Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

ProtoFlow LLC ("we," "us," or "our") respects your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and protect your information when you use our desktop application and website. We believe in data minimization and transparency.

2. Information We Collect

a. Account Information

When you sign up, we collect your email address and authentication credentials (via our auth provider, Firebase). We use this to identify you and manage your access to the service.

b. Payment & Subscription Data

When you purchase a subscription or credits, your payment is processed by Stripe. We do not store your full credit card number. We receive and store your subscription status, billing cycle dates, plan tier, and transaction history to manage your account and provide the appropriate level of service. Stripe may collect additional information as described in their privacy policy.

c. Usage Data

We collect telemetry about how you interact with the application — including the features and tools you use, the actions you take, and the items you search for, view, add, or edit — along with AI usage metrics such as model usage, request frequency, and credit consumption. When you use AI features, we also log the content of your request and, where an account is available, link it to your account so we can operate, secure, debug, and bill the service, enforce rate limits, manage fair use, and improve our services. You can opt out of non-essential usage telemetry in the application settings.

d. AI Prompts & Context

When you use AI features (e.g., "Generate a power supply circuit"), the text of your prompt and relevant context from your active PCB are sent to our cloud servers and third-party LLM providers (such as OpenAI or Google) to generate the response. Your designs remain yours, and using AI features does not change your ownership of them.

When you use the AI-powered support chat on our website, we may log the messages you submit, the assistant's responses, and related usage data for customer support, service operation, safety and abuse prevention, debugging, analytics, and product improvement. The support chat may be used without an account, so these records may be stored without a signed-in account identifier or linked to your account if you are signed in. By submitting a message in the support chat, you acknowledge that your chat will be processed as described in this Privacy Policy. Please do not submit passwords, API keys, payment card details, or other sensitive information.

To operate and improve ProtoFlow, we may use the content and activity you generate in the Software — including your designs, prompts, and how you interact with its features — to improve our products and models and to create de-identified and aggregated datasets and insights. Where we use this information for these purposes, we take steps to remove details that directly identify you, do not reproduce your specific design for other users, and do not attempt to re-identify it. This is enabled by default; you can turn it off at any time under "Help improve ProtoFlow AI" in Settings → Privacy. Accounts governed by a separate written agreement with us are excluded, and for users in the EU and UK it is off unless you opt in.

3. How We Use Your Information

• To provide and maintain the Service, including managing your subscription and feature access.
• To process payments, manage billing cycles, and handle credit transactions.
• To process your AI requests and return generated content.
• To develop, train, and improve our products and AI models, and to create de-identified and aggregated datasets and insights.
• To enforce rate limits, fair use policies, and subscription tier restrictions.
• To notify you about changes to our Service, pricing, or Terms.
• To provide customer support.
• To monitor the usage of the Service and detect technical issues or abuse.

4. Data Storage & Security

Local First: Your project files are stored locally on your device unless you use a cloud feature. When "Help improve ProtoFlow AI" is enabled and you start an AI run, ProtoFlow may automatically upload privacy-scrubbed snapshots of the active schematic or PCB immediately before and after that run, together with the prompt, AI tool actions, and outcome. We remove direct account, project-title, title-block, email, and local-path details before upload. These improvement records are pseudonymous rather than anonymous: we keep them linkable to your account through a protected participant identifier so we can honor a deletion request.

Subscription, usage, and AI-improvement data is stored securely in Firebase and Google Cloud, and payment data is processed by Stripe. We use industry-standard encryption (TLS/SSL) for data in transit. However, no method of transmission over the Internet is 100% secure.

5. Third-Party Services

We may employ third-party companies and individuals to facilitate our Service ("Service Providers"), such as:

• Firebase (Google): For authentication, database services, and storing subscription/usage data.
• Stripe: For processing subscription payments, one-off credit purchases, and managing billing.
• Vercel: For website hosting and serverless API functions.
• Google Ads and OpenAI Ads: For measuring ad clicks and whether they lead to website downloads or purchases. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland these run only after you accept cookies in the banner. Elsewhere they run by default and no banner is shown; to opt out, email admin@protoflow.ai.
• LLM Providers (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, xAI, and others): For processing AI queries. Your prompts and PCB context are sent to these providers to generate responses.

These Service Providers access your Personal Data only to perform these tasks on our behalf, and are contractually obligated not to use it for unrelated purposes. Each has its own privacy policy governing their handling of your data.

Aggregated & De-Identified Data

We never sell your personal account information, such as your name or email. We may use, share, license, or sell aggregated and de-identified data — including design, component, and usage data from which information identifying you has been removed — for our business purposes, such as research, developing electronic-design tools and AI models, and producing industry, market, and supply-chain insights. We keep this data in a de-identified form, commit not to attempt to re-identify it, and contractually require recipients not to re-identify it. The source improvement records described above remain pseudonymous and are treated as account-linked data until they are deleted or separately transformed into a de-identified dataset. Only that separately de-identified data is treated as data that does not identify you.

6. Data Retention

We retain your account information, subscription data, and usage history for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services, comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. AI request logs, including support-chat messages and responses, are retained for a limited period to operate, secure, and bill the service. Pseudonymous AI-improvement records, including before-and-after active-design snapshots, currently have no automatic expiration and are retained until you submit a verified deletion request or we remove them manually. Turning off "Help improve ProtoFlow AI" stops future collection for these purposes and clears improvement data waiting locally for upload, but it does not delete records already received by our servers. If you delete your account or submit a verified deletion request, we will delete or anonymize account-linked data within a reasonable timeframe, except where retention is required by law. Separately de-identified data that can no longer be linked back to your account may not be affected by a later account deletion.

7. Your Data Rights

You have the right to request access to the personal data we hold about you. You also have the right to request that we delete your account and associated data, including pseudonymous AI prompts and design-improvement records that remain linked to your account. Contact admin@protoflow.ai to exercise these rights. We will respond to your request within 30 days.

You can opt out of AI model training and de-identified datasets at any time under "Help improve ProtoFlow AI" in Settings → Privacy. California residents: we do not sell your personal information, and de-identified data is not "personal information" under the CCPA. EU/UK residents: AI model training and dataset use are off unless you opt in, and where we rely on your consent as the legal basis for processing, you may withdraw it at any time.

8. Changes to This Policy

We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time at our sole discretion. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page and updating the "Last Updated" date. Material changes may also be communicated via email or in-app notification. Your continued use of the Service after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

9. Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at admin@protoflow.ai.