Privacy Policy
What PermitChime collects, why, and what it deliberately does not collect.
Last updated
This policy describes how the product actually behaves. It has not been reviewed by counsel — have a lawyer review it against the privacy laws that apply to your business before relying on it.
What we collect
Account information. Your name, email address, hashed password, and timezone. If you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address, and profile image from Google.
Organization information. Organization name, membership and roles, notification preferences, and — if you configure client status pages — your business name, logo, and accent color.
Product usage. Which permits and projects you create, your filters and settings, and standard technical logs (IP address, user agent, timestamps) used for security, abuse prevention, and debugging. Rate-limit counters are keyed to a hashed identifier and expire automatically.
Billing information. Handled by Stripe. We store your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, your plan, and your subscription status. We never see or store your card number.
Permit records and public personal information
PermitChime reads public permit records published by government authorities. Those records sometimes contain personal information — most commonly a property address, and sometimes an applicant, owner, or contractor name.
We deliberately limit what we ingest to the fields needed to identify a permit and track its progress: permit number and identifiers, address, permit type, description, status, dates, plan reviews, inspections, fees, conditions, and comments.
We do not ingest homeowner email addresses, homeowner phone numbers, or unrelated applicant personal details, even where a source exposes them.
PermitChime is not a people-search service. We do not build profiles of individuals, we do not offer name-based search across permit records, and we do not sell permit data or personal information to anyone.
Why we process this information
- to operate the service you asked for: monitoring permits and telling you what changed
- to send transactional email — verification, password reset, invitations, permit alerts, and your daily brief
- to bill you, if you are on a paid plan
- to keep the service secure and prevent abuse of the public permit checker
- to understand and improve how the product performs
If you are in a jurisdiction requiring a lawful basis, ours is performance of our contract with you for the first three, and legitimate interests for the last two.
Operational email — account verification, password reset, invitations, permit change alerts and the daily brief — is part of the service. You control which alerts you receive in Settings → Notifications, including turning off instant alerts and the daily digest entirely.
Product and marketing email is a separate, independently revocable opt-in.
Who we share it with
Only with the processors needed to run the service:
| Processor | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Neon | database hosting |
| Cloudflare | application hosting, object storage, queues, network security |
| Resend | transactional email delivery |
| Stripe | payments and subscription management |
| PostHog (optional) | product analytics, only when configured |
We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
Government permit sources receive only the permit number we look up on your behalf. They do not receive your identity, and we do not identify our customers to them.
Client status pages
If you create a client status page, anyone with the link can see the permit information you chose to expose — you control whether permit numbers, comments, fees, inspections, reviews, and the timeline appear. Links use a cryptographically random token, can be given an expiry, and can be revoked at any time. Treat a share link as public: it has no login.
Retention
- Account and organization data: while your account is open, then deleted within 30 days of closure (except records we must keep for legal or accounting reasons).
- Permit change history: kept for as long as you keep the permit, subject to your plan's history window.
- Diagnostic check records: 30 days.
- Raw portal payloads stored for debugging: 90 days.
- Rate-limit counters: automatically expired.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal information, or to object to certain processing. Email [email protected] and we will respond within 30 days. You can export your permit data as CSV yourself at any time on plans that include export.
Note that we cannot delete a public permit record from the government source. If you want a government record changed, contact the issuing authority.
Security
Passwords are hashed. Sessions use secure, HTTP-only cookies. Data is encrypted in transit. Organization scoping is enforced on every query that touches customer data. Share-link tokens are stored hashed, never in plaintext. Connectors can only contact an explicit allowlist of government hosts, and no part of the product will fetch a URL supplied by a user.
No system is perfectly secure. If you find a vulnerability, please email [email protected] rather than disclosing it publicly, and we will work with you.
Children
PermitChime is a business tool and is not directed to anyone under 18.
Changes
We will post updates here and change the date at the top. Material changes will be emailed to account owners before taking effect.