PRIVACY

Privacy policy

Last updated 4 November 2026

RivalGrade (rivalgrade.com) checks a product's website against its closest rivals and similar indie products. This page explains what we collect, why, who helps us run the service, how long we keep it and what you can ask of us. Questions or requests: [email protected].

What we collect

• Website addresses and public web pages. When you scan a site, we fetch the public pages of that site and of its likely rivals (homepage and pricing page), the way a normal browser would, respecting robots.txt.
• Listings from Launchpadly, Submit Your Startup, AI Tool Directory and SaaS List. When a founder submits a listing there, the directory sends us the listing (name, website address, category) and the submitter's email address, as described in that directory's own privacy policy.
• Your email address when you buy a report or a monitoring plan (collected by Stripe at checkout), or when a directory sends it with a listing.
• Payment details are handled entirely by Stripe. We receive the email address, the amount and the payment status, never card numbers.
• Your IP address, to limit how many scans one network can start per hour (kept for one hour), and in our server logs.
• One session cookie, set only after you start or open a scan, so the home page can show "continue where you left off". It expires after two weeks. We use no advertising or tracking cookies and no analytics scripts.

Why we use it

• To produce your scorecard and, if you buy one, your full report and its PDF.
• To build our benchmark of indie products: prices and descriptions taken from public pages, used in aggregate (for example "the median price of 23 similar tools"). We never show one product's data as anyone else's.
• To send the emails you asked for (receipts, report links, monitoring alerts) and, for founders whose listing a directory sent us, a free scorecard email.
• To take payments, prevent abuse and keep the service secure.

We never sell your personal information and do not use it for advertising.

Emails and unsubscribing

Every email from RivalGrade has an unsubscribe link, and supporting email apps also show a one-click unsubscribe button. Once you unsubscribe we send you nothing more; we keep your address on a do-not-email list so it stays that way. We send at most one free scorecard per founder and per product every seven days.

Who helps us run RivalGrade

• Hetzner (Germany) — servers and backups, located in Helsinki, Finland (EU).
• Cloudflare — domain name service and network protection in front of our servers.
• OpenAI (USA) — reads the public text of the scanned websites to describe and score them. We send website text, not your email address.
• Brave Search — web searches for possible rivals, using product names and keywords.
• Sendaro — sends our emails.
• Stripe — payments and tax.

Transfers outside the EU (OpenAI, Stripe, Cloudflare) rely on these providers' standard contractual safeguards.

How long we keep it

• Scan results, reports and website snapshots: while the service runs, or until you ask us to delete them.
• Email addresses: while you use RivalGrade; the do-not-email list is kept so we can keep honouring unsubscribes.
• Database backups: 14 days. Server logs are rotated and kept only briefly.
• Payment records: as long as accounting law requires.

Your rights

You can ask to see the personal data we hold about you, to correct or delete it, to object to its use, or to receive a copy. Email [email protected]; we answer within one month. If you are unhappy with our answer you can complain to your data protection authority.

Changes

If we change this policy we update the date at the top of this page.