SmartCostSeg LLC, a Rhode Island limited liability company, operates SmartCostSeg.com and decides how the personal information described in this policy is collected and used, which makes it the controller of that information. You can reach us about anything in this policy at team@smartcostseg.com.
1. What we collect
Account data: your name, email address, phone, company, and role. Property data: the property details you enter in the wizard (address, purchase price and dates, land value, square footage, type, and related inputs). Documents: the files you upload, meaning closing or settlement statements, inspection or valuation reports, and property photographs. Settlement documents commonly contain sensitive identifiers such as Social Security numbers and loan numbers; treat this whole section as being about them. Usage data: authentication session cookies and basic logs needed to run and secure the Service.
If you join the agent waiting list, we collect the details you give us and any resume or files you upload, and use them only to review your sign up and to contact you about the program.
2. How documents are protected
Uploaded documents are stored in private Supabase Storage buckets, encrypted at rest. Nothing you upload is publicly accessible: files are served only through short-lived signed URLs, and row-level security scopes every file to your account and to the staff preparing your study. We never place personal data in URLs. Card payments are handled by Stripe, our payment processor, on its own checkout page; we never see or store your full card number.
3. How we use your information
To prepare your Cost Segregation Study, operate your dashboard and Library, communicate about your project (status updates you can toggle in Settings), and meet legal obligations. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share your documents with anyone except the service providers that host the platform (such as our database and storage provider) and the staff preparing your study.
4. How we use AI
We collect user data as described above: your account details, property information, and the documents you upload. Some of it passes through automated tools on the way to your finished study. The site includes an AI assistant: questions you type into the chat are processed by a third-party AI provider to generate answers, so please do not paste sensitive identifiers (Social Security numbers, loan numbers, account numbers) into the chat. Document text extraction and automated classification assist the preparation of your study. Uploaded images are screened automatically for authenticity (provenance). A human reviews every study before it is delivered.
Messages you send us are reviewed with the help of AI. Inbound emails, contact form inquiries, Spiky chat transcripts and interview transcripts may be processed by a third party AI provider to grade each message and to draft a reply. A person on our team sends every reply, unless we have switched on autopilot for routine answers, in which case a routine reply may be sent automatically from the address you wrote to. Interview transcripts are mirrored into the same review store our team uses for correspondence. Spiky conversations are anonymous, are kept only under a random id created by your browser, and are stored for 7 days.
5. Electronic signatures
When you accept an agreement or consent to electronic records, we record the time, the version hash of the exact text you accepted and your browser user agent. For the Smart Cost Segregation Agreement on a study, and for an agent application, we also record your IP address. For the account agreement and the electronic records consent at sign up, and when you accept an updated account agreement, an updated agent agreement or the electronic records consent on your dashboard or Overview page, we record a one way hash of your IP address instead of the address itself. These are the records of your electronic signature, and they are retained with the executed agreement.
6. Retention
Executed agreements, completed studies, invoices and the records supporting them are kept for as long as your account exists, so you and your CPA can return to them at tax time. When you delete your account they are deleted with it, as our Terms describe, so download your study and keep it with your tax records before you do. When you mark a study as used, the files you uploaded for it are scheduled to be deleted 30 days later (files another study on the same property still uses wait until that study is marked as used too), and the final deliverables stay in your Library. Other account data is kept while your account is active. Correspondence with our team, meaning inbound emails, contact form inquiries, chat and interview transcripts and any attachments, is retained for up to 1095 days (about 3 years) and then deleted; anonymous Spiky conversations are deleted after 7 days.
7. Your rights, including deletion
You can view and edit every profile field, change your email or password, and permanently delete your account from Settings at any time. Uploaded documents can be deleted individually from your dashboard, and account deletion removes your files from storage along with your profile, properties, studies, and deliverables. Executed agreements and records we are legally required to keep may be retained for the balance of the retention period described above, then deleted. You can also email us to request a copy of your data or ask questions about any of this. Section 12 sets out the privacy rights we extend to every user, wherever you live.
8. Cookies and browser storage
We use authentication session cookies to keep you signed in, and a few other strictly necessary cookies: one that limits ratings to one a minute, one that holds a document upload started before you create an account, and ones that keep an agent’s or staff member’s access code verified or show a new access code once. Your browser’s own storage keeps your wizard answers on this device until you submit, holds the random id of a Spiky chat for the current tab, and remembers which Spiky invitations the current tab has already shown. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies. The site counts page views and measures page speed without cookies and without identifying visitors.
9. Do Not Track
We do not track you across other websites, and no third party collects information about your browsing on our site for that purpose, so the site works the same whether or not your browser sends a Do Not Track signal.
10. Children
The Service is for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18; if you believe a minor has given us information, email us and we will delete it.
11. Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle your data, for example when online payment launches, we will update this policy and flag material changes in the app before they take effect.
12. Your state privacy rights
Some states give their residents rights over the personal information a business holds about them. We extend the rights below to every user, wherever you live.
- To know: you may ask what personal information we hold about you, where it came from, why we use it, and the kinds of service providers we share it with.
- To correct: you may ask us to correct personal information that is inaccurate.
- To delete: you may ask us to delete the personal information we hold about you, apart from records we are required to keep, which are deleted when that period ends (section 6).
- To obtain a copy: you may ask for a copy of your personal information in a common, readable format you can take elsewhere.
How to ask: email team@smartcostseg.com from the address on your account and say which right you are using. Someone you authorize may ask for you if they send your written permission. We may ask you to confirm your identity before we act. We answer within 45 days of receiving your request, or sooner where the law that applies to you requires it. If we decline a request, we tell you why, and you may ask us to reconsider by replying.
No sale of personal information: we do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising on other businesses’ websites or apps.
Sensitive information: settlement statements and other documents you upload can contain sensitive personal information, such as Social Security numbers, bank and loan account numbers and other government identifiers. We use that information only to prepare your study and to keep the records described in this policy.
13. Contact
SmartCostSeg LLC. Privacy questions or requests: team@smartcostseg.com.