Privacy notice

1. Who is responsible

FAIRBEAM LTD (company number 17517971), registered in England and Wales, is the data controller for the Fairbeam service.

Registered office: 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom.

Privacy requests: privacy@fairbeam.co.uk.

2. What information we process

Manual quote checks may include installation price, panel count, system size, equipment, batteries, warranties and included work. You do not need to provide your name, telephone number or email address.

Uploaded PDFs may contain names, addresses, contact details or other personal information. Please remove information not needed for the assessment before uploading where practical. We extract relevant quote facts to create your report.

If you choose to register competing-quote interest, we use limited quote and postcode-district information for demand statistics. The historical-demand section below explains the fields, purposes, safeguards and retention.

Our infrastructure providers may process technical request information, including IP addresses and potentially full request URLs, for delivery, security and operational logs. Upload preparation uses a secret-keyed hash of an IP address for rate limiting; that mechanism does not write the underlying IP address to the quote record. Report links contain access tokens, so please keep them private.

3. Why we use information

We use quote information to provide the assessment and temporary report you request. Where applicable, our lawful basis is performance of a contract with you or taking steps at your request before entering one (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(b)).

We use proportionate security and anti-abuse measures, aggregate website measurement and service-performance information under legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)): protecting the service and understanding whether it works effectively. We consider these interests alongside users' rights and expectations.

We use optional postcode-district expressions of interest to understand demand for competing solar quotes. Where those signals are personal data, our basis is legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)) in assessing local demand, taking account of the limited information collected and the optional nature of the feature. This does not authorise future sharing of identifiable leads: any contactable-lead service will require updated information and appropriate permissions before it starts.

We handle privacy requests to meet applicable legal obligations (Article 6(1)(c)) where required, or under legitimate interests for ordinary correspondence. We do not use your PDF to advertise to you.

Optional competing-quote interest and historical demand statistics

If you choose to register interest in a possible competing-quote service, we ask for your outward postcode district (for example, SW1A, rather than your full postcode) and confirmation that you have not signed an installation contract. We combine this with information from the quote you checked to count accepted submissions by postcode district, calendar month, panel-count band and total quoted-price band. We record your confirmation that the contract is unsigned; we do not independently verify it.

Panel-count bands are 1–9, 10–14, 15–19, 20–29 and 30 or more panels. Total quoted-price bands are below £5,000; £5,000 to below £7,500; £7,500 to below £10,000; £10,000 to below £12,500; £12,500 to below £15,000; £15,000 to below £20,000; £20,000 to below £25,000; and £25,000 or more. Missing or unusable figures are recorded as unknown. The historical statistics hold bands, rather than exact panel counts or prices, and distinguish test submissions from production submissions.

We use these statistics to understand where demand arises, how quote sizes and prices vary over time, and whether developing a competing-quote service is commercially viable. Where this processing involves personal data, our lawful basis is our legitimate interests under Article 6(1)(f) of the UK GDPR: proportionate commercial planning using limited information. Registering interest is optional and does not affect your quote check, arrange an installer introduction or guarantee another quote. It is not consent to marketing.

The historical statistics contain no name, email address, telephone number, full postcode, quote reference or report-access token. A separate temporary record links the submission to your quote so that repeat submissions for the same quote are not counted twice. That record contains the quote reference, postcode district and submission time. It is removed through scheduled cleanup after the report expires, or when the quote record is deleted. Separate quotes submitted by the same person may count separately: these are accepted-submission counts, not counts of unique homeowners.

We retain the historical monthly statistics for a rolling window covering the current calendar month and the previous 23 calendar months, using Europe/London time. Daily cleanup removes older monthly rows; a failed or delayed cleanup can delay removal and must be corrected. This is a calendar-based window of approximately 24 months, not 24 months from each submission. Temporary quote records, PDFs, platform logs and provider backups follow the separate retention arrangements described elsewhere in this notice.

We restrict access to the detailed historical statistics. Small or unusual combinations can still allow someone to single out a household or link information with other sources, so aggregation does not automatically make information anonymous. Any external demand summaries will use broader postcode areas and suppress counts below five, with further grouping or withholding where combinations or comparisons could still reveal information. Five is a safeguard, not a guarantee of anonymity. We do not provide installers with your contact details or identifiable quote records through this feature.

You can object to personal-data processing based on our legitimate interests, on grounds relating to your particular situation, by emailing privacy@fairbeam.co.uk. We will assess your objection and stop that processing unless we have compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests, rights and freedoms, or need it for legal claims. Once a contribution can no longer be linked to you, we may be unable to identify it within combined statistics; we will explain any limitation rather than request unnecessary identifying information. Your other rights and how to complain to the ICO are explained in this notice.

4. PDF extraction and service providers

PDFs are uploaded directly to private Cloudflare R2 storage. OpenAI's API processes their contents to extract relevant quote details, which may include personal information in the document. Our application requests that API responses are not stored, but this does not guarantee immediate deletion of all provider-side records.

Vercel hosts the website and application, Supabase stores application data, Cloudflare provides PDF storage, OpenAI provides document extraction, and our business email provider handles correspondence. These providers may use sub-processors or process data outside the UK. Where restricted international transfers occur, applicable UK transfer safeguards must be in place. UK or EU storage does not mean all processing stays in the UK or EU.

5. Storage, access and deletion

Reports are designed to be accessible through a private link for up to 30 days, subject to recorded expiry and cleanup. Anyone with the full report link may be able to open it during that period, so keep it private.

Fairbeam attempts to delete original PDFs from private storage after processing. Failed and abandoned uploads are handled by scheduled cleanup, and the storage bucket has a one-day lifecycle rule as an additional safeguard. Deletion may be delayed by failures. Scheduled cleanup also handles expired quote and demand records. Link expiry, live database deletion, R2 object removal and provider backup or log expiry are separate events.

Aggregate counts such as quote completions and postcode-district demand may be retained beyond individual report expiry. Some information may remain in provider backups or security logs under separate retention arrangements. Contact us if you have questions about a particular record.

6. Website measurement and cookies

When enabled, Fairbeam uses limited first-party statistics to understand and improve how our service works. Page-view measurement covers only our homepage, PDF quote checker, manual quote checker and solar panel quote checker landing page. It records the day, page path, broad source category (such as search or direct) and development or production environment. These statistics do not identify individual visitors: they contain no report tokens, full referring URLs, query strings, quote contents, names or persistent visitor identifiers. They count page views, not unique people, and may include automated traffic.

You can turn optional website measurement off easily and free of charge using Measurement settings in the footer. Your quote check works normally with measurement off. We honour your choice before reading browser information for optional measurement or sending it to our collectors.

We remember only an on/off preference in this browser's local storage, without creating a visitor identifier or using advertising cookies. Your choice applies to this site on this browser; clearing storage removes it. If storage is unavailable, optional measurement stays off and we may be unable to remember your choice between visits. This preference is used only to respect your settings.

These optional statistics are used for service improvement, not advertising or profiling. Separate operational counters record quote processing, completions, failures and estimated processing costs so we can operate the service. Turning optional measurement off does not stop that necessary service accounting or alter optional competing-quote interest you choose to submit. Hosting and security providers may separately process technical request information as described above.

7. Your rights and complaints

Depending on the circumstances, UK data protection law may give you rights to access, correct, erase, restrict or object to processing of your personal data, and to data portability. Where consent applies, you may withdraw it. Contact privacy@fairbeam.co.uk for requests; we may need to verify that the data relates to you.

You may also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

8. Changes and contact

We will update this notice when the service or data practices materially change. For privacy questions, email privacy@fairbeam.co.uk.