How we handle your data.

Account information: your name, email address, a hashed password (we never store your actual password), your date of birth (collected once at signup solely to confirm you're 18 or older), and optionally your city and country.

Billing information: if you subscribe, Stripe processes and stores your payment details directly - we never see or store your card number. We keep a reference to your Stripe customer/subscription ID and your subscription status so the app knows what you have access to.

Content you submit: alert preferences (a category or keyword and a notification email), and anything you send through the Contribute or Contact forms.

Technical data: your IP address is used transiently to prevent abuse (rate-limiting login attempts, signups, and form submissions) and isn't stored long-term or used to track you across the site.

We don't use advertising or analytics tracking cookies. The only cookie we set is a session cookie that keeps you logged in.

• To create and secure your account, and let you log in.
• To process your subscription and give you access to what you've paid for.
• To send transactional email: account verification, password resets, alert notifications, billing receipts, and responses to what you submit through Contribute or Contact.
• To improve the archive itself, drawing on submissions we review.

We use a small number of third-party services to run Venture Trail, each processing only what they need to do their job:

• Stripe - payment processing. Stripe holds your card details; we never do.
• Resend - delivers our transactional emails.
• Google - if you sign in with Google, Google authenticates you; we only receive your name, email, and a Google account identifier.
• Groq - when you use Evaluate, we first search our own archive for the closest matching companies ourselves. Only the text of your idea and that shortlist are then sent to Groq's API to write the verdict in plain language. Groq doesn't have access to the rest of the archive or your account, and isn't linked to your identity within that request.
• Supabase and Vercel - host our database and the application itself.

We don't sell your data, and we don't share it with advertisers.

You can delete your account at any time from Settings. Doing so permanently removes your account, sessions, alert subscriptions, and submissions from our database - this can't be undone, and we don't keep a hidden copy afterward.

If you're in the EU/EEA (or anywhere with similar protections), you have the right to access, correct, or delete your personal data, object to or restrict certain processing, and request a copy of your data in a portable format. Most of this you can already do yourself in Account Settings; for anything else, reach us through our Contact page. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority - in Sweden, that's the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (IMY).

Venture Trail is for people 18 and older. We ask for your date of birth at signup specifically to confirm this, and we don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 18.

Passwords are hashed, never stored in plain text. All traffic to the site is encrypted (HTTPS). We rate-limit sensitive actions like login and signup to reduce automated abuse.

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, we'll update the date at the top.

Questions about this policy or your data - reach us through our Contact page.