Privacy policy

The short version is at the top. Everything below it is the detail, and every sentence describes something the site actually does today.

Effective: 2026-08-24  ·  Last updated: 2026-09-23

The short version

We are Pilebase LLC, a one person company in Colorado. We run pilebase.io, where you can find landscaping and outdoor materials at supply yards and nurseries near you, and order from them.

Here is the whole of it in eight lines.

• Browsing sets no cookie. If you make an account, one cookie keeps you signed in.
• We ask for your exact location, and we ask before your browser does. If you give it we keep it, on our own servers, until you delete it: one tap in the location bar, and no expiry date. If you say no, nothing stops working and we do not ask again. It makes distances true; it never sets a price. The detail, including what the delete cannot reach if you gave it without an account, is under "Your exact location" below.
• We run no analytics, no advertising pixels and no tracking scripts. Nothing on this site follows you anywhere else. The one script we would ever load from another company is Stripe's card field, on a payment page that is not switched on today, and the storage and cookies notice names it.
• What we do keep about BROWSING is a daily tally of how often a yard page, a material comparison, a search, a price question or an order happened, on Pilebase's own servers, with no identifier of any kind in it: no cookie, no address, no session, no account and no row about a person. It is a set of totals, not a record of you, and it is described under "How long we keep it" below. A quote you ASK FOR is kept as well, as its own record, and the next bullet says what is in it.
• When you get a quote, we save it: which yard, what you asked for, the price you were shown, and when. The yard you asked can see that you asked. If you are a contractor, the yard sees your name and your business name. If you sent a price request, the yard sees what you typed into it. We see the numbers, and a count of how many quotes there were. Nothing is sent to you or to anybody because of it.
• We have never sold anyone's personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We do not run advertising.
• When you order, the yard filling your order gets your first name, your phone number, and, on a delivery, the address the truck is going to.
• When you fill in the form that asks a yard a question, that form exists to pass your question and your contact details to that business. Read "The form that asks a yard a question" below. That form and the quotes above are the two places your details are meant to leave us, and both are written out in "Who else sees it".
• You can download everything we hold about you, and you can delete your account, from your account page. What deletion does and does not reach is written out below, in plain words, because the honest answer is not "everything".

What we collect, and why

When you browse. Our server keeps ordinary web request records. If you have told us where you are, your browser keeps its own copy of that: a five digit ZIP code, and the exact position too if you gave one, so a page knows where to draw from without waiting on us. Either is gone from that browser the moment you clear it from the location bar, and what the server holds is the next section.

Your exact location, if you give it. A ZIP puts you somewhere in a few square miles. A position puts you where you are, and every distance on this site gets truer: which yards are actually near you, how far each one is, where the map opens, which planting zone you are in. So we ask for it. We ask before your browser does. You will see what we are asking for and why, in plain words, and the browser's own permission box only appears if you say yes to ours. We never ask when a page loads, only when you do something the precision is for: a search, a map, a "near me". If you say no, we do not ask again, and nothing on this site stops working. You get the same pages measured from your ZIP instead, which is exactly what everyone got before September 2026.

If you do give it, we keep it, on our own servers, until you delete it. There is no expiry date, which is only an honest thing to say because the delete is real and it is one tap: "Delete my stored location", in the same location bar, removes it from our servers and not merely from your browser. We store the position itself: a latitude and a longitude to five decimal places, the accuracy figure your browser reported, and the time. Nothing else sits beside it. No trail, no history: there is one position, and a new one replaces it. We do not keep a record of where you have been.

This works whether or not you have an account, and that changes how the delete works. If you are signed in, it is attached to your account and deleting your account deletes it. If you are not, it is attached to a random code your browser makes at the moment you say yes, never before, so simply browsing this site still creates nothing. We store only a scrambled form of that code, so the only way to reach that record is to hold the code itself. We show it to you, next to your stored location, and you should keep it if you are not signed in: clearing it from that browser deletes it, and emailing us the code deletes it, and if you lose both there is nothing left that can find it. It names nobody and joins to nothing, but we cannot delete it on request, and we would rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise. This is the same seam as the price request described further down, and it is the reason we did not attach an email address to it, because that would make a record that names nobody into a record that names you.

Your position never sets a price. Not a delivery fee, not a minimum, not a total. Delivery charges come from the yard's own published terms and the address you type at checkout. When this site says a yard "probably delivers to you", that is a comparison against a radius the yard itself published, and it is a hint on a screen, never a number anyone is charged.

