Privacy Policy

Overview

TechCompare ("we", "our", or "us") operates this website. The site, including all calculators and comparison tools, runs almost entirely in your browser. Most tools can be used without signing in and without transmitting any personal data to us. Signing in (via Google or GitHub) is optional and unlocks cross-device sync of your favorites, saved tool states, and recent tools.

Data we do not collect

We never ask for and never store:

• Passwords. We do not offer email + password sign-in, and we never see or store any password you use elsewhere.
• Payment information (the site is free to use).
• The contents of calculator input fields. Settings included in a page URL may appear in browser security reports, as described below.

If you choose to sign in (optional), we do collect the data described in the "Accounts and user data" section below. If you never sign in, we still receive the data described in the page ratings, Ask assistant, log files, and error and security reports sections. Our ad partner Google receives the data described in the advertising section.

Accounts and user data

Signing in is optional. If you do sign in, we use Google and GitHub as the authentication providers. We never see the password you use on Google or GitHub. The OAuth flow hands us a verified token only.

When you sign in for the first time, we receive and store the following data from your chosen OAuth provider:

• Your email address (as returned by Google or GitHub). Used to identify your account and to send you the transactional emails described below.
• Your display name (the name Google or GitHub has on file for you). Shown on your account page only, never displayed publicly.
• A stable internal identifier (your TechCompare user id). Used to link your favorites, saved states, and recent tools to your account.

As you use TechCompare while signed in, we also store:

• Favorites: which tools you have favorited, so they follow you across devices.
• Saved tool states: any tool configuration you explicitly save (with a label you choose). The label and the URL search params for the saved state are stored on our servers under your user id.
• Recent tools: the last 10 tools you visited, tracked automatically. Used to show "Pick up where you left off" on the homepage.
• Settings: your unit preference (centimeters or inches) and homepage customization settings.
• Ask chats, only if you say yes: your Ask chats, so they sync across devices. Each one is deleted 7 days after its last message. See the AI tool assistant section below.

Anything you type into a tool's input fields is not stored on our servers unless you explicitly click "Save this configuration", and even then only the URL search params (which encode the tool's state) and the label you give it are stored, never raw input strings you typed in.

We do not sell your data. Your authentication provider (Google, GitHub, or Discord) sends us your verified email and display name only during sign-in, and Supabase stores your account data on our behalf as our backend provider. Your account data is visible only to you and to our team for support and abuse response.

Marketing emails and consent

When you sign in for the first time, we show you a one-time welcome modal that asks whether you want to receive occasional emails about new tools and major features. The checkbox is unchecked by default, so your consent is opt-in, not assumed.

We only send you marketing emails if you explicitly opt in. We never send marketing emails to users who have not opted in, regardless of whether they have an account.

You can withdraw your consent at any time by contacting us (using the email in the Contact section below) or by clicking the unsubscribe link in any marketing email we send. We will remove your email address from our marketing list within a reasonable timeframe (typically within 7 days).

Transactional emails (such as account deletion confirmation or security notices, if we ever send them) are not marketing. They are sent as part of operating your account and you cannot unsubscribe from them without closing your account.

We do not currently send any emails at all (no marketing, no transactional). Email sending will only start once we have configured a transactional email provider. This section describes the rules we will follow when we do.

Google, GitHub, and Discord as authentication providers

When you click "Continue with Google", "Continue with GitHub", or "Continue with Discord", you are momentarily redirected to that provider's domain to choose which account to use. The provider then sends us a verified token containing the data described in the "Accounts and user data" section above. Their handling of your sign-in is governed by their own privacy policies, not ours:

• Google Privacy Policy
• GitHub Privacy Policy
• Discord Privacy Policy

For your safety, we have enabled "manual linking" in Supabase Auth so that if you later sign in with two of these providers using the same verified email address, the identities automatically merge into one TechCompare account. You do not need to take any action for this to happen. The merge happens based on email matching by Supabase's auth server.

Right to access, correct, and delete your data

Under the GDPR (European Economic Area) and similar laws in other jurisdictions, you have the following rights:

• Right of access (Article 15): you can request a copy of all the personal data we hold about you.
• Right to rectification (Article 16): you can correct inaccurate personal data we hold about you.
• Right to erasure (Article 17): you can request that we delete your account and all associated data.
• Right to data portability (Article 20): you can request a machine-readable export of your account data.
• Right to withdraw consent (Article 7): for any processing based on your consent (such as marketing emails), you can withdraw that consent at any time.

