Privacy policy

TradeEasy is run by TradeEasy AI Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17466004), whose registered office is 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, United Kingdom. We’re registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office as a data controller, registration number ZC254457.

In this policy, “we” and “us” means that company. The best way to reach us about anything on this page is help@tradeeasy.uk, or About my data on our help page.

We haven’t appointed a data protection officer, because the law doesn’t require one for a business like ours.

We hold information about five kinds of people, and it’s worth knowing which one you are, because what we hold and why is different for each.

• Tradespeople who use TradeEasy — you built a website with us, made an account, or pay for one.
• People who tried the builder — you filled in our form and looked at a preview, but didn’t make an account.
• Visitors to a website we host — you looked at a tradesperson’s website on a tradeeasy.uk address, sent them a message through its enquiry form, or left feedback on it. You may never have heard of us. That’s fine: section 7 is for you.
• Businesses we messaged first — we wrote to your business on Instagram before it had contacted us: section 8 is for you.
• People who asked for new articles by email — you typed your email address into the box on our blog: the part of section 3 headed “If you asked for new articles by email” is for you.

If you use TradeEasy

We don’t collect anything about your health, religion, politics, ethnicity or any of the other “special category” information the law treats separately, and we don’t ask for it.

Card details never reach us. You pay on Stripe’s own page, and Stripe holds your card, your billing name and address, and your invoices. We hold only Stripe’s reference numbers for your customer record and subscription.

If you tried the builder without making an account

Everything you typed into the builder — your business details, your contact details, any photos — is used to make your preview and, if you ask, to send you a link to save it. You asked us to build it, so our lawful basis is legitimate interests, and it’s deleted when the time runs out.

The preview is shown for 7 days. After that it stops being shown, but you can still save it until it’s deleted, with its photos, 30 days after you made it. If you save it by making an account, it becomes part of your account instead.

Without an account, the builder’s AI gives you 2 goes a day at rewriting your words and at writing a job from a photo. To count them we keep a scrambled code made from your internet address — one that can’t be matched to anything else we hold — for a day, and then delete it.

If you asked for new articles by email

On our blog there’s a box headed “Subscribe for future updates”. If you type your email address into it and press its button, we put the address on our list for new articles, and keep it with which page of the blog you asked on, when you joined and when we last emailed you to say so. If you unsubscribe, we keep when you did. To stop the box being misused, we also count how often it’s used from each internet address, as a scrambled code we delete within a day.

It’s used to email you when there’s a new article — and, as you join, one email to say you’re subscribed, with a button to unsubscribe. So if somebody else typed your address in, that email tells you, and one press takes it off. Our lawful basis is your consent: you typed your address in and pressed the button, and you can take it back whenever you like. Resend sends the emails (section 5).

We keep the address until you unsubscribe — press Unsubscribe in that email, which takes it off as it opens, or email help@tradeeasy.uk. After that we keep only the address and the dates, as the record that you said no, so nothing can put it back on the list but you pressing the box again. Email help@tradeeasy.uk to have that deleted too.

Things we do not do

• We don’t sell information about anyone. The one thing we use for advertising is Google Ads, and only if you say yes (section 4).
• We send marketing emails only to people who asked for them: new articles from our blog, and the one email that says you’re subscribed, to an address typed into the box there (“If you asked for new articles by email”). Every other email we send is about your account or your website. The one way we contact anybody first is a message on Instagram to a business, sent by hand (section 8).
• We don’t make decisions about people by computer. We use AI to write the words on your website (section 5), and to check feedback left on the websites we host (section 7) — but that check can only ask the writer to change something or pass the feedback to a person, and nothing decides anything about you automatically in a way that has a legal or similarly significant effect.

We use a handful of cookies to keep you signed in to TradeEasy. None of them track you, none is for advertising, and none is set on the websites we host for tradespeople. Each is strictly necessary or remembers a choice you made. Every one, with what it does and how long it lasts, is listed on our cookies page, built from the same settings the code uses.

Measuring how our service performs. Our own pages use Vercel Web Analytics and Speed Insights, from our hosting provider — not the websites we host for tradespeople, which have visit counts of their own (section 7). They set no cookies. Vercel identifies a visit by a scrambled code made from the request, which it throws away after 24 hours, and records the page address, where the visitor came from, their rough location, and their browser, operating system and type of device. We use it to see which pages are slow or broken. We send it each page’s address without anything after a “?”, so nothing you type into a form goes with it. When one of our own links or emails brought you, we also tell it which one, by a name from a fixed list of our own, and nothing else from the address. We also keep two dates and a count in your browser: the day you first came, the last day we counted you coming back, and how many days you have come, up to ten. Vercel, and PostHog if you said yes to it, are told only roughly how long you were away and which visit this is, and nothing that says who you are.

