Your privacy, in plain words

The short version

This website shows no ads, runs no advertising trackers, sets no cookies unless you allow analytics, and never sells data. Beyond what you choose to send us, we hold two other kinds of personal information: the published contact details of businesses we write to about their online presence, and the details homeowners enter when they ask one of our cost calculators for a quote. Every email we send tells you how to stop them, and we honour that for good.

Who we are

Digital Katalyst is a full-service software studio delivering websites, mobile apps, cloud, AI, and data work to clients in North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. For anything in this policy, contact us at inquiry@digitalkatalyst.us or write to Digital Katalyst, 5900 Balcones Drive, Ste 100, Austin, TX 78731, United States.

What we collect, and how

Messages you send us. Our contact form does not submit anything to our servers. It opens your own email app with a pre-filled message; nothing leaves your device until you press send in your own mail program. When you do email us, we receive whatever you include, typically your name, email address, company, and what you need. The same applies if you write to us directly.

Businesses we write to. We send a small number of individual emails to local businesses, mainly tree-care and landscaping companies, about how they show up on Google Maps, in search and in AI answers. We only use an email address the business publishes on its own website, and we record the page we found it on. We also keep the business name, the town it serves, details that are public on its website and Google Maps listing (such as its services, rating and number of reviews), our emails and any reply. We use software, including AI tools, to read those public pages and to help draft and sort emails; a person reads and answers every reply.

Quote requests from our cost calculators. If you ask for a quote through one of our cost calculators, such as treecostremovalcalculator.com, we receive what you enter: your name, ZIP code or postcode, phone number or email address, and a description of the job. We pass it to one local company so it can contact you about that job, and to no one else.

Basic server logs. Like virtually every website, our hosting infrastructure records standard technical logs: IP address, browser type, pages requested, and timestamps. Used only for security and to keep the site running. These are kept briefly and are not used to identify or profile visitors.

Almost nothing else. No advertising identifiers, no cross-site advertising, no social-media pixels and no fingerprinting. We measure page views with Cloudflare Web Analytics and Ahrefs Web Analytics, neither of which uses cookies or can identify you, and we load Google Analytics only if you agree to it, which does set cookies. Your theme preference and your answer to that question are stored only on your own device, see our cookie policy.

What we use it for

• Replying to your inquiry and having the conversation you started
• Preparing proposals and delivering work you engage us for
• Writing to businesses about services relevant to their business, and honouring every opt-out
• Passing a homeowner's quote request to the one local company they asked us to connect them with
• Keeping records the law requires us to keep, such as invoices
• Protecting the website against abuse

Where GDPR or UK data-protection law applies, our legal bases are your consent (you chose to contact us, or you asked for a quote), performance of a contract, our legitimate interests (responding, keeping the site secure, and writing to companies about services relevant to their business), and legal obligation for records we must retain. In the UK we only email sole traders and partnerships who have agreed to hear from us. In Canada and Australia we rely on the business having published its address for enquiries without a notice refusing unsolicited messages, and we only write about matters relevant to that business.

Opting out

Every email we send tells you how to stop them. Reply "unsubscribe" (or anything like it), or email inquiry@digitalkatalyst.us. We add the address to our do-not-contact list within five business days, usually the same day, and never write to it again. That list is the one thing we keep permanently, and only so the opt-out keeps working.

What we never do

• Sell, rent, or trade personal information, to anyone, ever
• Buy or rent email lists, or email anyone who has asked us to stop
• Use your data to train our own AI models
• Share your information except with providers essential to running our business (such as email hosting, workflow automation and AI text-processing services), under confidentiality, or with the one company a homeowner asked us to connect them with

Client project data

When we build or maintain systems for a client, we may process personal data inside those systems on the client's behalf. We do so only under the client's instructions and a written agreement, with the security practices described across our services: encryption, access control, and audit logging. That data belongs to our clients; this policy covers our own website and business contacts.

Where your data lives, and for how long

Correspondence lives in our business email system, protected by access controls and two-factor authentication. Because we serve clients across four continents, email may be processed in data centres outside your country; where GDPR applies, transfers rely on recognised safeguards such as standard contractual clauses. We keep correspondence as long as our conversation or engagement is live plus a reasonable period after, and financial records for as long as tax law requires. Outreach records and quote requests live in our own workflow system and business email: we keep outreach records for up to 24 months after our last contact and quote requests for 12 months, then delete them. You can ask us to delete your correspondence at any time.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, including under GDPR, UK GDPR, and laws such as the California Consumer Privacy Act. You can ask us to access, correct, delete, or export the personal data we hold about you, object to or restrict its use, and withdraw consent. Email inquiry@digitalkatalyst.us and we will respond within a month. You can also complain to your local data-protection authority, though we would appreciate the chance to fix things first.

Children

Our website and services are aimed at businesses and are not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16; if you believe a child has sent us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we ever add a service that changes how this site handles data, for example a form backend or privacy-respecting analytics, we will update this page and its date before the change goes live. We will never quietly weaken it.