If you are in a jurisdiction with similar data protection laws (for example, California's CPRA, Virginia's VCDPA, or Colorado's CPA), the same access, correction, and deletion rights apply, and you can exercise them through the same channels below.

To exercise any of these rights, you can use the self-service controls on your account page at /account, or you can email us at the address in the Contact section below and we will respond within 30 days.

The "Delete my account" button on your account page permanently deletes your account and all favorites, saved states, recent tools, page ratings, Ask chats kept in your account, and profile settings. This action cannot be undone.

The "Download my data" button on your account page produces a JSON file containing all the data we have stored about you.

How long we keep your data

We keep your account data for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account, all associated data is permanently deleted within a few seconds (the deletion is cascading and immediate). We do not retain backups of deleted account data beyond Supabase's standard database backup rotation (typically a few weeks of point-in-time recovery snapshots, after which deleted data is gone for good).

If you do not sign in for 24 months, we may close your account and delete its data, with a 30-day notice email if we have your marketing opt-in (we will not email you about account closure if you have not opted in and will simply delete the account after the 24-month threshold). This inactivity rule does not apply to stored data that is required for legal compliance.

Local calculators and tools

Every comparison, unit conversion, and calculator on the site runs locally in your browser. Input fields stay in your browser. Tool settings included in a page URL can appear in browser security reports. Your saved preferences (unit choices, theme, favorites, saved tool states) live in your browser's local storage when you are not signed in, and are synced to our servers when you are signed in. You can clear local data from your browser settings at any time without contacting us.

Log files

As with most websites, our hosting provider maintains short-lived server access logs that include your IP address, user-agent, and requested URL. These logs exist for availability and abuse-response purposes, are not copied into any database we control, and are retained according to our hosting provider's policy.

Local storage

Your browser's local storage is used to remember preferences (such as unit settings and your chosen shopping country), to keep your Ask chats for 7 days, and to briefly cache the public product recommendation catalog. This data stays on your device and is never transmitted to us, unless you choose to keep your Ask chats in your account. You can clear it from your browser settings at any time.

When you rate a page or use Ask without signing in, our server sets a first-party cookie called tc_client. It holds a random ID, not anything about you or your device, and lasts up to 400 days. Scripts on the page can't read it. It lets us tell your votes and questions apart from other visitors' without a browser fingerprint. After you pass the human check for Ask, a second cookie, tc_ask_pass, lets you skip that check for an hour. Neither cookie is used for ads, analytics, or tracking across sites. Clearing your cookies removes both.

The site uses a short-lived first-party cookie containing a two-letter country code to help choose the right local affiliate links without making another location request. It expires after 24 hours, does not identify you, and is not used for cross-site tracking. A shopping country you choose manually takes priority over this automatic country.

Realtime color sync

The Color Sync tool lets you compare colors across multiple devices in realtime. When you create or join a session, the color, gradient, and spectrum settings you choose are transmitted through Supabase Realtime to every other device in the same session. This is opt-in: the tool only sends data when you actively create or join a session with a code.

The only data transmitted is the color state itself (HSL values, gradient parameters, and cycle timing) plus a random 4-character session code. No personal data, account information, or identifiers are sent. Session codes are random, not tied to accounts, and the realtime channel is ephemeral: nothing is written to any database and the channel closes when the last device leaves.

Supabase processes these realtime messages as a message broker under their own privacy policy. If you do not create or join a session, no data is transmitted for this feature.

Page ratings and feedback

Every page on TechCompare includes a star rating widget in the footer. When you rate a page (1 to 5 stars) and optionally submit feedback text, we store the rating and the optional feedback you typed.

If you aren't signed in, your browser first passes a Cloudflare Turnstile check (see the third-party services section below). We then store a keyed hash of the random ID in your tc_client cookie with your vote, so a second vote from the same browser replaces the first. To stop one network from flooding a page, we also count votes per page by a salted hash of your IP address. Those counts are deleted after 2 days and aren't stored with your vote. We never store your raw IP address. Our older system stored a hashed browser fingerprint and a hashed IP address with each vote. We deleted both from every vote in November 2026.

If you are signed in when you submit a rating, we store your TechCompare user id with the rating instead. Voting again on the same page changes your vote. If you voted on a page as a guest and then vote on it while signed in, the guest vote from that browser becomes your account's vote.

