Privacy Policy

HomeCommand keeps a record of the equipment in your house — what it is, when it went in, what you've paid to keep it running — and reads the quotes contractors hand you. This page says exactly what leaves your phone, when, and what happens to it. It is written to match the code, not a template: if anything here ever stops being true, that's a bug, not fine print.

Your house record never leaves your phone. No account, no sign-in, no sync, no analytics, no advertising. Four things do leave, each only when you tap the button that does it: a photo of a nameplate, a photo or PDF of a quote, the text of that quote for a reading, and — if you choose to sign up — your email address. Two more are hand-offs to your own phone's services rather than to us: converting your location to an address, and searching for a contractor in your maps app.

Stored only on your device, in the app's own storage:

• Your equipment records — names, locations, manufacturers, model and serial numbers, capacities, dates, notes.
• Your service history — what was done, when, and what it cost.
• Your home address, if you enter one, and the photo of your house, if you add one.
• Every quote you've read, its text, and the reading that came back.
• A random install identifier the app makes for itself the first time it runs (more on that below). It is not an account and it is not tied to you.

We never receive any of this. There is no copy anywhere else, which cuts both ways: deleting the app deletes your records, and if you lose the phone they are gone. The app can write a backup file (Data & appearance → Back up) that you keep wherever you like; that file never passes through us.

The app's reading features run on Jaxter Labs' quote-reading service — the same engine behind our website readthenameplate.com. Everything below goes to that service over an encrypted connection.

1. A photo of an equipment nameplate

When you tap Scan the nameplate and take or choose a photo, the app shrinks it on the phone and sends it to the service, which passes it to Anthropic's Claude API to read the text on the tag — make, model, serial, dates, capacity. The result comes back to fill in the form.

• The photo is not stored. It is held in memory only for as long as the reading takes.
• Anthropic processes the image to perform the reading and, under its API terms, does not use it to train models. See Anthropic's privacy policy.
• Frame the tag, not the room. The app never touches your camera or photos except when you tap a button that says so.

2. A photo or PDF of a contractor's quote

When you upload a quote, the file goes to the service, which passes it to Anthropic's Claude API to transcribe what's on the page. The text comes back to your phone and is stored there with the quote. The file itself is not stored on the server.

3. The text of that quote, for the reading

The app then sends the transcribed text for a reading, along with the state and ZIP code from your saved address (never the street address) — the server keeps only the first three digits of the ZIP, which is as fine as any comparison gets; the full five are not stored — plus the equipment capacity if the app read it off a nameplate, and a description of the work. What comes back is the reading you see: what the document says, what it never mentions, where the price sits among real quotes for the same job, and the questions to ask.

This is the one place your choice matters. Above the upload buttons there is a checkbox, on by default: whether to add this quote to the shared comparison database that makes readings possible for the next person. If it is ticked, the text is redacted first — emails, phone numbers, street addresses, full ZIP codes and account-style numbers stripped automatically; names on a best-effort basis — and then kept as a structured, anonymous row: the job, the state, the equipment, the price. That row is kept indefinitely, is not tied to you, and may be included in aggregate data Jaxter Labs licenses. The full terms of that database — what it is used for and what it is never used for — are in the app's terms of service. If the box is unticked, nothing is kept — the reading is produced and the text is discarded. The app remembers your choice, so you say it once.

A reading costs real money to produce, so the app's readings are rate-limited per install and in total. That is what the install identifier is for: it is sent with these requests so the limit applies to one phone rather than to everyone sharing a carrier's address. It is a random string the app generated; it identifies an installation, not a person, and it is not used for anything else.

4. Your email address, only if you sign up

At the foot of a reading, and in Data & appearance, there is an optional signup for our email list about reading contractor quotes. If you enter an address, it goes to Buttondown, the service that runs the list, tagged as having come from the app. That is the only personal detail the app can ever send, and only because you typed it. Every email has an unsubscribe link.

Use my location. If you tap the location button when entering your address, the app asks the phone for your coordinates and asks the phone's own geocoder to turn them into a street address. On Android that geocoder is Google's, under Google's privacy policy. The address it returns is stored on your phone; the coordinates are not kept, and neither reaches us. You can always type the address instead.

Find a professional. The maintenance guides can search for a tradesperson near you. The app has no directory and does no searching: tapping the button opens Google Maps with a search made of the trade and the address you entered. From that tap onward you are in Google's app, under Google's policy. Nothing about that search comes back to us.

• No accounts, sign-in or profiles.
• No analytics, crash reporting, advertising or trackers. (Some library files named for Firebase ship inside the Android app because the notifications package depends on them; nothing is configured, nothing is sent.)
• No recording. The app's code contains a feature for recording a contractor conversation; it is switched off in this release, the button does not appear, and the Android build does not request microphone permission. If it is ever switched on, this page will say so first.
• No selling or sharing of personal information. The one thing shared is the redacted, anonymous quote row described above, and only when you leave the box ticked.
• No reading of your contacts, your other photos, your files or your browsing.

Every request the app makes passes through ordinary web hosting, which logs the connecting IP address for a short period for security and abuse prevention. The app's own limits are keyed on the install identifier, not the IP.

Service reminders, if you turn them on, are scheduled by your phone from dates you entered. They never touch a server and we cannot see them.

HomeCommand is not directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect anything from anyone under 13.

• Camera and photos — revoke in your phone's settings; only scanning, uploading and the house photo stop.
• Location — revoke, or simply never tap the button; typing the address works the same.
• The shared database — untick the box above the upload buttons. The app remembers.
• Your data — delete any record in the app, or delete the app and all of it goes with it. There is no server-side copy to ask us about. If you contributed a quote and have a specific concern, write to us; because rows are anonymous we generally cannot find which one was yours, but we will do what we reasonably can.

If what the app does changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. Meaningful changes are noted in the app's release notes.

Questions about this policy: [email protected]

HomeCommand is published by Jaxter Labs LLC. See also its terms of service.