Trades Chaser (tradechaser.online) is invoicing, quoting and lead-management software for trades businesses, run by Arthur Cady in Michigan, USA. We are the controller for information about our account holders, website customers and visitors.
Information about your customers. When you use Trades Chaser for your business, the information you keep in it about your customers (names, contact details, job addresses, quotes, invoices, photos and so on) belongs to you. For that information you are the controller and we act as your processor: we use it only to provide Trades Chaser to you, following your instructions, and we do not use it for anything of our own. If one of your customers asks us about their data, we will pass the request to you.
For anything about your personal data, contact us at help@tradechaser.online. In this policy “we”, “us” and “our” mean Trades Chaser.
| What | Why we use it | Legal basis | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account details: name, email, password (stored only as a salted hash), business name, trade, phone, address, logo and settings | To create and run your account, sign you in and support you | Contract: needed to provide what you asked for (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)) | While your account is open; deleted within 30 days after you ask us to close it, except billing records |
| Billing: your plan, Stripe customer and subscription IDs, and receipts. Card details go straight to Stripe and never reach us | To charge for subscriptions and hosting | Contract: needed to provide what you asked for (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)); Legal obligation, e.g. tax and accounting law (Art. 6(1)(c)) | As long as tax law requires (usually 7 years) |
| Your business records: customers and their contact details, job addresses, quotes, invoices, payments, expenses, receipts and photos, schedules, notes, leads and team members | To provide the service. We process your customers’ data on your behalf (see section 1) | Contract: needed to provide what you asked for (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)) (for your customers’ data, your own legal basis applies) | Until you delete it or close your account |
| Messages sent for you: quote, invoice, reminder and follow-up emails to your customers, and whether and when a customer opened an invoice or quote link | To deliver your messages and show you their status | Contract: needed to provide what you asked for (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)) | As for your business records |
| AI features (optional): the text, receipts or photos you choose to send to an AI feature (receipt scanning, materials lists, job analysis, the assistant, outreach drafts, part identification and price search), and the results and assistant history | To produce the result you asked for. The content is sent to Google’s Gemini API, which processes it under Google’s API terms | Contract: needed to provide what you asked for (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)) | Results and history stay in your account until you delete them |
| Website leads: name, contact details, job description and photos sent from an estimate form on a website connected to your account | To deliver the lead to you | Contract: needed to provide what you asked for (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)) | Until you delete it |
| Website orders (Trades Chaser Sites): company and legal name, email, phone, address, trade, description, colours, photos, domain preference, and whether you want a call or texts | To build and host your website, call you from 989-858-6742 about the design (unless you opt out), text you only if you opted in, and bill hosting. Order emails, with the photos, go to our Gmail inbox | Contract: needed to provide what you asked for (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)); Your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)); you can withdraw it any time (texts) | While we host your site, then as tax law requires for billing records |
| Affiliate program: partner name, email, referral code, referred sign-ups and commissions | To run the program and pay commissions | Contract: needed to provide what you asked for (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)) | While you are a partner, then as tax law requires |
| Unsubscribes: the email address of anyone who unsubscribes from messages sent through Trades Chaser | So that address is not emailed again | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) | Kept on the suppression list so we can keep honouring it |
| Emails to us: whatever you write to help@tradechaser.online | To answer you | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) | As long as needed to answer and keep a record of support |
Our pages load a small script from our own domain (/_hub/e.js) that reports to our own server. It is not Google Analytics or any other third-party analytics service, and nothing it collects is shared with advertisers. When it is allowed to run (see your choices below) it records:
utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) and whether an ad click ID was present (never the ID itself);These IDs are random numbers, not your name or email address, and our server scrambles them with a secret key (hashing) before saving them. Your IP address is used for a moment to block floods of fake requests and is not saved by this measurement. We use the results to learn which pages help people, to find errors and slow pages, and to decide what to improve. Detailed records are deleted after 400 days (about 13 months); a visitor record is deleted 400 days after its last visit.
Legal basis: if you are in the EU/EEA, the UK or Switzerland, your consent (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a) and the ePrivacy rules on storing information on your device). Elsewhere, our legitimate interest in understanding and improving the site (Art. 6(1)(f)), which you can switch off at any time.
Our public pages (home, guides, comparisons and similar) also count views on the server: the page, a campaign tag from the link, the referring website’s domain, the device type, time on page, and a country looked up from your IP address on our own server (the IP address itself is not stored). These rows contain no identifier and no cookie is used. Legal basis: legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)).
