Privacy Policy

First Mate Technologies (“First Mate,” “we,” “us”) operates www.firstmate.tech. This policy explains what information we collect when you use this site, why we collect it, who we share it with, and how you can request access to or deletion of it. It applies to this website only, not to work we deliver for clients under a separate engagement agreement.

Information we collect

We collect what you submit through the forms on this site, described below, plus the technical data our service providers collect when you visit (see “Technical data”).

Contact form

When you submit the contact form, we collect your first and last name, email address, company name and phone number, and the type of enquiry you selected if there is one. If you reach the form from your MVP estimate’s result page, we also record which estimate you came from.

Job applications

When you apply to an open role, we collect your name, email address, location, phone number, an optional message, and your résumé file if you choose to attach one.

MVP cost estimator

When you use the MVP cost estimator (/estimate), we store the product features and options you select and the estimate we calculate from them. Where present, we also store UTM campaign parameters and the referring page, so we can tell which marketing channels are working.

If you then enter your details to unlock the full breakdown, we collect your first and last name, your email address (any address works except a disposable inbox, and we suggest a work address), your company name, your funding stage, and your answer to whether you have a technical co-founder. We also record when you gave consent and whether the address is from a free email provider. We generate a PDF summary of your estimate with your name, company and selected features, store it, and email it to you.

The estimator also has an optional “Describe it in your own words” box on the first step. If you use it, the text you enter is sent to TypeSafe AI (“TypeSafe”), a third-party processor, which suggests answers to the estimator’s questions. Every suggestion is shown to you, and you can change or clear it before you continue. We store what you typed. If it isn’t attached to an estimate you finish, we delete it after 30 days. If it is, we keep it for as long as we keep that estimate and delete it along with the estimate. Please don’t include names or confidential details in this box.

Technical data

Our error-monitoring provider, Sentry, receives some technical data on every visit:

• your IP address, browser and device
• the page you were on (estimate links are removed)
• details of any error

Sentry also records about 1 in 10 visits, and every visit with an error, as a session replay. A replay rebuilds the page and your clicks and scrolling. Page text and anything you type are masked, and images are blocked. We don’t record replays on estimate result pages. We use this only to find and fix bugs.

How we use this information

• To respond to your enquiry, follow up on a job application, or send you your MVP cost estimate.
• To contact you about your MVP estimate, if you agreed to that when you unlocked it.
• To notify our team internally that a new lead or application has come in.
• To understand which pages and marketing channels bring in visitors, so we can improve the site.
• To detect and prevent spam and abuse of our forms.

We do not sell your information, and we do not use it to serve third-party advertising.

Legal basis

We process this information based on your consent (given when you submit a form, and explicitly recorded for the MVP estimator) and, for the abuse-prevention and analytics uses above, our legitimate interest in keeping this site secure and useful. You can withdraw consent at any time by contacting us. See “Your rights” below.

Who we share it with

We use the following service providers to run this site and act on the information above. Each processes data on our behalf, under their own security and privacy terms:

• Supabase runs our database and file storage. Résumés and the PDF summaries we generate for estimator leads are stored here.
• Resend sends our internal and outbound notification emails. Mailjet is set up as a fallback provider and may be used instead.
• Vercel hosts this site and provides basic, aggregated visitor analytics.
• Sentry provides error and performance monitoring and session replay, so we can catch and fix bugs affecting the site. It receives the technical data described above.
• Ahrefs provides site traffic analytics.
• Slack sends our team an internal notification when a new lead comes in through the MVP cost estimator.
• Cloudflare Turnstile runs a spam-prevention check, used only when it is enabled on this site.
• TypeSafe AI processes the optional free-text description you enter in the MVP cost estimator, to suggest answers to the tool’s questions.

We do not otherwise share, rent, or sell your information to third parties, except where required by law.

IP addresses and abuse prevention

To prevent spam and abuse of our forms, we apply rate limits based on your IP address. We do not store your raw IP address for this purpose. It is cryptographically hashed with a secret salt before being stored, so it cannot practically be reversed back to your actual address. The MVP cost estimator also rate-limits by email address, which we store as a salted hash too. (Sentry may still receive your IP address as part of the technical data described above.)

Data retention

We keep contact submissions and job applications for as long as reasonably needed to respond to you, evaluate an application, or maintain a record of your enquiry, and no longer than necessary for those purposes, unless we’re required to keep it longer by law. You can ask us to delete your information sooner at any time (see below).

MVP cost estimates, including the options you selected and, if you unlocked the breakdown, your details and the PDF summary we generated, are kept until you ask us to delete them. That keeps your estimate link working. When we delete an estimator lead, we delete the stored PDF with it. Text you typed into the optional description box is kept as described above: 30 days if it isn’t attached to a finished estimate, otherwise for as long as that estimate.

Your rights

You can ask us what information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. To do so, contact us at hello@firstmate.tech or through our contact form. We’ll respond within a reasonable time.

Children

This site is intended for business use and is not directed at children.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the site changes. We’ll update the “last updated” date above when we do.

Contact us

Questions about this policy? Reach us at hello@firstmate.tech.