Privacy Policy
Effective date: September 4, 2026 · Replaces the version dated September 2, 2026
The short version. We do not sell your data, share it for advertising, or train AI models on it. Phone numbers and SMS consent are never shared with anyone except the carriers needed to deliver a message. Repair shops own the customer records they enter; we hold them on the shop's behalf. Everything is stored in the United States. We name every company that touches the data below. This box is a plain-English summary — the sections below are the policy.
BayDocket ("we", "us", "our") is a product of Black Cat Software LLC, a Florida limited liability company. This policy describes what information we collect through the baydocket.com website, the BayDocket application, and the public demo, how we use it, and the choices you have. It is part of, and should be read with, our Terms of Service.
1. Our two roles
We handle two different kinds of information, under two different responsibilities, and it matters which one applies to you.
- Information we control. Repair shop account and billing information, and marketing-website usage. For this we decide the purposes and means, and this policy governs.
- Information a shop controls. The business records a repair shop enters — its customers, vehicles, repair orders, inspection photographs, invoices, and message history. The shop decides what to collect and why; we process it only on that shop's instructions, as its service provider. If you are a vehicle owner asking about your own information, see Section 10 — start with the shop.
2. Information we collect
Setup reminder emails. If you enter your email address to start setting up a shop and don't finish, we send up to two reminders — one a few hours later and one after three days — and then stop. Each reminder carries an unsubscribe link. Using it adds your address to a permanent suppression list to prevent further setup emails and signup requests. We use the address to deliver these emails through our messaging provider; we do not sell it. No account is created unless you finish signing up.
- Shop accounts: name, work email, role, and password (stored only as a salted Argon2 hash — never in readable form), plus staff invitations and sign-in activity.
- Billing: your subscription status and the billing contact details needed to invoice it. Card details are entered on Stripe's hosted checkout and held by Stripe — BayDocket never sees or stores a card number.
- BayDocket application: account information for repair shop staff (name, email, role) and business records shops enter about their own operations, including their customers' names, phone numbers, email addresses, vehicles, and repair orders. Shops control that data; we process it on their behalf. This also includes vehicle photographs and technician annotations captured during inspections, scheduling records, parts and purchase-order records, invoice and payment records, and the two-way text-message history between a shop and its customers.
- Public booking requests: when a visitor submits a request through a shop's public booking page we record the name, phone number, vehicle, and description of the concern they entered, together with the time of the request. The request is held for that shop alone until a member of its staff accepts or dismisses it; on acceptance the details are linked to a customer record inside that shop's account, which the shop then controls. We send no text message to a booking requester.
- Assistant conversations: what you type to the in-app assistant, the records it read or changed in response, and our provider's reply, stored in your shop's account as a record of what was done on its behalf.
- Text messages: the phone numbers involved, message content, timestamps, delivery status returned by the carrier, and opt-out (STOP) status.
- Technical and security data: IP address, browser and device type, and request logs, retained for a limited period to operate the service, rate-limit abuse, and investigate incidents. Approval, payment, invitation, password-reset, and signup links are redacted from our logs so a credential in a URL is never written down.
- Diagnostics: when the server encounters an unexpected error we send a technical report — the error, the code path, and identifiers such as a shop or record ID — to our error-monitoring provider so it can be fixed. These reports are not designed to carry customer records.
- Support: whatever you choose to put in an email to us.
- This marketing website: aggregate usage statistics — pages viewed, referring site, approximate region, browser and device type — collected through Google Analytics, which sets a first-party cookie in your browser to distinguish one visit from another. It runs on baydocket.com only. The BayDocket application uses first-party funnel events to measure signup and billing steps, with an anonymous browser identifier stored locally. These events contain no name, email address, IP address or user agent and are sent only to our service. The application carries no advertising trackers.
We do not ask for, and ask that you not enter, government identification numbers, health information, or payment card numbers in free-text fields.
3. How we use information
- To operate the BayDocket service — including sending the estimate-approval, service-update, and invoice payment-link text messages that repair shops initiate to their customers, and holding a public booking request for the shop it was sent to until that shop accepts or dismisses it. We send no text message to someone who submits a booking request.
- To create, bill, and support your BayDocket subscription.
- To secure, maintain, and improve the service — authentication, tenant isolation, abuse and fraud prevention, debugging, and capacity planning.