Aggregate ratings (the average score and total vote count per page) are baked into the page at build time so search engines can read them, and are also fetched live when the page loads so real visitors see up-to-date numbers. Your individual vote is never displayed publicly. Feedback text is visible only to our team for review and is never published with any identifier.

AI tool assistant

The "Ask TechCompare" assistant (the "Ask anything" bar on the homepage and the /ask page) lets you describe what you want to do in plain language. When you use it, your conversation and unit preference are sent to our server and then to DeepInfra, our AI inference provider, which determines which tool fits your question and what values to prefill it with. The AI's response tells your browser which tool to open and with what parameters. No tool input is ever sent anywhere until you land on the tool page itself.

The browser sends your conversation and unit preference to our server. For signed-in users, it also sends a Supabase access token. If you aren't signed in, it sends your tc_client cookie, and your first question passes a Cloudflare Turnstile check, which then covers you for an hour. The server uses the token or a keyed hash of the cookie's random ID for rate limits, and derives an IP hash from the request for the same purpose. It sends the conversation and unit preference to DeepInfra, but doesn't forward these identifiers. No data from other tools is included. If you type personal information such as your name or email into Ask, that text is sent to DeepInfra as part of your query. TechCompare doesn't add the token or cookie to the conversation sent to DeepInfra. Avoid typing personal or sensitive information into Ask. DeepInfra handles query text under its privacy policy and terms of service, DeepInfra's privacy policy says it won't store, sell, or train on API inputs and outputs without explicit consent. TechCompare's function doesn't keep the conversation after the request completes. Your chats are saved in your browser, and only stored by TechCompare if you send feedback or keep your chats in your account, as described below.

Your browser saves your Ask chats in its local storage, so you can go back to them from the chat list on the /ask page or in the Ask panel. It keeps up to 20 chats, and deletes each one 7 days after its last message. These saved chats aren't sent to TechCompare. You can delete one chat or all of them from the chat list.

If you're signed in, Ask asks once whether to keep your chats in your account so they sync across devices. Only if you say yes, we store each chat's messages, its title (taken from your first message), and when it last changed, under your user id. Each chat is deleted 7 days after its last message, and expired chats are removed from our database every day. You can change your answer in your account settings at any time. Turning it off deletes the chats in your account right away, and deleting your account deletes them too. When you sign out, chats kept in your account are removed from that device. We never use these chats for feedback, analytics, or testing, and "Download my data" includes them.

When TechCompare's own pages and tools can't answer a question, or it needs current info like prices or news, the assistant can search the web. It writes a short search query from your question, and our server sends that query to Exa, or to Tavily as a backup. No IP address, IP hash, cookie, or account details go with it. When the assistant reads a web page, our server fetches it, so the site sees our server instead of your browser. We keep search results in our server's memory for 24 hours, so a repeat search doesn't run again. To enforce the daily search limits, each search is counted with the same IP hash, cookie hash, and account ID used for question limits. Those counts are deleted after 35 days.

Each reply has thumbs up and down buttons. Clicking one sends nothing yet. The chat first asks whether to send it, and only sends it after you confirm. Then we store the chat up to that reply, your rating, a comment if you write one, the names of the tools the assistant used, and the AI model and prompt version. We don't store your account ID, IP address, IP hash, or cookie with it. Feedback is deleted automatically after 90 days, and only TechCompare admins can read or delete it before then.

For each answer, TechCompare analytics also counts how many steps it took, which tools it used, how long it took, whether it searched the web, and which AI model answered. It also counts when you open the assistant and when you send a message. It never records your question or the answer, and replays leave the Ask chat out.

Due to sanctions, the Ask assistant is not available in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Russia, or Belarus. Visitors from those regions see a "not available" message instead of the assistant. All other TechCompare tools remain fully available in those regions. Only the AI assistant is blocked.

Third-party services

The site runs on our own server and is delivered through Cloudflare, which caches pages and filters abusive traffic. Cloudflare processes requests, including IP addresses, strictly on our behalf and under its own security controls. We show ads through Google AdSense, as described in the advertising section below.

