Privacy Policy

What we collect

• Account details: your email address, password (stored only as a bcrypt hash), and anything you add to your builder profile (name, photo, bio, location, time zone, website and social links). If you sign in with Google or GitHub, we receive your email and basic profile from them.
• What you post: startups you submit (name, website, descriptions, logo, screenshots, video link, categories), comments, reviews, feed posts and replies.
• Activity on the site: upvotes, Startup Battle picks, badge checks, and similar actions, plus the answers you give in our "how did you hear about us" survey.
• Usage and device data: pages you visit, the referring website, approximate country (from Cloudflare), device type, and basic browser signals we use to tell real visitors from bots. We keep your IP address only as a salted, one-way hash, so we can rate-limit and stop vote manipulation without storing the address itself.
• Payments: handled by Stripe. We receive the amount, status and your email; your card details go to Stripe and never touch our servers.

Cookies

• Essential: keeping you signed in, and a visitor ID cookie used to count votes and Startup Battle picks fairly and to prevent abuse.
• Preferences: small browser storage items such as whether battle sound effects are on.
• Analytics: PostHog, which records how visitors use our pages (including session replays, with typed form input masked) to help us find bugs and improve the site.
• We do not use advertising cookies and do not sell your data.

How we use it

• To run the site: show your listings, comments and reviews publicly, run the weekly launch rounds and Startup Battle, award weekly winners.
• To send emails: account and verification emails, listing and launch updates, reminders, and (if you haven't opted out) our newsletter and short letters from the founder. Every non-essential email has an unsubscribe link.
• To keep it fair and safe: detect bots, spam, duplicate listings and vote manipulation, and moderate comments.
• To improve the product, using aggregated usage data.

Services we use

• Stripe (payments), Amazon SES (email), Cloudflare (security and delivery), PostHog (analytics), Hetzner (hosting, EU).
• AI services: OpenRouter to moderate comments, reviews and posts, and Firecrawl to read a website you ask us to autofill. We only send them the content needed for that task.
• Google / GitHub for optional sign-in.

AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude and other MCP clients)

Our public assistant connector (postyourstartup.co/mcp) only reads public directory information (startup listings, reviews, categories, weekly launches and directories). It does not access your account or any personal data. For each request we log which tool was used, which assistant made it (when identifiable) and a hashed IP address for rate limiting. We do not store the questions you ask the assistant.

Sharing

We share data only with the services above to run the site, when required by law, or to protect the site and its users. Your public profile and posts are, by design, visible to everyone.

Retention

We keep account data while your account exists. Server logs are kept up to 90 days. Payment records are kept as long as required for tax and accounting.

Your choices and rights

• Edit your profile and email preferences anytime in your dashboard, or use the unsubscribe link in any email.
• Ask us for a copy of your data or to delete your account and its data: email [email protected].
• Depending on where you live (for example the EU/UK under GDPR, or California), you may have additional rights, such as objecting to processing or lodging a complaint with your data protection authority.

Children

PostYourStartup is not intended for children under 16.

Changes

If we change this policy we'll update the date above, and for significant changes we'll tell you by email or on the site.