Privacy policy

What we collect

• Contact details: your name, email address and phone number.
• Business details: what you tell us about your business and your site, and the files you send (photos, logos, menus).
• Conversations: chat transcripts and emails with us.
• Orders and payments: quotes, invoices and payment status. Card details are handled by Stripe and never reach us.
• Technical data: the minimum our servers log to run and protect the site, such as IP addresses for rate limiting and security.
• Website usage: which of our pages are visited, where visitors came from, and which buttons and links are used, as described under Cookies below. Never what you type.

Chats are recorded

Our chat may be answered by an automated assistant; every conversation is recorded, including what you type and the replies. We use transcripts to carry on your order, to check our work, and to improve our service. People on our team can read them.

How we use it

• to build, change, launch and host your site, and to answer you;
• to confirm it's really you (we email you a link);
• to bill you and keep financial records;
• to keep our service safe from abuse;
• to understand how people find and use our website, so we can improve it.

Who processes it for us

We share data only with the companies that help us run the service, under contracts that limit what they can do with it:

• Amazon Web Services: hosting, storage and email;
• Anthropic, PBC: the AI models behind our assistant and the drafting of sites;
• Stripe: payments and invoices;
• Namecheap: registering domains in your name (your registrant details);
• PostHog, Inc. (United States): website analytics. It receives pseudonymous usage events (pages visited, buttons used) and, once you have an order, its reference number, never your name, email address, messages or the contents of your brief.
• Google LLC (United States): measuring our Google ads. It learns whether a visit that began with one of our ads led to a request or a purchase, with that order's or payment's reference number and the amount paid, never your name, email address, messages or the contents of your brief.

We don't sell your data. We don't use it to show you ads or to build advertising profiles: we only measure whether our own ads lead to requests and purchases.

How long we keep it

• Emails, files and chat transcripts: for 2 years after your order closes, then deleted.
• Invoices and payment records: for 7 years, for tax.
• Your published site: for as long as you have a care plan, and to the end of the period you paid for.

Your choices and rights

You can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by emailing hello@ciderwebsites.com. We honour deletion requests except where we must keep records by law (such as invoices) or for an open legal matter. Marketing email is separate and optional; every marketing email has an unsubscribe link.

Cookies

We use:

• one cookie when you use the chat, to keep your conversation going across pages (strictly necessary);
• one cookie, ag_consent, that remembers your cookie choice for 180 days (strictly necessary);
• one cookie, ag_vertical, set when you come straight to one of our pages for a kind of business (such as Cider for Restaurants) from a search, an ad or a typed address, so our home page opens that page for you next time; it holds only which page, for a year, and going to ciderwebsites.com/general clears it;
• PostHog's analytics cookie, which lets us count visits and see how our website is used. Where the law asks us to, we ask first: until you choose, nothing is counted, and if you say no, we count visits without any cookie. Elsewhere we use it unless you say no, and then we stop counting your visits.
• Google Ads' conversion cookie, which tells us whether a visit that began with one of our Google ads led to a request or a purchase. It follows the same choice as the analytics cookie, and we don't use it for remarketing or advertising profiles.

These cookies are set only for this website, never shared with other websites, and we don't use them to follow you elsewhere or to show you ads. You can change your choice at any time with Cookie settings at the bottom of every page. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, we don't run analytics or ads measurement at all.

Contact

Questions about privacy: hello@ciderwebsites.com.