Privacy Policy

1. What this covers

This policy describes what FDD Evaluation collects when you use https://fddevaluation.com, what it is used for, who else handles it, how long it is kept, and how to have it deleted. It applies to the free QuickScore, the Full FDD Evaluation, FDD Compare, and the pages around them.

The short version: we collect your document, your email address, and a few answers you give at checkout. We use them to produce your report and to send it to you. We never sell or share your address, never share your document with a franchisor, and never market a franchise to you.

2. What we collect

We collect only what the service needs to do its work.

• The Franchise Disclosure Document you upload, as a PDF.
• Your email address, which you give to receive your report or which Stripe passes to us when you purchase.
• At checkout for a paid evaluation: the ZIP code you are considering, and your answers to three optional questions about planned investment, your operating role and your growth plans.
• Payment details are collected by Stripe, not by us. We receive the amount paid, the currency, a reference to the Stripe session, and the email address on the payment. We never see or store your card number.
• When you sign in, a session cookie that keeps you signed in. We set no advertising or analytics cookies.
• Ordinary server logs, including your IP address and browser type, held by our hosting provider for operating and securing the service.

3. How we use it

• Your document is read by software to produce your report. No person reads it to produce your score.
• Your email address is used to send your report, your sign-in link, and a notice when a paid evaluation is ready. We also send occasional email about the product and about reading an FDD well. Every such email carries a one-click unsubscribe, which we honour immediately. Unsubscribing never affects your reports.
• Your ZIP code is used to grade the market factors of a paid evaluation against public census data for that area. The three optional checkout answers are stored for future features and do not affect any grade.
• The sentence shown beside the email field when you gave your address is recorded with it, along with the time, so that what you agreed to is a matter of record rather than memory.

4. Who else handles your data

We use a small number of service providers to run the site. Each receives only what its job requires, and none may use your data for its own purposes.

• Supabase: the database and encrypted file storage that hold your document, your evaluation and your email address, and the sign-in service.
• Netlify: hosts the site and runs the software that reads your document.
• Stripe: processes payments. Stripe collects your card details under its own privacy policy and sends you the receipt.
• Resend: delivers the emails we send you.
• Anthropic: when our own reader cannot interpret the financial performance table in Item 19 of your document, the text of that Item alone is sent to Anthropic’s API to extract the figures it prints, under commercial terms that do not permit Anthropic to train on it. The rest of your document is never sent. Every figure returned must appear verbatim in your document, and the model never grades.
• United States Census Bureau: the ZIP code you give at checkout is used to look up public population and income figures through the Census Bureau’s API. Nothing else is sent.
• Google Fonts: the site loads its typefaces from Google, which means your browser requests them from Google’s servers and Google sees your IP address in the ordinary way a web request does.

5. What we never do

• We never sell, rent or share your email address.
• We never share your document, your report or the fact that you are evaluating a franchise with any franchisor, broker or anyone else.
• We never market a franchise to you. We are not affiliated with any franchisor and nobody pays us to put a brand in front of you.
• We never use your document to train an artificial intelligence model, and we do not permit our providers to.
• We never show advertising.

6. How long we keep it

Your evaluation, including your email address, your checkout answers, your score and the findings, is kept so that your report stays available at its link, until you ask us to delete it.

The Franchise Disclosure Document itself is retained after your evaluation. An FDD is the franchisor’s disclosure document rather than your personal information. Keeping it is what lets us compare next year’s edition of a franchise against this year’s, and retained documents are the material future benchmark releases are built from. A retained document is stored by its content, not under your name, and is never linked to you in any report.

Your email address stays on our mailing list until you unsubscribe or ask for your evaluation to be deleted. An unsubscribe is permanent until you tell us otherwise; uploading another document does not re-subscribe you.

Stripe keeps payment records for as long as its own obligations require. Server logs are kept for a short period by our hosting provider.

7. Deleting your data

To delete your evaluation, reply to any email we have sent you, or write to admin@fddevaluation.com, and ask. We remove your record entirely: your email address, your answers, your score and the findings, and we take your address off our mailing list outright rather than merely suppressing it.

The Franchise Disclosure Document is retained as described above. It is not your personal information and it is not linked to you.

8. Security

Your document travels over an encrypted connection into private, encrypted storage that accepts only PDFs. It is never public, never listed or indexed, and never shown to anyone else. Access to the systems that hold your data is limited to the people who operate the service.

9. Children

The service is for adults evaluating a business purchase. It is not directed at anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

10. Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. A change that reduces what we promise about your document or your address will not apply to data collected before it.

11. Contact

Questions about this policy or about your data go to admin@fddevaluation.com.