Privacy Policy

Effective Date: July 9, 2026

Last Updated: August 13, 2026

1. Introduction

This Privacy Policy describes how Ficombinator LLC ("we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, discloses, and protects information when you use SoloSearcher ("Service").

Who we are: Ficombinator LLC, Delaware, United States.

Where we operate: the Service is offered in the United States and intended for users in the United States. We do not offer it in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, and this policy is written to United States law.

For privacy inquiries, contact: privacy@solosearcher.com

2. One Zone: Your Private Workspace

Company data in SoloSearcher lives in a single zone, and understanding it explains almost everything else in this policy. (Service-level records — authentication data, audit logs, rate-limit counters, waitlist entries — sit outside it and are described in Sections 3, 9, and 12.)

2.1 Every company record belongs to one user

There is no shared company dataset. The Service holds no pool of company records that users read in common. A new workspace starts empty, and it contains only what you put into it: companies you create by hand, import from a CSV, ingest from a broker listing URL, or upload as a CIM — together with everything you attach to them, including notes, ratings, statuses, contacts, uploaded documents, extracted financials, saved views, search preferences, the analyses your AI agent saves, and every other record you create.

2.2 Everything in your workspace is private to you

Other users never see it. Isolation is enforced in the database itself — the database role the application reads and writes with can only see rows belonging to the requesting account — and not merely in application code. Section 5 describes that in detail.

Two consequences are worth stating plainly:

• We do not pool your data. Nothing you add is merged across users, aggregated into a product, or sold. The company datasets sold separately at data.solosearcher.com are built from public records and never from any user's workspace.
• The records you add may describe other people. A company record — particularly one imported from public-record data — can name a business owner in a business capacity. That is personal data about someone who is not our user, and Section 8 describes how we handle it and how such a person can reach us.

3. Information We Collect

3.1 Account data (via Clerk)

Authentication is handled by Clerk, Inc. When you sign in, Clerk collects and provides us with your email address, display name (if set), session tokens and device identifiers, and login timestamps and IP addresses.

3.2 Private workspace data (user-provided)

Data you enter or upload into your private workspace, including company notes and ratings, pipeline statuses, contact records, uploaded documents (CIMs, tax returns, financial statements), and financial figures you record.

3.3 Payment data — none collected

The Service is free of charge and we collect no new payment data. There is no subscription and no trial, no payment card is requested at any stage, and card numbers have never reached our servers.

Historically, people who reserved a founding-member place completed a card verification through Stripe, Inc. That flow is retired: we send Stripe nothing, and no charge was ever made to anyone. Where a reservation was made, four payment-derived fields remain alongside that waitlist entry — Stripe's customer identifier, a verification timestamp, a card fingerprint, and the founding-member rank. The corresponding objects may still exist in our Stripe account, so Stripe remains a processor of that residual data; see Subprocessors.

We keep these for one purpose: to honour and evidence the founding-member commitment made to those people. We review this retention at least annually and delete what is no longer needed. You may ask us to delete your reservation record at any time at privacy@solosearcher.com; we remove our copy and the corresponding Stripe objects together.

3.4 AI interaction data

When you run AI analysis inside the Service, the relevant company data and prompts are transmitted to Anthropic's Claude API. Every AI invocation is logged with timestamp, model, token counts, and cost — for cost tracking and auditability, not marketing or profiling.

If you connect your own AI agent to the Service (Section 6), we log each tool invocation your agent makes. That log records which tool was called, when, whether it succeeded, and a restricted set of request parameters — never the content of your notes, documents, or financial values (numeric financial parameters are recorded only as coarse bands). The one exception is the report_gap tool, whose free-text summary is, by its stated purpose, shared with the operator.

3.5 Usage, diagnostics, and security data

• Vercel (hosting) logs request metadata (URL, status code, IP, user agent) as part of normal operations.
• Sentry (error monitoring) receives error reports; our Sentry integration is configured to redact private content from error payloads before transmission.
• Upstash (rate limiting) stores request counters keyed by account or network identifiers — counters only, no content.
• We maintain an append-only audit log of security-relevant actions (logins, key lifecycle events, deletions, corrections, agent tool calls). Audit metadata passes through an allowlist-based redaction layer so that free-text and financial values are excluded by construction.

4. How We Use Your Information

We do not use your private workspace data for training AI models, marketing to third parties, or sale to data brokers. The datasets we sell separately are built from public records, never from any user's workspace.

