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, or when you catch up on estimates you already sent. 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 never see your card. Payment is handled entirely by Stripe: the card form is theirs, on their page, and what comes back to us is a customer reference, a subscription reference and whether the last payment succeeded. Card numbers, expiry dates and security codes are never sent to our servers and are not stored in our database.

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 about a month, 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 this application writes one down in full: if one of those limits stops you, we also write a one-way fingerprint of your address to our own diagnostic log, which nobody can turn back into the address. Neither is the only place one exists: our host records every request that reaches the site — including simply opening a page — in their own log, described in section 9.

6. Who else touches it

Six 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 third-party fonts or scripts. This site loads nothing from anyone else’s server — the address suggestions described above included, because our server fetches those and passes them on. 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 six 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.

Thirty days, then they are deleted, and that is our hosting provider's setting rather than a promise we have engineered. There are two: the log this application writes, described above, and — separately — our host's own record of each request that reaches the site, which is one line holding the time, the page asked for, the browser string and the IP address it came from. The second is the visit itself being recorded at their network before it gets to us, not something we write. Nobody outside circlinback and that provider can read either, and neither is copied anywhere else.

10. How long we keep it

Plainly: two things are on a timer and the rest is not. Every night we delete the records of individual emails — what was sent, what came back, when — once they are two years old, and the IP addresses in section 5 go after about a month. Nothing else goes automatically: your estimates and your contacts are on no timer at all.

We would rather say that than describe a schedule we don’t run. The other half of automatic deletion — 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 and contacts are kept until someone deletes them by hand.
• The record of each individual email — the subject, the follow-up we sent, the text of any reply, and whether it was delivered — is deleted two years after it was written. The estimate it belonged to stays; the correspondence attached to it does not.
• Sign-in links expire after 15 minutes and stop working; the record of one may remain.
• Account closure is a button, as of 1 September 2026: deleting your account from your settings page removes it and everything in it — every estimate, every customer, and the record of every email sent or received — and we cannot undo it. We ask you to cancel your subscription first, so that we are not left billing a card for an account that no longer exists; while one is still running, ask us instead and we will do it by hand. Download your estimates as a spreadsheet first if you want to keep them; that download also keeps working after you cancel. Some records outlive the deletion — they are listed below. None holds your estimates, and the customer data in them is an email address and nothing else.

We answer within 30 days, and in practice much sooner than that. You never have to wait for a copy of your estimates: if you have an account, the spreadsheet download on your settings page is immediate. Deleting the account is a button on the same page once any subscription has been cancelled — we ask for that first so we are not left billing a card for an account that no longer exists. While a subscription is still running, ask us and we will do it by hand.

What survives a deletion

These are deliberate, and they are the reason a deletion can never be quite total. None of them holds your estimates or your customers.

• Your sign-in identity. Deleting a business does not delete the person. The email address you sign in with, and the record of sign-in links sent to it, stay — you can sign in afterwards and start again, and someone may hold an account with us for more than one reason. If you want that removed too, ask us and we will.
• Opt-out records. When someone unsubscribes or refuses in a reply, we write a permanent record holding their address and the fact they refused, and we keep it even if their contact record goes. Be clear about what it is: a record, not a block. What actually stops a further email is the mark on the contact, and that goes when the contact does — so if a business deletes its account and signs up again, this record will not by itself stop it emailing that person. We keep it because a record of a refusal is worth keeping.
• 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.
• The record of who looked. When one of us opens a business’s data from the internal admin screen, that access is logged, and the log outlives the business. A record of who read someone’s data that disappears when that data does answers the question for everybody except the cases worth asking about. It holds who looked and when, and none of what they saw.

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. If you have an account, there are two things you can do yourself from your settings page. Downloading a spreadsheet of your estimates is immediate and needs nobody: it covers your customers, your jobs, your amounts, how many follow-ups went out and when somebody replied, though it does not carry the text of those emails. Deleting the account is the second, once any subscription has been cancelled — section 10 sets out that condition and the two cases we still handle by hand. Everything else — the text of those emails, a correction, or anything asked by someone who is not an account holder — is done by hand, with no automated tooling behind the scenes. Tell us who you are so we can find the right records, and we will not ask for more identification than that needs. Section 10 says how long we take.

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. The email services in section 6 do not all run there: the mailbox behind our contact address is Swiss, and we have seen the servers that receive your customers’ replies answer from Ireland. Wherever you are, using circlinback means your information is handled in these places.

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.