Privacy Policy

tradies2Quote is operated by Challis Samu (sole trader), trading as tradies2Quote, based in Tauranga, New Zealand. In this policy, “we”, “us” and “our” refer to Challis Samu (sole trader), trading as tradies2Quote. “You” means the tradie or business that signs up to use tradies2Quote.

We are the data controller for the personal information you give us. This policy explains what we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the rights you have over it.

This policy also covers T2QCAL, our separate construction calculator app. T2QCAL uses the same Tradies2Quote account when you choose to sign in.

We collect four kinds of information.

1. Account information — your name, email address, business name, hashed password, country, and any branding (logo, business number, contact details) you choose to add for your quotes.

2. Job and quote content — the audio you record, the cleaned-up transcript of that audio, plan and site photos you scan, the line items and prices that go into each quote, the client contact details you save against a job, the hours you log in the Timesheet, messages your clients send in the quote chat, and — if you use the weather feature — the job-site address you check. This is the working data of the product.

3. Location — only if you turn it on, in the Timesheet: where you start and finish work, and your route while you're clocked in. See Location below for exactly what is kept, who sees it and for how long.

4. Technical information — IP address, browser and device type, basic usage events (e.g. “quote generated”, “PDF exported”), and error logs. We use this to keep the service running and to spot problems.

We do not collect payment card details ourselves. Card payments are handled by Stripe — your card never touches our servers.

T2QCAL on-device work — calculator inputs, drawings, saved jobs and room measurements are stored on your device. Saving a calculation locally does not send it to Tradies2Quote. When you choose to send selected work to your account, its job details, quantities, prices and calculation evidence are sent to our service. Optional voice and plan-reading features send the recording or image you select for processing, after AI consent. The provider disclosures below apply to those features too.

PDFs imported into T2QCAL remain on your device, separate from the public reference-manual cache. Signed-in imports are shown only for the account that added them; signed-out imports stay in the device library. Older imports without an owner require a recovery choice. Importing a PDF does not upload it for AI processing.

• To create your account and let you sign in.
• To transcribe your voice memos and turn them into a quote.
• To generate, store, and deliver your quote and invoice PDFs.
• If you turn location on: to pin where you start and finish work, work out travel kilometres, and clock you in and out at job sites automatically if you ask for that.
• To send you transactional emails (sign-in links, password resets, your client's opened-quote notifications).
• To debug, monitor, and improve the service. Where we look at usage to improve the product, we work from aggregated data, not from the content of your individual quotes.
• To detect, prevent, and respond to abuse or fraud.
• To comply with our legal obligations.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not use it to train AI models — see the next section for what happens to your voice memos.

tradies2Quote uses two external AI providers, Anthropic and OpenAI, to turn what you give it into a quote. Content is processed as follows:

• Typed descriptions and transcripts — sent to Anthropic's Claude models to draft your quote, tidy the transcript and write a short job summary.
• Voice memos — sent to OpenAI to turn the recording into text. We keep the text, not the audio.
• Photos and documents — site drawings, plan scans and photographed supplier quotes are read by Anthropic's Claude. Job photos, including photos a client adds to a quote request, are described by OpenAI.
• Customer quote chat — when your client uses the chat on their quote page, their messages are answered by Anthropic's Claude. The chat is clearly labelled as AI, the conversation is visible to you, and both sides of it are screened by an automated content filter.

Anthropic and OpenAI process this content to return the result. Under their commercial API terms they do not use it to train their models, and neither do we. Their processing may take place outside New Zealand, including in the United States.

The text description or transcript lives inside your quote and is deleted when you delete the quote or close your account. Plan and site images you attach are stored with your account so your quotes keep their source documents; delete the quote (or your account) and they go with it.

Location is off until you turn it on yourself, in the Timesheet. We never use it for advertising and we never sell it.

• Timesheet — only if you turn location on. When you start or finish work, the app saves where you are, for example “At the Hemi Walker job”. While you're clocked in it also keeps your route, to work out kilometres for travel: precise while the app is open, and rough while it's in the background. Nothing is recorded while you're not clocked in.
• Automatic clock-in — only if you turn it on, in the iPhone app. During the work hours you choose, your phone watches for you arriving at and leaving your job sites, using iOS region monitoring (iPhone asks you to allow location “Always” for this). The check happens on your phone; nothing is sent until you arrive or leave. Outside your work hours nothing happens.
• Who sees it — you see your own. If you work for a business that uses tradies2Quote (you've joined its team), the business owner can see your hours, where you clocked in and out, and where you were while you were clocked in.
• How long it's kept — route points are deleted after 90 days. Where you clocked in and out stays with hours that have been invoiced; otherwise it is cleared after 90 days too.
• Maps and addresses — job-site addresses are looked up with OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service, and maps are drawn with OpenStreetMap map tiles, which your phone loads straight from OpenStreetMap. To name the town on the weather button, your location rounded to about 1 km is looked up there too. Only the address, the rounded area, or the area of the map on screen is sent — not who you are.
• Weather — the weather button shows the forecast where you are when you've allowed location (or when you tap “Use my location”), and otherwise for your business address. Your location is rounded to about 1 km before the forecast is requested from Open-Meteo. It isn't saved with your account or anywhere else; only that area's forecast is kept for up to 30 minutes, so it loads quicker.

You can turn location off at any time in the Timesheet (Location settings), and in the iPhone's Settings under tradies2Quote, Location. Turning it off stops collection straight away; what was already saved is deleted on the schedule above.

