Privacy Policy

We collect the following categories of information:

• Account and identity information. When you sign up, our authentication provider (Clerk) collects your name, email address, and authentication credentials, and manages your organization/team membership and role (admin or member).
• Billing information. If you subscribe to a paid plan, our payment processor (Stripe) collects and processes your payment details directly — PencilOut itself never sees or stores your full card number. We retain your plan, subscription status, and billing history.
• Property and analysis data you submit. Addresses you look up, purchase assumptions and buy-box criteria you enter, saved analyses, and any notes or pipeline/board entries your organization creates.
• Property and public-record data from third-party sources.To run an analysis we retrieve property characteristics, valuation, and rent-estimate data from RentCast, and — for Chicago-area properties — publicly available assessed-value, tax-bill, and parcel-sale-history records from the Cook County Assessor's Office and Cook County's public open-data portal. These county records are public whether or not you use PencilOut; we do not alter or resell them.
• Usage and device data. Pages visited, features used, and your IP address, which we use in part for abuse-prevention rate limiting (for example, limiting how many organizations can be created from the same IP address per day).
• Communications. Messages you send us, for example through our support contact address.
• Cookies and similar technologies.We use cookies/local storage for signed-in session management (via Clerk) and aggregated product analytics (via PostHog). We do not use advertising or cross-context behavioral-tracking cookies, and our systems do not currently respond to browser "Do Not Track" signals.

• To operate the Service — run analyses, save your work, and manage your organization.
• To process payments and manage subscriptions.
• To detect and prevent abuse of free-tier or rate-limited features.
• To generate the AI-assisted prose explanation of an analysis you request. This text is always generated from your own analysis figures — the underlying Deal Score itself is always computed by deterministic, versioned code, never by an AI model.
• To send you transactional email (e.g. a welcome email, billing notices).
• To understand aggregate feature usage and improve the product.

We do not sell your personal information. We share information only with the service providers ("subprocessors") that help us run PencilOut, each under contract and limited to what they need to perform their function:

• Vercel — application hosting.
• Supabase — database storage (encrypted at rest).
• Clerk — authentication and organization/team management.
• Stripe — payment processing and subscription billing.
• RentCast — property characteristics, valuation, and rent-estimate data.
• Anthropic — AI-generated explanatory text for your own analyses.
• Sentry — error monitoring.
• PostHog — aggregated product analytics.
• Resend — transactional email delivery.
• Upstash — rate-limiting infrastructure.
• Inngest — background job processing (e.g. investor report generation).

We may also disclose information if required by law or legal process, to protect the rights or safety of PencilOut or our users, or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets (in which case this policy would continue to apply to your information under the new ownership).

Your organization's saved analyses, buy-box, and pipeline data persist until you or an organization admin deletes them, or until your organization's account is closed. Cook County assessment/tax/sale records are public reference data shared across all PencilOut organizations (not tied to any one account) and are retained indefinitely as a historical record. Billing records are retained as required for tax and accounting purposes.

PencilOut is a business (B2B) tool. For the property analyses, buy-box criteria, and pipeline/board data your organization enters, PencilOut acts on that organization's behalf — an organization admin controls who on the team can see or edit that data, and can remove members or delete records directly in the app. For your own account and identity information (login, billing), PencilOut is the controller.

Application data is hosted on infrastructure located in the United States and Canada (our database provider's Canadian data center). If you access the Service from outside these regions, your information will be transferred to and processed there.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. California residents have the right to know what personal information we've collected, to request its deletion or correction, and not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights. To make a request, email support@pencilout.net.

Organization admins can remove members and delete saved analyses directly within the app. To request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information — or to close your account entirely — email support@pencilout.net. We will respond within a reasonable time.

Data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest. Every organization's data is isolated at the database level using PostgreSQL Row-Level Security, keyed to your organization — not enforced only in application code. Access to production data is limited to what each internal service role needs to do its job.

PencilOut is an informational underwriting tool. Deal Scores, verdicts, and modeled tax or reassessment figures are estimates, not guarantees, and do not constitute investment, tax, or legal advice. Separately from this policy: PencilOut's scoring never uses demographic information to influence any recommendation or score.

PencilOut is a business tool intended for real-estate investors and professionals. It is not directed at, and we do not knowingly collect information from, children under 16.

We may update this policy from time to time. We'll update the "Last updated" date above, and for material changes we'll make reasonable efforts to notify active organizations (for example, by email).

Questions about this policy or your data can be sent to support@pencilout.net.