signature, and attached photos — are kept for bookkeeping and tax purposes. Your name and contact details are removed from the record they reference, and your vehicle's VIN is removed even where the vehicle's year, make, and model stay on the invoice.

Residual copies. Deleted records may persist for a limited time in routine database backups before those expire. Photo files are a stronger case than they used to be: deleting one issues a real delete against the storage service and we check the result. Where that delete fails — the file has already gone, or the storage service is briefly unreachable — the deletion of everything else still goes ahead and the failure is counted rather than retried, so a small number of image files can outlive the records that pointed at them.

If you are the shop. An owner can close their Steadmere account from Settings, which immediately deletes the shop and everything in it — every client, vehicle, job, invoice, payment record and photo, with the photos removed from storage rather than hidden. There is no waiting period on this one and no undo, so download your data first; we cannot restore it for you. The invoice retention in section 15 exists so a customer cannot erase the shop's business records, and does not stop the shop destroying its own. The single thing we keep is the record that somebody accepted the Terms of Service — the version, the date, and the sentence agreed to. It contains no customer information and no shop name, and section 15 says how long we hold it.13. California: what we collect, in the state's own categoriesCalifornia law asks businesses to describe personal information using a fixed set of category names, so that policies can be compared with each other. Below is everything Steadmere has collected in the past twelve months, in those terms. Where a category is not listed, we do not collect it.

Identifiers — name, postal address, email address, phone number, IP address (as a salted hash only, never the address itself), account identifiers, and vehicle identification numbers. Sources: the shop's staff, the customer at the point of approving an estimate, and people who fill in a form on this site. Collected to create and run job records, estimates and invoices, to sign people in, and to answer them.

Customer records under Civil Code section 1798.80(e) — name, address, telephone number, and the typed name and drawn signature used to approve an estimate. Sources: the shop and the customer. Collected to produce and evidence the estimate or invoice.

Commercial information — records of the work quoted and carried out, amounts, and payments logged by the shop. Sources: the shop. Collected to run the job and keep the shop's business records.

Internet or other electronic network activity — the session cookie that keeps staff signed in, the theme and sidebar preferences stored in your own browser, and cookieless counts of which public pages were viewed and which link brought someone here (section 16). Sources: your device. Collected to keep you signed in and to remember how you like the app to look. There are no advertising or analytics trackers.

Audio, electronic, visual or similar information — photographs of vehicles taken by shop staff, which routinely capture licence plates and VIN plates. Sources: the shop. Collected to document damage and completed work.

Professional or employment-related information — a staff member's name and role within their shop. Sources: the shop owner. Collected to decide what each person can see and do.

Sensitive personal information — account log-in credentials, meaning an email address together with a password. Passwords are stored only as a bcrypt hash and are never readable by us. We use these only to sign you in and keep your account secure, which are purposes California permits without offering a right to limit. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for any other purpose, so there is no "Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information" link to provide.

We do not collect protected classification characteristics, biometric information, precise geolocation, education information, or draw inferences to build a profile about anyone.We have not sold or shared personal information in the past twelve months, and we never have. "Sold" and "shared" carry their California meanings here, which include disclosing information for cross-context behavioural advertising even when no money changes hands. There is therefore no "Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information" link, because there is nothing to opt out of. We also have no actual knowledge of selling or sharing the personal information of anyone under sixteen.We do disclose personal information for business purposes to the service providers named in section 5 — the hosting and file storage provider, the database host, and the email sender. No AI provider is on that list, because none is configured; section 4 explains why. The categories disclosed are identifiers, customer records, commercial information, and photographs, and the purpose is simply to run the service you are using.What governs those providers, stated exactly. Each of them publishes standard terms and a data processing agreement that restrict what they may do with data passing through their systems, and those published terms are what applies. We have not separately negotiated or signed an individual agreement with any of them. We are describing the arrangement rather than claiming a stronger one, because a privacy policy that overstates its own safeguards is a worse problem than a modest arrangement plainly described.14. California: your rights, and how to use themSteadmere is small enough that California's privacy law does not yet apply to it by force — the thresholds are roughly twenty-six million dollars in annual revenue, or the personal information of a hundred thousand Californians, or making half your money from selling data, and we meet none of them. We are telling you that rather than implying a legal obligation we do not have. We honour these rights anyway, and this section is a commitment you can hold us to.

The right to know what personal information we have collected about you, where it came from, why we collected it, who we disclosed it to, and the specific pieces themselves.

The right to delete the personal information we hold about you, subject to the limits described in section 12 — chiefly that a paid invoice is a business and tax record and is kept.

The right to correct information about you that is wrong.

The right not to be treated differently for exercising any of these. We will not deny you service, charge you a different price, or give you a worse version of the product because you asked.

The rights to opt out of sale or sharing, and to limit the use of sensitive personal information, are not listed above because neither applies: we do not sell or share, and we do not use sensitive information beyond signing you in.To make a request, email the address in section 19 and say which of the rights above you want to use. There is no form to fill in. We will confirm we received it within ten days and answer within forty-five, and if it needs longer we will tell you why before that runs out.How we check it is you. If you have a Steadmere account, we ask you to send the request from the email address on that account. If your information is in the system because a shop worked on your vehicle, we will ask you for enough detail to match you to the right record — typically the shop's name and the vehicle — and we will ask the shop to confirm before we hand anything over or delete it, because the record is theirs as well as yours. We will not ask you for more information than the request needs, and anything you send for verification is used only to answer it.Authorised agents. You can have somebody make a request for you. Send it from their email address with written permission signed by you attached, and we will also contact you directly to confirm you asked for it.We do not currently respond to browser opt-out preference signals such as Global Privacy Control, because they govern selling and sharing and we do neither. If that ever changes, this policy changes with it, and honouring the signal will come first.15. How long we keep thingsCalifornia asks for the retention period of each category, or the criteria we use to work it out. Ours:

Job records, estimates and photographs — kept for as long as the shop keeps its account, because they are the shop's working records. Deleted when the shop deletes them or closes its account, except where an invoice is involved.