We use a small set of third-party providers to run the service. Each one only receives the data it needs to do its job.

• Contabo GmbH — infrastructure. The application and its database run on a virtual private server we operate ourselves, hosted in Contabo's data centre in Sydney, Australia. Your account data, quotes, clients, and uploaded images live on that server (we run the database and file storage software ourselves — no third-party database service holds your data).
• Anthropic — AI processing of text and images: quote drafting, transcript clean-up, reading drawings and supplier quotes, and the customer quote chat and its content filter. Receives the text or image needed for that task.
• OpenAI — voice transcription and job-photo descriptions. Receives the recording or photo needed for that task.
• Open-Meteo — job-site weather. Receives the job-site or business address (to find it on the map) and/or coordinates — including your device location, rounded to about 1 km, when the weather is for where you are — and returns the forecast. No account identifiers are sent with it.
• OpenStreetMap — maps. Its Nominatim service turns job-site addresses into map points and names the town for the weather button, and its map tiles draw the maps. Receives only the address, a location rounded to about 1 km, or the map area; no account identifiers are sent with it.
• Stripe — payment processing, including client deposit payments where a tradie turns them on. Handles card details. We never see your card number.
• Resend — transactional email delivery. Sends sign-in links, quote and invoice emails to your clients, and account notifications.
• Apple — push notifications on iOS. If you turn notifications on in the iOS app, a device push token is stored and notifications are delivered through the Apple Push Notification service.

Text-message quote links are sent from your own phone's Messages app — no SMS provider receives your client's number or the message from us.

Error monitoring runs on our own server; crash and error reports are not sent to any third-party analytics service.

Each of these providers is bound by their own privacy policy and by contractual data-processing terms with us.

Your account data, quote content and any location you let the app record are stored on a server we operate, hosted by Contabo GmbH in Sydney, Australia. Backups live on the same infrastructure.

Typed descriptions, transcripts, AI chat messages, voice memos and photos you ask the app to read are processed by Anthropic and OpenAI, which may process them in the United States. Weather lookups go to Open-Meteo in the EU; address look-ups and map tiles come from OpenStreetMap; emails are delivered via Resend in the US.

That means your personal information is transferred to and processed in countries outside New Zealand and the United Kingdom, including Australia and the United States. We rely on the contractual safeguards our providers offer (including standard contractual clauses where required) to keep your data protected to a comparable standard.

• Active account data — we keep it for as long as your account is open.
• Deleted quotes — purged within 30 days of deletion.
• Location — route points are deleted after 90 days. Clock-in and clock-out places stay with invoiced hours; others are cleared after 90 days.
• Closed accounts — we delete your personal information within 30 days of account closure. Routine backups holding a copy are overwritten within a further 30 days.
• Aggregated usage metrics — we may keep de-identified statistics (e.g. “quotes generated this month”) indefinitely. These do not identify you.
• Records we are legally required to keep — tax invoices and similar records may be retained for the period required by NZ law (typically 7 years).

Under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 and, where it applies to you, the UK GDPR / EU GDPR, you have the right to:

• Access — ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct — ask us to fix information that is wrong or out of date.
• Delete — remove your personal information. You can delete your account and its data yourself, right now, in the app (Delete account, at the bottom of your account settings) — this removes your data immediately. If you'd rather we did it, email us from the address on your account and we'll action it within 20 working days. Either way, copies in routine backups are overwritten within 30 days.
• Export — get a copy of your quotes and client data in a machine-readable format.
• Object — tell us to stop processing your information for a particular purpose.
• Complain — to the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner (privacy.org.nz) or, in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@tradies2quote.com. We respond within 20 working days.

We use a small number of essential cookies. They keep you signed in, remember your theme preference, and protect against cross-site request forgery. Without them, the app cannot function.

We do not use advertising cookies or tracking pixels, and nothing follows you around the web. On our website, if you choose Accept on the cookie banner, a small analytics script from UptimeWatch (uptimewatch-vert.vercel.app) also runs to show us what's working; choose Decline and it never loads. The script itself sets no cookie. Every page view sends the page's address and the page you came from; if the page hits a JavaScript error, it also sends the error message, a short stack trace, your last few clicks and page changes, your browser, operating system, device type, viewport size and language, so we can fix it. It also reports how quickly the page loaded and felt (Core Web Vitals). The iPhone app uses essential cookies only: it shows no cookie banner and never loads that script.

Changed your mind? Cookie settings, in the website's footer, clears your saved choice and asks again — on any page, at any time.

tradies2Quote is built for self-employed tradespeople and registered trade businesses. It is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under the age of 16. If you believe a child has signed up, contact us and we will delete the account.

Data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2 or higher. It is stored on access-controlled infrastructure that only we administer. Passwords are hashed using industry-standard algorithms — we never store them in plain text.

Your account data is isolated at the database level using row-level security: a query running as your account literally cannot return another user's rows. No security is perfect, but we work to make a breach as costly and as small as possible.

We may update this policy as the product evolves. When we make a material change (something that affects your rights or changes how we use your data), we will notify you by email and inside the app before the change takes effect. The “Last updated” date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.

Questions about this policy, or want to exercise a right under it?

• Email privacy@tradies2quote.com
• Post: Challis Samu (sole trader), trading as tradies2Quote, Tauranga, New Zealand