When you order. Your name, your phone number, your email address, what you ordered, and for a delivery the street address and the date you asked for. For a pickup, a short description of the vehicle you are driving, so the yard knows how to load it.

When you ask a yard for a price. What you need, how much, your ZIP, and either an email address or a phone number, so an answer can reach you. We keep a record of the request for each yard it went to. If you are signed in, that record is attached to your account.

When you get a contractor quote. If you are a verified contractor and use "Get a quote", we save a record for each yard that had a price for something on your list: the yard, the materials and amounts, the prices and totals that yard's published prices produced, the date, and the date the quote was good until. A yard that had no price for anything on your list is not recorded, and it is not told you searched. We never record a price our own server did not work out from the yard's published prices.

Whether a quote became an order. If you place an order with the same yard from the same account within 30 days of a quote, we mark that quote as having become that order. We only match on your account. We never match on a name or an email address, so a price request sent without signing in is never marked.

When you make an account. Your name, your email address, and a password. The password is stored only as a scrypt hash, which is a deliberately slow one way scrambling of it, so a stolen copy of our database does not hand anyone a usable password. Optionally a phone number, saved delivery addresses, the ZIP you want remembered, and your cart: which yards, which products and how much, and never a price.

When you leave a review. Your rating, your comment, and the name that was on the order. A person reads every review before it appears. What appears publicly is your first name and the initial of your surname.

When you apply to be a verified contractor. Your business name, your website and your state. An EIN if you choose to give one. A photograph of a resale certificate if you choose to upload one. We never ask for a licence number and we never ask for anything that could be a Social Security number, and if a form sends one anyway it is dropped rather than stored.

When you turn on notifications. A subscription record for that one browser: the address your browser gave us and two encryption keys. It carries no name, no email and no account. It knows only which order it may be notified about. Notifications go to buyers only, and only about the state of a delivery you are waiting for: never a promotion, and never a figure you are being charged. You can stop them from the notification itself.

When you use the microphone. Nothing is stored here. Your browser's own speech recogniser does the listening, which means your voice goes to your browser's maker, Google on Chrome and Apple on Safari, not to us. Browser built in is not the same thing as on your device, and we would rather say so.

When you send us a photo of a material. The photo is sent to Anthropic to identify what it is, and the answer comes back. We do not keep the photo.

Who else sees it

The yard filling your order. Your first name, your phone number, and on a delivery the address. Not your email address, not your account, not your other orders.

The yard you asked for a quote. A yard that has claimed its listing can see its own quotes on its Pilebase portal, and no other yard's. For a contractor quote, it sees your name, your business name, that you are a verified contractor, what you asked for, the totals its prices came to, when you asked, and whether you went on to order from it. For a price request, it sees what you asked for and the name, phone number and email address you typed into that request, because the request went to that yard for it to answer. It never sees contact details you gave a different yard.

Pilebase's own operations console receives counts only: how many quotes there were in a week or a month, how many became orders, and how many contractors got their first quote. It receives no name, email address, phone number or account.

If that yard runs our software, your order is placed into that yard's own system, and that system needs your full name, email address and phone number to send you its own receipts. From that point you are that yard's customer as well as ours, and the yard decides what it does with its own records. Ours are still covered by this policy.

Companies that do a job for us. They are named, so you can look them up.

• DigitalOcean, which runs the server.
• Backblaze, which stores the nightly backups.
• Resend, which delivers our email.
• Anthropic, which reads free text you type (a search, a project description), a photo you send, and, if you apply as a contractor, your website and any certificate you upload.
• Google, for a driving distance on some delivery quotes, which means the delivery address is sent.
• Stripe, if and when checkout is switched on. Card details go from your browser straight to Stripe. They never touch our server.

Not the yards, where your location is concerned. A yard filling your order gets the delivery address you typed, because a truck has to go somewhere. It never gets the position your browser gave us, and neither does any other business on this site.

Nobody else. No advertiser, no data broker, no analytics company.

The form that asks a yard a question

Most businesses on this site have not signed up with us. Some publish no prices. For those we offer a form: what you need, how much, when, and how to reach you. The whole purpose of that form is to pass what you wrote, and your name, phone number and email address, to that business, at an address that business published on its own website.