Invoices and payment records — kept for four years while the shop's account is open. That is our operational choice rather than a legal conclusion about what your shop must keep: the California rules that could apply to a repair business point at three years and at four depending on which one you are reading, so we picked the longer one and are telling you it was a choice. Ask your own accountant what your shop is obliged to retain. This is why a customer's deletion request cannot remove a paid invoice — it is the shop's business record as well as the customer's transaction — and it does not stop the shop closing its account, which deletes these immediately along with everything else.

Staff account information — kept while the account is active, and after deactivation only so that a person's name stays attached to the jobs they worked on.

Terms of Service acceptances — kept indefinitely, including after the shop closes its account and after the accepting person's login is deleted. The retained record is a user id, a business id, the version accepted, the date, and the sentence agreed to: no name, no email address, no shop name, nothing about a customer. It is the only thing that survives an account closure. It survives because evidence that an agreement was entered into is worth nothing if it disappears with the agreement.

Text-message consent and opt-outs — kept while the number is on file. An opt-out is kept even if the consent that preceded it is deleted, and even if you never gave consent in the first place: forgetting that somebody said STOP is how they get texted again, so the record of the refusal has to outlive the record of the permission.

Sign-in links and invitations — fifteen minutes and seven days respectively, then they stop working. The stored value is a hash, never the link itself.

Mailing list entries — kept until you unsubscribe, and then kept as a record that you unsubscribed, so we do not add you back by accident.

Feedback and access requests — kept while we are still acting on them and for up to two years afterwards, so we can tell whether something we changed came from something you said.

Hashed IP addresses — kept with the record they protect. They exist only to stop the same source flooding a public form, and cannot be turned back into an address.

16. Cookies and what's stored in your browserThere is no cookie banner on this site, and that is a deliberate answer rather than an oversight. Consent banners exist because of tracking. Steadmere sets no advertising cookies, embeds no pixels, and loads nothing from an advertising network — so there is nothing to ask you to consent to, and a banner would only teach you to click through one.What we do set, in full:

One sign-in cookie. It keeps shop staff signed in and does nothing else. Without it you would have to sign in on every page, which is why it needs no permission: it is what you asked for by signing in. Clearing it signs you out.

Two preferences, stored in your own browser. Whether you chose light or dark, and how wide you dragged the sidebar. These never leave your device and are not sent to us.

We do count page views, using Vercel Analytics. It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean, because "we use analytics" usually means something worse. It sets no cookie, writes nothing to your browser, and builds no profile or identifier that could follow you to another site — so there is nothing in it a banner could ask you to consent to. What we get is counts: which pages were viewed, roughly where in the world from, and which link people arrived by. We use it to find out whether anyone reads the guides, not to work out who you are.Nothing on this site is loaded from a third-party server — no hosted fonts, no embedded maps, no chat widget, and the analytics script above is served from this domain rather than someone else's. Pages come from our own domain, so visiting one does not hand your IP address to a company you have never heard of.Do Not Track. Some browsers send a "Do Not Track" signal. There is no agreed standard for what a site should do about it, and we do not respond to it — not because we disagree with it, but because there is no tracking here for it to switch off. The same goes for Global Privacy Control signals, which govern the sale and sharing of personal information; we do neither. If we ever add anything that tracks you, honouring these signals comes before shipping it.17. Email and text messagesSign-in links, invitations and the confirmation you get after asking for an account are transactional: you get them because you did something that requires a reply, and there is nothing to unsubscribe from. If you no longer want them, close your account.Product updates are different. You only get those if you ticked the box on the keep-me-posted page, every one of them carries a working unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing takes one click and no account. We do not sell, rent or share the list. If you ask to be removed by email instead, that works too.Text messages. A shop can text you about your own job — that an estimate is ready, a reminder before your appointment, that the car is done — and only if you ticked the box saying so on that shop's request page. Nobody can tick it for you, and the exact sentence you agreed to is stored with the date, so what you were shown is a matter of record rather than of memory.Steadmere is the sender of record. The messages come from our number on the shop's behalf, not from the shop's own line. That has a consequence worth knowing: replying STOP stops texts from us about every shop, not only the one that sent the last message, because it is one number. Reply START to turn them back on, or HELP for help. We honour STOP immediately and permanently, and a shop cannot undo it for you — only you can. Message and data rates may apply. Agreeing is never a condition of buying anything.There is no inbox. Nothing you text back other than STOP, START or HELP is read by anyone — if you need to reach the shop, call them. We use Twilio to send and receive, so a message you send or receive passes through them.18. Changes to this policyWe may update this policy as the service changes. Material changes will be reflected here with an updated date.19. ContactQuestions about this policy, and any request to know, delete or correct your information, go to the address published on the Steadmere website. A person reads it.If your vehicle was worked on by a shop that uses Steadmere and you want to reach them rather than us, their contact details are on your estimate or invoice. Either route works — we will pass a request to the shop, or act on it ourselves, whichever gets it answered.Home · Terms of Service