We use Supabase as our realtime message broker for the Color Sync tool and as the backend for page ratings. Supabase processes realtime messages and page rating submissions under their own privacy policy. The Color Sync feature sends only color state and a random session code (see the "Realtime color sync" section above); no personal data is transmitted. Page ratings store only hashed identifiers (see the "Page ratings and feedback" section above).

We use DeepInfra as the AI inference provider for the Ask assistant. When you use the Ask feature, your conversation and unit preference are sent to DeepInfra to determine which tool fits and what values to prefill. DeepInfra processes this text under its privacy policy and terms of service. DeepInfra says it won't store, sell, or train on API inputs and outputs without explicit consent. The Supabase access token and the tc_client cookie are not sent to DeepInfra. See the AI tool assistant section above for details on data sent to TechCompare and DeepInfra.

The Ask assistant uses Exa for web search, with Tavily as a backup. They only get the search query the assistant writes, never your IP address, account, or cookie. Exa handles queries under its privacy policy and Tavily under its privacy policy.

We use Cloudflare Turnstile to check that a visitor is a person when you rate a page without an account and before your first Ask question as a guest. Signed-in visitors never see it, and signing in doesn't use it. It usually runs in the background and only shows a box when it isn't sure. Turnstile collects your IP address and signals from your browser to do this, and handles them under its privacy addendum. It doesn't use cookies for ads or tracking across sites.

We use two cookieless analytics services to understand which tools people find useful and to monitor page performance:

• Ahrefs Analytics: a lightweight, cookieless analytics script that counts pageviews and referral sources. It does not set cookies or build cross-site user profiles.
• TechCompare analytics: our own analytics service, hosted on analytics.techcompare.app. It counts pageviews, referral sources and page speed (LCP, INP and CLS) without cookies. It also counts what people do on a page, like changing a setting, copying a result or opening a related page. It records that the action happened, never what you typed. On pages with ads, it also notes whether an ad showed, whether an ad blocker stopped the ads, and what you chose in the consent message.

Neither service uses cookies or builds cross-site user profiles. Pageview counts, country-level location, referrer URLs and action counts are aggregate data that can't be traced back to an individual user.

TechCompare analytics also supports heatmaps and session replays. When we turn them on, heatmaps show where visitors click and how far they scroll on a page, added up over many visits. A replay plays back a small share of visits so we can see how a page gets used, and we delete replays after 30 days.

• Every form field is masked, so what you type is never recorded.
• The password generator, JSON formatter, encoding converter, token counter, character counter and color sync show their text as asterisks.
• The Ask chat, the JWT decoder, sign-in and account screens, and the admin area are left out completely.
• A replay includes the page address. It holds your tool settings and anything you typed in the homepage search box.
• We don't record visitors whose browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control.
• In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, we only record your visit after you agree in the consent message described in the advertising section. If we can't tell where you are, we don't record you.

Advertising

We show ads through Google AdSense to keep the site free. Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your earlier visits to this site and other sites. Google's use of advertising cookies lets it and its partners show you ads based on your visits to this site and other sites on the internet. Some of these cookies are set on this site, for example to remember your consent choice.

You can turn off personalized ads from Google in My Ad Center, and from many other ad companies at aboutads.info. Google explains how it uses data from sites that show its ads in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.

If you're in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, Google's consent message asks for your choice first. If you don't agree, you can still see ads, but they aren't based on your activity. You can change your choice at any time with the "Privacy and cookie settings" link at the bottom of every page.

We don't show ads on embedded tools, the Ask assistant, or the account, sign-in and admin pages.

Error and security reports

We use GlitchTip, hosted on debug.techcompare.app, to find and fix website errors. Browser error reports include error messages, stack traces, browser details, and page paths. We remove query strings and URL fragments from page and stack frame URLs in these reports. We disable session tracking and interaction breadcrumbs, and we don't attach account details, cookies, or request bodies.

Your browser also sends reports when our Content Security Policy blocks a resource. These reports can include the page URL and blocked resource URL. Settings included in a page's query string may appear in these browser security reports. These reports help us diagnose blocked resources and don't record calculator input fields or sessions.

Community links

The site links to our Discord community in the footer. Discord has its own privacy policy and data practices that are separate from ours. We do not control what Discord collects when you visit their platform.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be announced by updating the "Last updated" date below.

Contact

For privacy questions, data requests, or general support, email support@techcompare.app.

To responsibly disclose a security vulnerability, please contact security@techcompare.app instead. See our security.txt for the canonical disclosure policy.