The law lets us do this without asking first, as long as we tell you and you can say no. “Essential only” on our cookies notice, or the switch on our cookies page, stops both straight away.

Seeing where people get stuck — only if you say yes. PostHog records how our own pages are used: which pages are opened, and where people click, tap and scroll. It runs only after you press “Accept” on our cookies notice or turn it on on our cookies page, never on the websites we host for tradespeople and never on the pages our own staff use. It sets its own cookies on tradeeasy.uk, listed on our cookies page. Turning it off there stops it straight away and deletes its cookies. Our reason for using it is your consent, which you can take back at any time.

Google Ads — only if you say yes. We advertise on Google. After you press “Accept” on our cookies notice or turn it on on our cookies page, Google’s tag runs on our home page, pricing, the builder and the pages where you subscribe — never on a page whose address holds something you typed, never on the websites we host for tradespeople and never on the pages our own staff use. It notes which of our ads brought you and tells Google Ads when somebody who came from one subscribes, so we know which ads are worth paying for, and Google may use it to show you our ads on other websites. When you subscribe it sends Google what you paid, a reference for the payment and a scrambled copy of your email address, which Google matches against its own accounts to link the payment to the ad; the address itself never leaves us. It sets cookies on tradeeasy.uk, listed on our cookies page. Turning it off there stops it using them and deletes them. Our reason for using it is your consent, which you can take back at any time.

We use other companies to run TradeEasy. Each one handles information only to do a job for us, under a contract that requires them to protect it.

We’ll also share information if the law requires it — for example, a court order — and we’d tell you unless we were legally prevented.

Information that leaves the UK

Our database is hosted in London, and the servers that run TradeEasy and the websites we host are in London too. But most of these companies are based in the United States, so some of your information is handled there. This is what protects it at each one:

• The UK’s data bridge with the US (the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework): Vercel, Neon, Stripe, Resend, Sentry and Google
• The UK’s standard contract terms for international transfers (the International Data Transfer Addendum): Anthropic
• Kept in the EU, which UK law treats as safe: PostHog, which stores it in Germany
• Nothing sent: Facebook and Apple — you sign in on their own page, under their own privacy policy, and we send them nothing about you
• kie.ai, Meta (Instagram) and Meta (WhatsApp): In progress

The law doesn’t set a time limit for most of this — it says we mustn’t keep anything longer than we need it. So here’s what we need it for, and when it goes. A job runs every day and deletes whatever in our own database is past its time; what other companies hold, they delete on their own schedules, listed at the bottom.

Tradespeople’s websites live at addresses like daves-plumbing.tradeeasy.uk. The tradesperson decides what’s on it, and we build and host it for them — with one exception: feedback from their customers, which we check and publish together with them (below).

If you only looked at the website, we set no cookies on it and store nothing on your device unless you ask us not to count you. We do count visits so the tradesperson can see how many people found them, and we do it without knowing who you are: your internet address and browser are scrambled together with that day’s date and that website, using a secret key, into a code that means nothing on another day or another website. For the rest of that day we keep the code with how many pages you opened and whether you came from a search engine, a map, social media, another website or directly, so a second look isn’t counted as a second person. Early the next morning we add the day up and delete the codes. Only the totals are kept, for 90 days, and never your internet address.

The foot of every one of those websites says so, and has a switch, “Count my visits”. Turning it off stops the counting straight away; your answer is kept in your browser, for that website only. None of Vercel’s measuring runs on them.

If you sent an enquiry, what you typed — your name, your phone number or email address or both, and your message — is emailed to the tradesperson and kept in their TradeEasy account so they can find it again. It’s kept as long as their website is, and deleted with it. We don’t use it for anything else and we don’t contact you. The tradesperson is the one you wrote to, so for anything about your enquiry, ask them first. You can also ask us, and we’ll help.

If you left feedback, the tradesperson and TradeEasy are jointly responsible for it: they chose to take feedback on their website, and we built the form, run the checks and publish it. We look after it and answer any request about it; you can ask the tradesperson too, and they’ll pass it to us. How feedback is checked, and what a business can and can’t hide, is on our How feedback works page, which every website links to.

Before it’s published, an AI model reads your feedback — Anthropic’s Claude (section 5), which is given the words and never your email address. If your feedback mentions anybody’s health, or another person’s address or full name, the check asks you to take it out, so none of that is published.

Sometimes we write to a business on Instagram, before it has contacted us, to offer it a website. Sean Burtenshaw, who started TradeEasy, writes and sends every one of those messages himself, by hand, one at a time, from TradeEasy’s Instagram account or his own. No software sends them, and we don’t buy lists of businesses to write to.

