Privacy

BuilderNiche is software for running building jobs, built and operated by Southern Tradesman Company. A builder signs up, adds their staff, and puts their schedules, photos, documents and budgets in it. This page says what is stored, who can see it, and how to get rid of it.

The short version: we do not sell anything to anyone, there is no advertising and no analytics or tracking of any kind, nobody’s location is followed, and every company’s data is walled off from every other company’s.

What is stored, and why

Your account. Your name, email address, and optionally a phone number and job title. Your password is never stored — only a one-way hash of it, which cannot be turned back into the password.

Your work. Jobs, schedules, tasks, budgets, photos, documents, leads, and the trades you book. Some of that describes other people: a homeowner’s name and address on a job, a subcontractor’s phone number. It is there because a builder cannot run a job without it.

Hours, if you use the time clock. When someone clocks in and out, and which job they were on.

An activity log. Who changed what, and when. This is what makes a disputed change answerable months later.

Phones signed up for notifications. An address supplied by Apple or Google that lets us send a notification to one device, and a rough label like “iPhone · Safari” so you can tell your devices apart in a list.

Passkeys, if you add one. Optional, and never a replacement for your password — a faster way in on a device that supports Face ID, Touch ID, Windows Hello, or a security key. Only a public key is ever stored; the private key that actually proves it is you never leaves your device.

Location

If you clock in or out with location turned on, BuilderNiche records a single position at that moment, with the accuracy the phone reports. That is the whole of it.

Nothing follows anyone around. There is no background tracking, no record of where anybody was between clocking in and clocking out, and no way for an employer to look up where somebody is now. A punch card that knows where it was punched is a fair record; following people is a different thing with different consequences, and this app does not do it.

Location can be refused, on the phone or in the browser, and the hours still record normally. A shift with no position on it is a complete shift.

Who can see it

Each company is sealed off. Every query the app makes is filtered by company before anything else is considered, so one builder’s jobs are not reachable from another builder’s account by any route, including by guessing an address.

Inside a company, what someone sees depends on their role and which jobs they have been given. A homeowner login sees only documents marked visible to them. A subcontractor sees only what they are booked on.

Who else touches it

Only the services needed to run the app, and only for that purpose. We do not sell data to any of them, none of them pay us for it, and none of them are sent anything they do not need. Each one processes the data on our behalf, to provide its part of the service.

• Anthropic (AI). When you ask BuilderNiche to draft an estimate, it sends Anthropic’s Claude API what you typed to describe the work, the photos, plans and documents you attached, any floor plan you drew in the app and linked, the project address, the job type and size, and a summary of your company’s recent estimate lines so the draft matches your pricing. The AI assistant (“ask BuilderNiche”) sends your request and the jobs (with client name and address), tasks, dates and budget lines you are allowed to open, so it can act on them. Translating a note between English and Spanish sends the text of that note. This is so the AI can write the draft, carry out the request, or translate the note. Under Anthropic’s commercial terms, data sent through its API is not used to train its models. You are told this, and asked to OK it, before your first AI draft. If your company connects its own Anthropic account in Settings, the same data goes to that account instead, under your company’s own agreement with Anthropic, and is billed to it; BuilderNiche only keeps the key, encrypted, to make those requests. If you connect your own AI assistant (such as Claude or ChatGPT) to BuilderNiche with the connector in Settings, that assistant’s provider receives what your assistant asks BuilderNiche for — only what you can see yourself — under your own agreement with that provider. You can disconnect it at any time.
• ElevenLabs or OpenAI (spoken replies). When lifelike voices are switched on for the assistant, the words the assistant is about to say out loud — a one-line summary of a change, a question back, or “Done” — are sent to the text-to-speech service in use (ElevenLabs, or OpenAI) to be turned into speech. Your own voice recording is never sent to either. Each processes the text for us under its API terms, which do not let it use the data to train its models.
• Telnyx (text messages). Sends the job texts described under “Text messages” below. It receives the phone number and the text of each message, to deliver it.
• Stripe (payments). Handles a company’s subscription on our website. It receives the company name, the owner’s email address and the card or bank details the owner types into Stripe’s own page, to charge the subscription. Card numbers go straight to Stripe; BuilderNiche never sees or stores them.
• QuickBooks (Intuit), only if your company connects it. When you send an accepted estimate or a bill to QuickBooks, it receives the customer’s or trade’s name and email address, and the line items and amounts, to create the invoice or bill in your own QuickBooks company.
• Cloudflare R2 (file storage). Stores the photos, plans and documents uploaded to BuilderNiche, so they can be shown to the people at your company allowed to see them.
• The hosting provider (Render) runs the server and holds the database.
• The email provider sends password resets, verification links, invitations, estimates you choose to email, and the messages that tell a trade their dates have moved. It receives the recipient’s address and the contents of each email, to deliver it.
• Apple Push Notification service (and, for notifications in a web browser, that browser’s push service) delivers notifications to your phone. It receives a device address and the notification, encrypted for the one device it is going to, so it carries the notification without being able to read it.
• Mapbox (address lookup). When you type an address into an address field, what you have typed so far is sent to Mapbox to suggest matching addresses. Tapping an address to get directions opens Apple Maps or Google Maps with that address; that is your choice, made by the tap.
• The off-site backup storage holds encrypted copies of backups. The files are encrypted before they leave the server and the storage provider cannot read them.