So a promise that we never share your details with anyone would be false, and we are not going to make it.

What is true today: that forwarding is switched off. Your request is saved so a person here can answer it, and nothing is emailed to the business. The form tells you which of those happened when you submit it, and it does not say "sent" unless something was sent. When we switch forwarding on, this paragraph changes and the date at the top of this page changes with it.

How long we keep it

• A tracking link for an order stops working after 180 days. For a quote, 90 days. For a review invitation, 60 days.
• Sign in sessions last 90 days.
• Verification, reset and email change links last hours, not days, and are stored only as hashes.
• Order records are kept as business records. After you delete your account they no longer carry your name, phone number or email address.
• Our record of email we sent you holds the message as it was rendered, with the personal links taken out of it. Your tracking link, your sign-in link and your review link work normally in the message that reached your inbox; the copy we keep has them stripped, so nobody who could read that file can open your order. The record is also capped deliberately low, and old entries are dropped as new ones arrive.
• Your exact location, if you gave it, is kept until you delete it. No expiry, and we are not going to invent one: a date we picked would be a promise about a record you cannot see, where "until you delete it" is a promise about a button you can. One position, replaced when it changes, never a list of them. Deleting it is one tap in the location bar; deleting your account deletes it too; and if you gave it without an account, the code we show you beside it is what deletes it later. It is on our own server, in the same database as everything else, and it is in the nightly backup described at the bottom of this list.
• Quote records are kept until you delete your account. A price request sent without signing in is not attached to any account, so no account deletion can reach it: it is deleted 12 months after it was sent, and the name, phone number and email address on it go with it.
• The security log, which records sign ins, password changes, address changes and account deletions, is kept without a time limit. It holds the IP address the action came from. It is how we would answer "was this account broken into" months later, and a log that forgets cannot answer it.
• The daily count files are kept indefinitely. They are a daily tally of how often a yard page, a material comparison, a search, a price question or an order happened, on Pilebase's own servers, with no identifier of any kind in it: no cookie, no address, no session, no account and no row about a person, so there is nothing in them to expire and nothing in them to give back to you or delete on request. One small file a day of integers.
• Backups are taken nightly. Copies on the server are kept 30 days. A copy is also sent to Backblaze. Backblaze encrypts what it stores; we do not add our own encryption before we send it, and we would rather tell you that than use the word "encrypted" and let you assume more than is true.

Getting a copy of your data

Sign in, go to your account page, and choose the download. You will be asked for your password again. You get a JSON file holding your profile (including the ZIP and the exact position we hold for you, if you gave one), your saved addresses, your cart, your orders, every quote you asked for while signed in (the yard, what you asked for, the prices you were shown and whether it became an order), and, if you applied as a contractor, your application including the EIN you gave us and every check we ran. It is built field by field so it can never contain another person's data.

Deleting your account

Sign in, go to your account page, choose delete, and type DELETE to confirm. You will be asked for your password again. Then, in one step:

• your name is removed, your email address is replaced with a dead placeholder, your phone number and your password are erased;
• your saved addresses, your cart, your notification subscriptions and any pending verification or reset are deleted outright;
• your stored location goes: both the exact position, if you gave one, and the ZIP. If you first gave a position as a guest and then signed in, that earlier copy was moved onto your account when you signed in, so it goes with the rest;
• your contractor application is deleted, and any certificate image you uploaded is removed from the disk;
• every sign in session ends, and every tracking link you were ever sent stops working;
• your name, phone number and email address are erased from your orders;
• every quote record attached to your account is deleted, and a price request you sent while signed in keeps its place in our books with your name, phone number and email address erased from it. If a quote became an order, the order keeps its own record of what was ordered and what it cost, as every order does.

What deletion does not reach, said plainly

1. Order records stay, without your name, phone number or email address. What was ordered, what it cost, what happened to it, and the delivery address the truck drove to all remain, because they are the record of a real transaction.
2. A review you left keeps the name it was submitted under. Publicly it shows a first name and an initial, which does not change. In our database the full name stays.
3. A question you sent a yard through the form above stays, with the contact details you put on it. Those messages are not attached to an account, so there is no way to find them from one.
4. A price request you sent without signing in is not reachable by any account deletion, because it belongs to no account. It is deleted 12 months after it was sent, with the contact details on it. One you sent while signed in is covered above: the record goes, and your details are erased from the request.
5. A location you gave as a guest, on a browser you no longer have, stays, unless you kept the code we showed you beside it. It is two numbers and a date, attached to nothing but that code, and without the code neither you nor we can point at it. Email us the code and it is gone the same day. This is the one record on this site we cannot delete on request alone, and we are naming it rather than letting you find out.
6. The security log stays, and the line recording that the account was deleted names the account's email address and name. That line exists so the deletion itself is accountable.
7. Email we already sent you stays in our sending record until it ages out, without the personal links, which are stripped out of that copy when it is written.