Where your details came from, and what we keep. Your business’s public Instagram profile and its posts. We keep its Instagram handle, its name, its trade and its town, the messages between us, and how the conversation ended. If we built you a preview from your profile, it uses our own stock photographs, never yours, and it’s held as any preview nobody has saved is (section 3). If you ask, we put it under your email address and send you the link.

What it costs. A preview we built for you after messaging you first costs you nothing. We never charge you the £129 we charge for building somebody’s website for them. If you want to keep it, the only thing you ever pay is a plan, at the price on our pricing page, and only when you choose one to put your website live.

Why we’re allowed to. Our lawful basis is legitimate interests: offering a business a service it may want. We’ve weighed that against yours: we write only to businesses, about their business, by hand; every first message says who we are and how to stop; and we keep only what the conversation needs.

How long we keep it. If the conversation ends without you taking a website, we delete what we hold about it 30 days after our last message. If you say no, or ask us to stop, it goes the same day. Two things stay: your Instagram handle, on our list of businesses we must not message again — the only way to be sure we don’t — and a count of the messages we sent and how they ended, with nothing in it that says who. If you do take a website, what you give us from then on is covered by the rest of this policy.

To stop, or to have it deleted, reply “stop” on Instagram, or email help@tradeeasy.uk. We stop straight away, and you don’t need to give a reason. Instagram belongs to Meta, which keeps its own copy of the messages under its own privacy policy, not ours.

You have rights over information about you. Most of them you can use yourself, straight away, from your account:

To ask us for any of these, use About my data on our help page, or email help@tradeeasy.uk — in any words; you don’t have to name the right. If you use the form, you’ll get an email straight away with the date we’ll reply by. If you email us, one of us will confirm we’ve got it. Either way we reply within one month of it reaching us. If a request is complicated we can take up to two months more, and we’ll tell you within the first month if we need to, and why. We may ask you to prove the request is yours before we act on it — we’ll only ask for what we need to be sure.

It’s free, unless a request is plainly unfounded or excessive, which the law lets us refuse or charge for; we’d tell you why.

This is also the page we give Facebook, Google and Apple for how to delete what we hold.

If you have an account: sign in, go to Your account, and choose Delete my account. The screen tells you exactly what will go before you confirm:

• Your website comes off the internet straight away, and is deleted with its words, photos and the enquiries sent through it.
• If you’re paying, your subscription is cancelled there and then. If it’s within 14 days of your first payment we refund that payment in full; otherwise nothing is refunded (see our terms).
• Your login, and every device you’ve signed in on, is deleted.

What we keep, and why:

• Your invoices, at Stripe, for six years — the law requires it.
• Messages you’ve sent us, with the address you sent them from, for 12 months after we dealt with them. Any photos you sent with them are deleted with your account.
• Our staff log, where it notes anything we did on your account, for 12 months.
• Copies in our database backups, kept out of use until they’re overwritten.

If you can’t sign in, or never made an account: email help@tradeeasy.uk from the address you used, or use About my data on our help page, and we’ll do it for you within a month.

If you signed in with Facebook, Google or Apple: deleting your TradeEasy account deletes our link to it. That provider still knows you once used it to sign in to us; you can remove TradeEasy from the apps connected to your account in that provider’s own settings. If you remove it from Facebook’s, we remove our link to your Facebook account too.

If you sent an enquiry through a tradesperson’s website: ask them, or ask us with the website’s address and roughly when you sent it.

If you left feedback on a tradesperson’s website: the link in the email we sent you removes it, straight away. Or ask us, with the website’s address and roughly when you left it.

If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled information about you, tell us first — use About my data on our help page or email help@tradeeasy.uk. We’ll confirm we’ve got it — straight away if you use the form — and reply within a month.

You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK’s data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, whether or not you’ve come to us first.

• Nothing in an email we send you or a cookie in your browser is stored by us as-is: login links, codes and sign-in cookies are kept only in a scrambled form that can’t be turned back into a working link.
• Our staff tools need a separate login and an authenticator code, and every change our staff make is logged.
• Where your browser can, photos are re-saved before they’re sent, which strips the hidden details a phone adds, including where the photo was taken.
• Error reports have what you typed, your cookies and the rest of the request removed before they leave our servers.

If something goes wrong that puts your information at risk, we’ll tell the ICO within 72 hours where the law requires it, and tell you directly if it’s likely to put you at high risk.

TradeEasy is a service for businesses, and we don’t knowingly collect information about children. The websites we host are public pages anyone can read; they set no cookies and collect nothing beyond what section 7 describes.

When we change this page, we’ll change the date at the top.