Backups

The app takes a full backup once a day and keeps the most recent 14, plus one older checkpoint per week for the 12 weeks after that — so a gap of a month or more between checking on it still leaves something to restore from before the gap started, not only copies taken during it. If off-site backups are switched on, encrypted copies are also sent to separate storage so that losing the server does not lose the data; there the most recent 60 are kept, plus one a week for the 24 weeks after that.

This has a consequence worth being straight about: after you delete something, it can still exist in a backup taken before you deleted it, until that backup rolls off on its own — at most 228 days (about 8 months) later. Backups are not searched or used for anything except recovering the whole server after a failure.

Text messages

BuilderNiche (Southern Tradesman Company) may text a subcontractor who has opted in to job texts from BuilderNiche — to tell them about jobs they are booked on — or an account owner who has added their own phone number, to ask them to approve a support session. The building companies that use BuilderNiche never send these texts themselves. These are operational messages, not marketing: message and data rates may apply, and message frequency depends on how often you are booked or need support. Full detail is in the SMS Terms section of the Terms of Service.

Your mobile information and messaging consent are not shared with any third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. We do not sell or share your SMS opt-in data or personal information with third parties for marketing purposes.

Security log

Signing in, and anything done by someone with server-wide admin access, is recorded with a timestamp, the IP address and browser it came from, and a plain-English description — a security audit trail, not a record used for anything else. It is kept for 365 days and then deleted.

Deleted budget lines

Deleting a line from a budget removes it from view right away, but it is kept, recoverable, for 30 days — in case it was a mistake. After that it is permanently destroyed and cannot be brought back.

Deleting your account

Your own login can be deleted from Your account inside the app, at any time, without asking anyone: you read what it does, type CONFIRM and your password, and it is erased immediately — no email step. Your name, email, phone and password are erased and you are signed out everywhere, permanently. The only owner of a company deletes the whole company instead.

What stays is the record of work: a photo still shows the date it was uploaded, a job still shows when it was created. Those are facts about a building, not about you, and they belong to the company that is still running that job. They show as having been done by a deleted user.

The whole company can be deleted by an owner, from the same page. Every job, task, photo, document, budget, lead, trade, shift and login goes with it. Because that is genuinely irreversible, it does not happen immediately: the owner types CONFIRM and their password, every owner is emailed a link to confirm it, and once an owner clicks it everyone with a login is told and the company is erased 30 days later. Owners are reminded 7 days and 1 day before, and any owner can undo it until then — from the banner in the app or the link in the email. After that it is destroyed, apart from the backup copies described above, and there is no copy anyone can ask us to hand back.

When a subscription ends

Cancelling a subscription, or one ending, does not delete anything. The account is paused and the company’s records are kept for 12 months after the subscription ends; owners are emailed 60, 30 and 7 days before they are removed, and subscribing again on the website brings everything back at once. During those 12 months an owner can ask for 7 days of read-only access to look through the records and download them. After 12 months the company is deleted exactly as above.

Getting a copy of your data

An owner can download the company’s records at any time from Settings: one ZIP file with every job, schedule, budget, plan, photo, document, estimate, lead note and message. If you want a copy of what is held about you personally, or you think something is wrong and want it corrected, write to the address below and it will be sorted out.

Children

This is a tool for running a building business. It is not aimed at children and is not designed for anyone under 13.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes and everyone with a login is told. It will not change quietly.

Getting in touch

Questions about any of this, including a request to see or delete what is held: privacy@builderniche.com.