If you want any of the above removed as well, email us and ask. We will do it by hand. There is no button for it today, and we would rather show you the seam than paper over it.

Advertising

We do not run advertising. There is no advertising anywhere on this site: no paid placement, no sponsored listing, no ad network, no ad script, no ad pixel and no advertising cookie. Nobody can buy a position in any comparison, and nobody can buy space beside one.

If that ever changes, this section is what changes with it, and it will say plainly what runs and on which pages. It is written from a single record of whether advertising is switched on, so this page cannot say one thing while the site does another.

Your rights

We are one person and a small site, and we are honest about what that means legally.

The Colorado Privacy Act applies to a business that handles the data of at least 100,000 Colorado residents in a year, or 25,000 if it makes money selling personal data. We are far below both, and we sell nothing, so the Act does not apply to us today. Several other states have similar laws with similar thresholds. Two, Texas and Nebraska, have no threshold at all but exempt small businesses, which we plainly are.

So rather than list rights that do not attach, here is what we promise regardless of whether any law makes us:

• You can see everything we hold about you, through the download above or by asking.
• You can correct anything that is wrong. Email us.
• You can have your account deleted, with the limits set out above.
• We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.
• We do not build profiles of you and we do not make automated decisions that affect you, except the contractor check described above, which never rejects anyone automatically. It either approves or asks a person to look.

If a law does come to apply to us as we grow, this section changes and the date at the top of the page changes with it.

Children

This is a site for buying landscaping material. It is not aimed at children, and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 13. If you think we have, email us and it will be removed.

Security

Passwords are hashed with scrypt and checked against known breached password lists. Every session and every link token is stored as a hash, never in the clear. The database file is readable only by the account that runs the server. Sensitive actions, including the data download and account deletion, ask for your password again. Uploaded certificates are stored outside the code, with restricted permissions and a random filename, and are never written to any log.

If we ever suffer a breach that affects you, we will tell you. Colorado law gives a deadline for that and we intend to be inside it, but the reason we would tell you is that you would need to know.

Found a security problem? See our security page.

Changes

When this policy changes, the "last updated" date at the top changes with it. If a change means something materially different happens to your data, we will say so on the page rather than leave you to spot the difference.

23 September 2026. This one adds something, and it is the largest change this policy has made. Until today this page said, in these words: "We never store a coordinate, not even when your browser offers us one. If you use the 'near me' control, your position is read once, resolved to the nearest metro anchor, and dropped." That was true of the code. It is no longer. We now ask for your exact location and, if you give it, we store it and keep it until you delete it, including when you are not signed in. We ask you first, in our own words, before your browser's permission box; we never ask on page load; and one refusal is final. Nothing on the site became unavailable to anyone who says no.

What did not change, and we are stating it here rather than leaving you to check: we have still never sold anyone's personal information, we still do not share it for advertising, we still run no analytics, no advertising pixels and no tracking scripts, and no yard, no advertiser, no data broker and no analytics company receives your position. The reason we wanted it is that a ZIP makes every distance on this site wrong by a few miles, and we would rather show you the yards that are actually nearest you.

23 September 2026. We now save quotes. When you get a contractor quote or send a price request, we keep a record of it: which yard, what you asked for, the price you were shown, and when. The yard you asked can see it, as set out under "Who else sees it", and it is on your account page, in your data download, and deleted with your account. A price request sent without signing in is deleted after 12 months. This ADDS to what we hold, so it is written out here rather than left to the date at the top.

25 August 2026. Our record of email we sent you used to keep the message exactly as it was rendered, personal links and all, and this page said so. It no longer does: those links are stripped out of the stored copy when it is written. The link in the message that reached your inbox is unchanged and still works. This is the only change on this date and it takes something away from what we hold, rather than adding anything.

Contact

Email info@pilebase.io. It reaches a person.

All Pilebase legal and policy pages