- To communicate with you about your account, security, billing, and material changes to the service or these policies.
- To comply with law and to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims — including retaining text-message consent and opt-out records.
What we never do: we do not sell personal information; we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising; we do not use shop records to train, fine-tune, or evaluate machine-learning models; and we run no advertising trackers inside the application.
4. Phone numbers and SMS consent
Phone numbers and SMS opt-in consent are never shared with or sold to third parties for marketing purposes. Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent are not shared with any third parties, excluding the messaging carriers and providers required to deliver the messages. Customers can opt out of text messages at any time by replying STOP.
Opt-out is honoured automatically and immediately for that shop, and the opt-out record is retained even if other data is deleted — we have to keep it in order to keep honouring it. Consent itself is obtained by the repair shop, not by us; see Section 7 of the Terms.
5. Who we share information with
We do not sell personal data. We share it only with the infrastructure providers required to run the service — hosting, database, object storage, and messaging delivery — each bound to process it solely on our instructions. As of the effective date above, those providers are:
- Render — application hosting (United States).
- Neon — the PostgreSQL database (United States).
- Cloudflare — object storage for inspection photographs and encrypted database backups, plus network delivery of the website.
- Twilio — text-message delivery and transactional email (sign-in links, password resets, staff invitations, signup confirmations).
- Stripe — subscription billing, and card payments taken by shops through their own connected Stripe accounts.
- Square — only for a shop that chooses to connect its Square account, and only to read completed payments for reconciliation.
- Intuit (QuickBooks Online) — only for a shop that chooses to connect its QuickBooks company, and only to send that shop’s own records one way into its books: customer names and contact details, finalized invoices, and recorded payments. BayDocket never reads a shop’s QuickBooks data back into customer records.
- Anthropic — AI processing for the in-app assistant; shop data sent for processing is not used to train models.
- Sentry — error and performance diagnostics.
- Google Analytics — usage statistics for the baydocket.com marketing website only.
- Ahrefs — cookieless, aggregate usage statistics for the baydocket.com marketing website only.
- OpenAI — measurement of advertising we run on ChatGPT, on the baydocket.com marketing website only: when you arrive from one of our ads and start a signup or open the demo, a conversion event tied to that ad click is reported back to OpenAI. No shop or customer data from the application is ever sent.
Vehicle Identification Number lookups are answered by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's public vPIC database. Only the VIN is sent; no personal information is included.
Website usage statistics are processed by Google Analytics on our behalf. We do not enable Google Signals, advertising features, or cross-site ad personalization, and we do not upload customer or shop data to it. See how Google uses data from sites that use its services. To opt out entirely, use Google's browser opt-out add-on or your browser's do-not-track and cookie controls.
Payments are handled by Stripe. Stripe processes payment data both on our instructions and, for fraud prevention, regulatory compliance, and operating its own services, as an independent controller in its own right. See Stripe's privacy policy.
We may also disclose information when required by law, subpoena, or valid legal process, or where necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of BayDocket, our customers, or the public — and, if we are ever involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, to the successor, which remains bound by this policy or gives notice before changing it. If we add or replace a provider in the list above we will update this page.
6. How we protect information
- In transit: HTTPS/TLS everywhere, with secure, HTTP-only session cookies.
- At rest: our database, storage, and backup providers encrypt stored data.
- Passwords are stored only as salted Argon2 hashes. Session tokens and every emailed or texted link credential — approval, payment, invitation, password-reset, and signup links — are stored only as one-way hashes, so a copy of our database does not yield a usable link. The text of an outbound message a shop sends is a different thing from that hash: it is kept in the shop's own message thread for as long as the shop's records are kept, so an approval or payment link inside it stays readable there — the link itself stops working at the end of its validity window — and it is hidden from staff who are not the shop's Owner or an Advisor.
- Tenant isolation is enforced in the database itself, not only in application code: every shop's rows are protected by PostgreSQL row-level security under a least-privilege database role, so one shop cannot read another's data even if application code were wrong.
- Least privilege: role-based access inside the application, separate database roles for the application and for authentication, and payment-processor tokens stored where they cannot be read back.
- Backups: nightly encrypted database backups, with restores rehearsed.