The first time you visit, a small “Privacy choices” box explains this. If your device is set to a European time zone (EU/EEA, UK, Switzerland and neighbouring countries), nothing is stored and nothing is measured unless you click Accept. Elsewhere, measurement runs unless you click Opt out. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal, we treat it as an opt-out. You can change your mind at any time:
Opting out stops the script on this site, removes its storage from your browser, and deletes the visitor record linked to your random ID from our server. Your choice is saved in the hub_consent cookie for 12 months; if you clear your cookies we will ask again. You can also block or delete cookies and site storage in your browser settings and the site will still work.
| Name | Type | Purpose | How long | Category |
|---|---|---|---|---|
hub_consent | Cookie | Remembers your privacy choice (analytics on or off) | 12 months | Strictly necessary |
_hub_nb | Session storage | Notes that the privacy box has already been shown in this tab (outside Europe only) | Until you close the tab | Strictly necessary |
_hub_s, _hub_n, _hub_lp | Session storage | Random tab-session ID, page count and previous page, to link the pages of one visit | Until you close the tab | Analytics |
_hub_v | Local storage | Random visitor ID, date of first and last visit, number of visits, to tell new visitors from returning ones | 12 months | Analytics |
session | Cookie | Keeps you signed in | Up to 30 days | Strictly necessary |
affiliate_session | Cookie | Keeps affiliate partners signed in to their dashboard | Up to 30 days | Strictly necessary |
We do not use advertising cookies, tracking pixels or cross-site trackers.
Like almost every website, our web server writes a line for each request it handles: your IP address, the date and time, the page or file requested, the result, the referring page and your browser’s User-Agent. We use these logs to keep Trades Chaser running and secure: fixing errors, spotting attacks and abusive bots, and counting traffic. The log files roll over by size and are overwritten automatically, usually within a few days. Our traffic dashboard keeps only counts made from them. For daily unique-visitor counts it combines the IP address and browser with a random value that changes every day and is thrown away after three days, so the count cannot be traced back to you.
Legal basis: legitimate interests in security and in running the service (Art. 6(1)(f)).
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We share it only with:
| Who | What for | What they receive | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner Online GmbH | Server hosting (data centre in Helsinki, Finland) | Everything stored on our servers | Finland (EU) |
| Stripe, Inc. / Stripe Payments Europe | Card payments and billing | Name, email, payment details, amount, billing or shipping address you give at checkout | US / Ireland |
| Resend, Inc. | Delivering emails (invoices, quotes, reminders, account emails) | Recipient address, message content and attachments | US |
| Google LLC (Gemini API) | Optional AI features | Only the content you send to an AI feature | US |
| Google LLC (Gmail) | Our business inbox, where website orders arrive | Website order details and photos | US |
| Porkbun LLC | Domain names and forwarding of email sent to our addresses | Emails you send us | US |
When you pay, you are taken to a Stripe-hosted checkout page, where Stripe’s own privacy policy applies. Our public pages load no third-party scripts or fonts.
We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to protect someone’s safety, or to defend legal claims. If the business is ever sold or reorganised, the buyer would take over this information under the same promises.
Our servers are rented from Hetzner Online GmbH and located in Helsinki, Finland, in the EU. We are based in Michigan, in the United States. Some of the providers above are based in the United States. Where the GDPR applies, transfers to the US rely on the EU–US Data Privacy Framework for providers certified under it, and otherwise on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses in the provider’s data-processing terms.
Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you the personal data we hold about you, give you a copy (including in a machine-readable format), correct it, delete it, or stop using it for a particular purpose.
EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland: under the GDPR (and the UK GDPR and Swiss law) you have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, data portability and objection, including the right to object at any time to processing based on our legitimate interests and to any direct marketing. Where we rely on your consent you can withdraw it at any time; that does not affect what we did before. You can also complain to your data protection authority (list of EU authorities; in the UK, the ICO; in Switzerland, the FDPIC), though we would appreciate the chance to put things right first.
United States: residents of states with privacy laws (such as California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia and others) have similar rights to know, delete and correct their information and to opt out of its sale or use for targeted advertising. We do not sell or share personal information in that sense, and we honour Global Privacy Control signals.
We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects.
To use any of these rights, contact us at help@tradechaser.online. We reply within one month. For complex requests we may take up to two more months and will tell you if so. We may need to confirm that a request really comes from you, for example by replying from the email address on your account. Using your rights will never count against you.
Trades Chaser is a business tool for adults and is not directed to children under 16. We do not knowingly collect children’s personal data; if you think we have, contact us and we will delete it.
Every page is served over HTTPS. Admin tools are password-protected, passwords are stored only as salted hashes, and card numbers never reach our servers (Stripe handles them). No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your data we will tell you and the authorities where the law requires.
We will post any changes here with a new effective date. If a change is significant we will also say so on the site and email account holders.