Privacy policy

1. Who is answerable for this

circlinback is operated by Vera Labs LLC, and Vera Labs LLC is the company responsible for the information described below. “We” and “us” mean Vera Labs LLC throughout. Write to hello@circlinback.com about anything on this page.

2. There are two different people in this policy

The contractor who signs up, and the homeowner they send an estimate to. The second one never agreed to anything with us — their address was typed in by the contractor.

That distinction runs through everything below. If you are a homeowner who received an email from circlinback: we sent it on behalf of the business named in it, using an address that business gave us. That business decides who gets emailed. The unsubscribe link in the email stops it permanently and immediately, and you can write to us at hello@circlinback.com about anything else.

3. What we hold about you, if you have an account

• Your email address. That is your entire identity here — there is no password and we never ask for a name or a photo.
• Your business name, the sending name your customers see, your sign-off, your timezone, and what kind of work you do. The timezone box is pre-filled from your browser before you confirm it.
• Your business’s postal address, once you add it in settings. It is printed in the footer of every follow-up, because the law requires a real address in commercial email.
• The wording of your follow-up templates and your schedule settings.
• Sign-in records — the one-time links we email you, and a session record while you are signed in.
• Your account status — which plan you are on, when your free trial ends, and, if you took a founding place, which of the ten it is.

We do not collect payment information, because there is nothing to pay for yet — no card is requested anywhere in the product.

4. What we hold about the people you send estimates to

You type this in; they don’t give it to us.

• Their email address, and their name if you enter one.
• What the job is — the short description you write, which also becomes the subject line of the email they receive.
• The amount of the estimate, if you enter one, and the dates it was sent and logged.
• The full text of every follow-up we sent them, exactly as it went out.
• The text of their replies to us, up to about 16,000 characters each, along with the subject and the date. This includes automatic replies such as out-of-office messages, which we store but do not forward or act on.
• A record of every send attempt, including the ones we refused and the reason we refused them. That record is how we can answer a customer who says “you kept emailing me”.
• If they unsubscribe, bounce, or report an email as spam: a permanent record of that. See section 9.

We do not collect phone numbers. We do not buy, enrich, or look anyone up anywhere. Nothing about an estimate or a customer is shared with any other business using circlinback, with one exception set out in section 10.

5. What we hold about visitors to this website

If you fill in the form in our footer, we store the email address you typed and the date. Nothing has ever been sent to that list.

We keep it until you ask us to remove it. Email us and we will — and since nothing has ever been sent to this list, there is no unsubscribe link to use instead.

Separately, when you submit that form, sign in, or use an unsubscribe link, we store your IP address for a day or two, to stop the same address being hammered by a script. It is stored as it is, not hashed, and then deleted. That is the only place we keep an IP address, and browsing the site does not create one.

6. Who else touches it

Four companies, and that is the whole list.

What we don’t use, checked rather than assumed: no analytics of any kind, no tag manager, no advertising or tracking pixels, no session recording, no chat widget, no error-reporting service, no third-party fonts or scripts. This site loads nothing from anyone else’s server. Our follow-up emails are plain text, so they cannot contain a tracking pixel.

We never sell personal information and we have never disclosed any to anyone outside the four above, except where we would be legally required to.

7. What happens when your customer replies

Every follow-up carries a private return address belonging to that one estimate. A reply to it stops the sequence, gets stored, and is emailed on to you.

In order: we mark the estimate as replied, which is what stops the next follow-up. We store the reply’s subject, date and text. Then we write you a new email containing your customer’s message, and set its reply-to so that hitting reply reaches your customer directly. We also check the reply for plain refusals like “unsubscribe” or “not interested”, and if we find one we permanently opt that person out of your follow-ups.

Three honest notes on this:

• The forwarded email in your own inbox is the only copy you can read. The reply text is stored, but no screen in circlinback displays it.
• We do not cryptographically verify who sent a reply. The private return address is what we trust. It sits in the inbox of everyone we have ever emailed on your behalf, so anyone who obtains one could cause a message to be stored against that estimate and forwarded to you.
• If you forward or BCC an estimate to your intake address, we currently store a record that it arrived — the sender and the subject — and do nothing else with it. That feature is not built yet, and you are not notified.

8. Cookies

Three, all set by us, all needed to sign you in and keep you signed in, none readable by JavaScript in your browser. There are no analytics or advertising cookies, which is why there is no cookie banner. Reading this site signed out sets no cookie at all.

We do not currently act on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signals from your browser. Since we run no tracking, there is nothing for them to switch off.

9. Logs

The application writes operational logs. They are written to record counts and outcomes rather than people, and the logging layer strips out sign-in links and the private reply and unsubscribe tokens before anything is written. We will not pretend it is airtight: an error message returned by our email provider can name a recipient, and those are written through as they arrive.

10. How long we keep it

Plainly: today, nothing containing your data or your customers’ data is deleted automatically. Not after a month, not after a year. The only thing on a timer is the IP address in section 5.

We would rather say that than describe a schedule we don’t run. Automatic deletion — a ceiling on how long email records are kept, and a full removal some months after an account closes — is designed and not built. When it is built, this section changes and we will say so.

What that means in practice:

• Estimates, contacts, follow-up text and reply text are kept until someone deletes them by hand.
• Sign-in links expire after 15 minutes and stop working; the record of one may remain.
• Account closure and data removal are manual. Ask us and we will do it. There is no button, and there is no export yet either.

The two records that survive everything

These are deliberate, and they are the reason a deletion can never be quite total. Both exist to make sure a refusal is honoured.

• Opt-out records. When someone unsubscribes or refuses in a reply, we write a permanent record holding their address and the fact they refused. We keep it even if their contact record goes, because deleting the record of a refusal is how somebody ends up being emailed again after asking us to stop.
• The blocked-address list. An address that hard-bounces or reports one of our emails as spam goes on a list that applies to every business using circlinback, not just the one that sent the email, and it has no expiry. It exists because we all send through one shared domain, and continuing to mail someone who has already objected is what gets that domain — and everybody’s follow-ups — shut off. It does mean one business’s customer complaint can block that address for a different business.

11. What you can ask for

Write to hello@circlinback.com and ask for a copy of what we hold about you, a correction, or deletion. This is done by hand — there is no self-service export or delete in the product, and no automated tooling behind the scenes either. Tell us who you are so we can find the right records, and we will not ask for more identification than that needs.

If you are a homeowner rather than an account holder: the unsubscribe link in any email we sent you stops all of it immediately, and you don’t need us for that. For anything else, write to us and we will act on it and tell the business concerned.

12. Keeping it safe

Sign-in is by emailed link only, so there is no password of yours for us to lose. Every query for a business’s data is scoped to that business, and the isolation between accounts is covered by tests that run against a real database rather than a stand-in. Credentials are held outside the codebase. Private links — unsubscribe and reply addresses — are long random strings and are kept out of logs and out of search engines.

We have not had a breach. If we do, we will tell affected people directly rather than posting a notice and hoping.

13. Where it lives

The application and database run in the United States, as do the email services in section 6. If you are outside the United States, using circlinback means your information is handled there.

14. Changes

If we change something that matters — particularly anything in section 10 — we will change the date at the top and email account holders before it takes effect. Our terms of service sit alongside this.

15. Getting in touch

hello@circlinback.com. A real mailbox, read by a person.