No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee the security of information transmitted over the internet. If we become aware of a breach affecting your information we will notify affected shops without undue delay, and regulators and individuals where the law requires, with what we know and what we are doing about it.
7. Data retention and deletion
Application data is retained while your shop's subscription is active. If you cancel, your shop becomes read-only and your records are preserved rather than deleted, so you can still read and print them and can resubscribe later without losing anything. Contact us to request deletion.
More precisely:
- Deletion on request: on a verified request from a shop Owner we will delete or return the shop's records within a reasonable time, and in any event within 30 days.
- Backups: copies may persist in encrypted backups for a limited period after deletion before expiring on their normal cycle. They are not returned to active use.
- Opt-out records: text-message opt-out records are kept indefinitely so we can keep honouring them.
- Billing records: invoices and payment records are kept as long as tax and accounting law requires.
- Assistant conversations: kept for the life of the shop's account, so the shop can see what was asked and what was changed on its behalf, and deleted with the rest of the shop's records on a verified deletion request.
- Logs and diagnostics: kept for a limited period, then discarded.
- The public demo: demo shops and everything in them are deleted automatically, typically within a few hours. Do not enter real information there. When a demo shop is deleted we keep an archived copy of its assistant conversations, separated from the deleted shop, to diagnose failures and abuse of the public demo; those archived transcripts are retained for up to 90 days. A demo shop is not a customer account, so what is typed into it is not the Shop Data that Section 5 of the Terms governs — which is why this archive is disclosed separately here. Diagnosis and abuse investigation are the only things we do with it: like Shop Data, and for the avoidance of doubt, demo conversations are never used to train, fine-tune, or evaluate a model. Do not put real customer information into the demo.
8. Cookies and tracking
- In the application: one strictly-necessary session cookie (
__Host-crm_session), which keeps you signed in. It is HTTP-only, secure, and cannot be read by scripts. There are no analytics or advertising cookies in the application. - On this marketing website: Google Analytics first-party cookies, used to count visits and referrers; a first-party cookie set by OpenAI's measurement pixel when you arrive from one of our ChatGPT ads, used only to attribute signups and demo visits to those ads; and Ahrefs Analytics, which sets no cookie at all.
- Do Not Track / Global Privacy Control: we do not sell personal information and use no cross-site advertising trackers; the only ad-related cookie is the first-party ad-measurement cookie above, for ads we ourselves ran. To stop analytics or ad-measurement collection on the website, use the Google opt-out add-on linked above or your browser's cookie controls.
9. Your privacy rights
Whether or not a given privacy law applies to us, we extend the following rights to everyone whose information we control:
- Know and access — what we hold about you, where it came from, and who we shared it with.
- Correct — fix information that is wrong.
- Delete — we will delete what we hold about you, or remove your contact details from records we are required to keep, subject to the retention exceptions in Section 7.
- Portability — receive a machine-readable copy.
- Opt out of sale or sharing — we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we have not done so in the preceding twelve months, so there is nothing to opt out of.
- Non-discrimination — exercising any of these rights will never cost you service or price.
- Authorized agent — you may use an agent, with proof of authorization.
To exercise a right, email org@baydocket.com from the address on the account, or with enough detail for us to verify you. We will respond within 45 days and will tell you if we need longer. We may decline a request we cannot verify, and we will say why. If you disagree with our decision you may reply to appeal it and a human will review the outcome.
10. If you are a repair shop's customer
If a shop entered your details, that shop decides what to keep and why. Start with the shop — it can correct your record, change your contact preferences, or remove your contact details. You can also email org@baydocket.com; we will forward the request to the shop and help it act, but we will not unilaterally alter a shop's business records unless the law requires it. Removing your contact details does not erase the invoices, payments, and text-message opt-out records a shop has to keep — the opt-out record in particular has to survive, because it is what keeps the messages stopped. To stop text messages immediately, reply STOP to any message.
11. Children
BayDocket is a business tool and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child's information reached us, email us and we will delete it.
12. Where your information is stored
BayDocket is operated in the United States, and information is stored and processed there. If you access the service from elsewhere, you understand your information is transferred to the United States, whose data-protection laws may differ from those of your country.
13. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version. For material changes we will give notice through the service or by email to the address on your account before they take effect.
14. Contact
Black Cat Software LLC · org@baydocket.com
See also the Terms of Service.