BidYourStartup

Privacy Policy

Effective date: August 27, 2026

BidYourStartup is privacy-light by design: the whole product is one public listing and a $1.99 payment, so the data we need is small and we intend to keep it that way.

1. Who we are

BidYourStartup is operated by [OPERATOR-LEGAL-NAME], reachable at support@bidyourstartup.com. This policy covers the website at bidyourstartup.com (domain registration pending).

2. What we collect

  1. What you submit publicly: your startup name, URL, tagline, and optional logo. These are displayed on the site by design and retained in public archives such as reign history and the hall of fame.
  2. Email address, only if you provide one at purchase — used for your receipt, refund requests, and essential service emails about your placement. Providing it is optional; placements work without it.
  3. Payment details — handled entirely by our processors. Card data goes straight from you to our payment processors over their hosted flows. We never receive or store card numbers. What reaches us is limited to processor confirmations: a payment token/reference, card brand, last four digits, and expiry — enough for receipts and dispute handling, and out of scope of PCI-DSS for us as a result of this design.
  4. Server logs and IP addresses. Like nearly every web service, our hosting records standard logs including IP address, timestamp, and user agent, used for security, fraud prevention, and keeping the site up.
  5. Billing country/postal code if our processor’s checkout collects it for tax purposes.

3. What we never collect

No phone numbers. No precise location. No social logins. No behavioral advertising or cross-site tracking pixels. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are used in state privacy laws like CCPA/CPRA.

4. Payment processors

Payments are handled by third-party processors — at launch, expected to be Stripe ([STRIPE-ACCOUNT-TBD]), with Safepay ([SAFEPAY-STATUS-TBD]) and NOWPayments ([NOWPAYMENTS-STATUS-TBD]) as potential additions. When you pay, your payment data is collected and processed under each processor’s own privacy policy (for example, stripe.com/privacy). We see only confirmation data from them, never full card numbers.

5. Why we use your data

  1. To deliver what you bought: display your listing, run the reign timer and crowns, keep the public record accurate (performance of our contract with you).
  2. To send receipts and handle refunds and disputes (contract; legal obligations).
  3. To detect fraud, abuse, card-testing, and leaderboard manipulation, and to keep the service secure (our legitimate interests).
  4. To comply with tax and accounting rules (legal obligation).

6. How long we keep things

  1. Reign history is public forever, by design. The point of BidYourStartup is a permanent hall of fame. If your data needs correcting or a removal is required (e.g., legal complaint), we will remove or annotate the affected entries and recompute crowns where needed.
  2. Server logs: kept on a short rotation window of [LOG-RETENTION-DAYS-TBD] days, then purged.
  3. Purchase records: retained as long as tax and accounting rules require — commonly 3–7 years depending on jurisdiction; exact period set per advice from our accountant. [TAX-RETENTION-YEARS-TBD — confirm with CPA]
  4. Email addresses: kept while needed for receipts, refunds, and disputes, then deleted on request.

7. Your rights & requests

You can ask us what data we hold about you, ask for a correction or deletion, or withdraw an email address from our records. Email support@bidyourstartup.com; we respond within 30 days. Deletion means we strip your email and payment references from our systems; the public reign history itself stays in anonymized form so leaderboards stay honest.

8. Cookies & analytics

At launch, BidYourStartup sets no cookies beyond strictly essential ones needed for the site to function (and currently none at all beyond server-side essentials). No analytics tools, ad pixels, or third-party trackers are installed. If we ever add analytics, we’ll update this section and honor consent requirements before enabling them.

9. Children

You must be 18+ to buy a placement (see Terms of Service). BidYourStartup is not directed at children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If you believe a minor submitted data, email support@bidyourstartup.com and we’ll delete it.

10. Security

An honest, modest statement: traffic is served over TLS; payments are tokenized through our processors, so card numbers never touch our servers; we collect the least data the product allows. No system is perfectly secure, but the blast radius of a BidYourStartup data incident is small because there simply isn’t much data here.

11. Changes to this policy

  1. If we change this policy, the new version goes live at this URL with a new effective date; material changes are announced on the site in advance where feasible.
  2. This policy is part of our Terms of Service. Related: Refund Policy.

Data questions? Email support@bidyourstartup.com. This document is a template prepared for attorney review; it is not legal advice.