Privacy Policy

Information we collect

From coaches

Mandatory: your name; the email address you register and log in with; your coaching category selections; your minimum hourly rate.

Optional, where you choose to provide them: mobile number; date of birth (used only to show an age band - your exact date of birth is never shown publicly); gender and coaching preferences; profile photo and gallery images; your biography and coaching-approach narrative; qualification/certificate details and files; languages; availability; your location (via What3Words) and map coordinates; travel radius; website and social links.

Generated/derived by us: your Founder Coach status and join date; your profile-completeness and quality-review results; a record of which profile sections were AI-assisted (see "AI features" below).

Billing records: your chosen plan, Introduction Credit and Notification Wallet transaction history, and (once real subscriptions begin) your Stripe billing identifiers.

Security logs: your IP address and verification data collected at signup, used to confirm your account is genuine.

From clients

Mandatory: your name; email address; the coaching category and core details of what you're looking for.

Optional, where you choose to provide them: phone number; further details about your situation, goals, challenges and preferences; your budget; your meeting location (via What3Words) and map coordinates, if you want in-person coaching; details of any coach you choose to contact and the message you send them.

Security data: your IP address, collected to help confirm your request is genuine.

A note on sensitive information: the free-text fields on our client request form (such as "current situation" and "goals") sometimes contain health, neurodiversity or other sensitive ("special category") information, because people naturally explain why they want a particular kind of coach. We only ask you to share what's relevant to being matched well, and we ask for your explicit consent to this specific processing before you can submit a request - see "Special-category information" below.

Purposes and lawful bases

Special-category information

Because our client request form's free-text fields may contain health, neurodiversity or other special-category information, we rely on your explicit consent (UK GDPR Article 9(2)(a)) for this specific processing, in addition to our other lawful bases for the rest of your request. Before you can submit a request, you must tick a clear, separate checkbox confirming this consent - it is never pre-ticked, and it is not bundled with any other agreement. We record the exact wording you agreed to, the Privacy Policy revision that was in effect, and the time your request was verified.

You can withdraw this consent at any time by contacting us at the privacy email shown at the top of this page. Withdrawing consent will not affect the lawfulness of anything we did before you withdrew it, but may mean we can no longer use that specific information to continue matching you with a coach. We only ever collect the sensitive information you choose to share - we do not ask follow-up questions to gather more.

Who we share information with

• Hosting - Heroku (Salesforce), for application hosting and a managed PostgreSQL database.
• File storage - Amazon Web Services S3, for profile photos, gallery images and qualification files.
• Email - our email delivery provider, for account, verification and service emails.
• Payments - Stripe, for subscription billing, Introduction Credit purchases and Notification Wallet top-ups, once/where these are enabled for you.
• SMS - Twilio, only for coaches who opt in to paid SMS alerts, and only once this is genuinely enabled. Paid SMS alerts are not currently enabled. If enabled, this policy will be updated to confirm the active provider before any coach data is sent to them.
• Location - What3Words, for converting a memorable three-word address into map coordinates.
• Maps - our map tile provider (OpenStreetMap), which may receive your device's IP address when a map is shown in your browser, in the same way any embedded map does.
• AI content assistance - OpenAI, used only for the optional coach AI Profile Assistant, and to help draft generic educational resource articles from a coaching-style name and a generic topic. We never send client request data, match scores, billing information or other private marketplace data to OpenAI.
• Analytics - only if and when a genuine analytics integration is enabled - none is currently installed.

AI features

Coaches may optionally use an AI Profile Assistant to help draft or improve specific parts of their profile. This is entirely optional, never writes or submits a profile automatically, and never makes an approval decision. If a coach uses it, we send OpenAI only their own questionnaire answers (or the specific text they've asked to improve), their selected coaching categories/style, and their chosen tone - never client data.

Working questionnaire/generation data behind an unaccepted, discarded or failed suggestion is normally retained for around 30 days before being cleared. Once a coach accepts a suggestion, the resulting wording becomes normal profile content and is kept under the same retention as the rest of their profile, and a minimal record that AI assistance was used for a particular section may be kept longer as an internal transparency record. No client-request data is ever used for AI profile writing or for resource-article generation.

International transfers

Some of the providers listed above may process data outside the UK. Where this happens, we rely on the safeguards each provider offers - which may include the UK's data-adequacy regulations for a particular country, the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses. Contact us at the privacy email above if you'd like more detail about the safeguards in place for a specific provider.

How long we keep information

We keep different categories of information for different lengths of time, set out in the retention table on this page. Deletion is currently a manual staff process for most categories - we do not claim automatic deletion where no automated process genuinely exists yet.

Your rights

Subject to UK GDPR, you may have the right to request access to, correction of, deletion of, restriction of, or objection to our processing of your information, to receive a copy of it in a portable format, and to withdraw consent where we rely on it - including the special-category consent described above. To make a request, contact us using the details at the top of this page.

You also have a specific right to object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk if you believe we have not handled your information properly.