5. How Your Data Is Protected — Stated Truthfully

We describe our security model in terms of what is actually implemented and verified, not aspiration:

• Layered isolation. Access to your private data is enforced by application-level access control and, beneath it, database row-level security: the database role the application reads and writes with can only see and modify rows belonging to the requesting account. These layers are verified by automated isolation tests that run on every change to the codebase.
• Per-user encryption at rest. Sensitive private content (documents and extracted financial data) is encrypted with a per-user data encryption key (DEK). When your account is deleted, your DEK is destroyed ("crypto-shred"), rendering the encrypted content unrecoverable, in addition to row deletion and file purging.
• Encryption in transit. All connections use TLS.
• What we do not claim. This is not end-to-end encryption and not a zero-knowledge system. The Service must process your data to operate (for example, to run extractions and searches you request), and the operator retains the technical ability to access data for service operation. Our operating stance on that access is described in Section 9.

6. Your AI Agent's Access

SoloSearcher is designed to be used by AI agents you connect (via API keys or OAuth you authorize):

• Your agent acts as you: it can see only your own workspace — exactly the boundary you have, and never another user's data.
• Keys carry explicit capability grants (read, or read + write) and expire by default; you can revoke them at any time.
• Agent tool invocations are logged as described in Section 3.4 for cost control and security auditing.
• Your agent's conversations with you happen inside your AI provider and are not visible to us; we see only the tool calls that reach our API.

7. Estimated Financials — Disclaimer

The Service derives modeled estimates (for example, estimated revenue, payroll, and seller discretionary earnings) from the records in your workspace and public industry statistics. These are:

• Labeled as estimates wherever they appear, with a stated confidence level;
• Accompanied by a methodology explainer describing how they are derived;
• Not financial statements, appraisals, valuations, or investment advice; and
• Provided without warranty of accuracy. Verify independently before relying on any figure in a transaction.

8. Information About Business Owners and Other Third Parties

This section is for people who are not our users — business owners, brokers, and other contacts who appear in a user's workspace.

Company records describe businesses, and many derive from public records: principally U.S. Small Business Administration PPP loan data released under the Freedom of Information Act, together with U.S. Census Bureau statistics and business-registry data. Where such a record names an individual in a business capacity — a business owner named in a public loan record, for example — we hold that information so a user can identify, evaluate, and approach a business about a possible acquisition. Users may also add business contacts of their own.

Whose record it is. Every company record sits inside one user's private workspace. That user decides what it holds and how long to keep it, and we hold it on their behalf — much as any customer-relationship tool holds the records its user keeps about the businesses they deal with. We do not edit or delete one user's workspace records because someone else asked us to. A record goes when that user deletes it, or when their account is deleted and their data is purged (Section 12).

Contacting us. If you are named in a record, you can write to privacy@solosearcher.com. We read what we receive, and we will review a claim that a fact is inaccurate against its source and applicable law. We do not promise a particular outcome, and for the reason above we do not delete another person's workspace records on request.

9. Operator Access Stance

Day-to-day operator monitoring is metadata-only: aggregate usage, cost roll-ups, error rates, audit events, and the redacted invocation logs described above. The operator does not browse users' private content. The only operator actions that touch private content are the ones you request — a data export or an account deletion — and both are recorded in the audit log.

10. Subprocessors

A full list with data-flow details is maintained at /legal/subprocessors.

11. Your Rights

The rights in this table are your rights over your own account and workspace. If you are not a user but appear in someone else's workspace, Section 8 explains what we do and how to reach us.

California (CCPA/CPRA): we do not sell or share personal information, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising a right. We respond to rights requests within 30 days.

12. Data Retention

13. Cookies

The Service sets Clerk's authentication cookies (required to sign in) and no advertising or third-party tracking cookies.

14. Children's Privacy

The Service is not directed to children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their personal information.

15. Where Data Is Processed

Our servers and subprocessors are located in the United States, with one exception: if the U.S. Census geocoder cannot resolve a business address, we fall back to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service, which is operated in the EU and receives only that business address. Everything else stays in the United States.

16. Governing Law

This policy is governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States. United States federal and state privacy laws apply to the extent they require.

17. Changes to This Policy

We will notify you of material changes by updating the "Last Updated" date and, where required, by email or in-app notice.

18. Contact

Privacy inquiries: Ficombinator LLC — privacy@solosearcher.com

Version: v3 · Last updated: 2026-08-13 — the Service is free of charge; payment-data collection and Stripe removed. Supersedes v2 (2026-08-05).