Privacy policy

Who is responsible

The controller of your personal data is Submitium (“we”). For anything about your data, write to [email protected]. We have not appointed a data protection officer, as the law does not require one for our activity; we handle these requests ourselves.

This policy covers submitium.com, the Submitium application, our emails, the badge wall and our crawler, SubmitiumBot. Submitium is a service for businesses and is not directed at children.

What we collect

Your account

• Your name and email address, whether the address is confirmed, and your password, stored only as a hash.
• For each sign-in session: the IP address and the browser's user agent, to keep you signed in and spot suspicious access.
• If you sign in with Google, when we offer it: the name, email address and picture Google shares with us.
• Your notification preferences.

Your projects and listings

• The product's address and the listing profile: name, descriptions, logo, screenshots, categories, pricing, links and social profiles, and the business location if you give it.
• The maker profile some directories publish: first and last name, photo, and optionally an email address and an X profile.
• The content of the site pages we read when you add a product, to draft that profile.
• The settings of your badge wall and the results of our checks of your homepage.

Orders and payments

• The directories ordered, amounts, credits, refunds and the related Stripe references.
• The billing name, email, address and any tax ID you give at checkout, and links to your invoices and receipts.
• The version of the terms of sale you accepted and when.

Your card details go straight to Stripe. We never see or store your card number.

The submission work

• The accounts we create on directories for your product: the login email address (one we manage) and the password, stored encrypted.
• Proof of each submission, such as screenshots of the filled form and of the confirmation page.
• The emails directories send to your project's inbox: sender, subject, date, text and links, which we read to update your statuses.
• Statuses, listing addresses, link checks and our operators' notes.

Technical and support data

• Server logs (request path, time, response status) and rate-limit counters, for security.
• Usage counters, such as site readings and new projects per day, to apply fair-use limits.
• The emails we send you and whether they were delivered, and the messages you send to support.

Why, and on what basis

Running your account and the service: projects, submissions, tracking, badge wall, service emails

Performance of our contract with you (GDPR art. 6(1)(b)).

Reading your site and drafting your listing with an AI model

Performance of the contract: you ask for it when you add a product.

Payments, invoices and accounting

Performance of the contract and our legal obligations (art. 6(1)(c)).

Reminders about an unfinished order or a missing badge wall, sent only to confirmed addresses

Our legitimate interest in helping you finish what you started (art. 6(1)(f)). One click turns them off.

Security, fraud and abuse prevention, fair-use limits

Our legitimate interest in protecting the service and its users.

Measuring how long directories take to publish, in aggregate, to improve the catalog

Our legitimate interest in keeping our information accurate.

Handling disputes and legal claims

Our legitimate interest, and legal obligations where they apply.

We do not use your data for advertising, we do not sell it, and no decision with legal or similarly significant effects is made about you by automated means alone. The AI draft of your listing is a suggestion you review.

Who receives it

• The directories you order. They receive your listing profile, including any maker profile, and publish it. Each one is a separate controller under its own privacy policy. Once a listing is published, the directory controls it: we cannot delete it for you, but we will help you ask for a change or removal.
• The people who operate Submitium, bound by confidentiality, who submit and follow up your directories.
• Anyone you give your project's report link to. The report shows your project's submissions, statuses and listing links, never proof screenshots. You can reset the link at any time.
• Our service providers, listed below, who process data only on our instructions.
• Authorities, when the law requires it.

Our service providers

• Hetzner Online GmbH

  Hosts the website, the application and its API.

  Location: EU (Nuremberg, Germany). Data processing agreement; standard contractual clauses if outside the EU.

• Hetzner Online GmbH (our own database server)

  Hosts our database.

  Location: EU (Nuremberg, Germany). Data processing agreement; standard contractual clauses if outside the EU.

• Trigger.dev

  Runs our background tasks: listing checks, badge wall checks, reminders and service emails. It reads what these tasks need from our database.

  Location: EU (Frankfurt, Germany), on Amazon Web Services. Data processing agreement; standard contractual clauses if outside the EU.

• Stripe (Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd.)

  Takes payments, issues invoices and receipts, prevents fraud. Holds your card details; we never see them.

  Location: Ireland, with processing by Stripe, Inc. in the United States. EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses.

• Plunk

  Sends our emails: account, receipts, statuses, reminders.

  Location: EU (sending through Amazon Web Services in Stockholm, Sweden). Data processing agreement; standard contractual clauses if outside the EU.

• Cloudflare, Inc.

  Domain names, content delivery and security filtering, storage of uploaded files (logos, screenshots, proofs), and delivery of the emails directories send to project inboxes.

  Location: United States and Cloudflare's global network. EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses.

• Anthropic, PBC

  AI model that turns the text of your site into a draft listing when you add a product. Under its commercial terms, Anthropic does not train its models on this content.

  Location: United States. Standard contractual clauses.

• Ahrefs Pte. Ltd.

  Gives the Domain Rating of your product's domain. Receives only the domain name.

  Location: Singapore. Standard contractual clauses.

• Discord, Inc.

  Alerts for our team, in a private channel: a new account (your name and email), a new project, a payment, a request for a check by hand. Nothing else about you.

  Location: United States. Standard contractual clauses.

• Proton AG (SimpleLogin)

  Email aliases our operators use to create directory accounts for your product.

  Location: Switzerland. EU adequacy decision for Switzerland.

If you sign in with Google, when we offer it, Google acts as a separate controller under its own privacy policy.

Transfers outside the EU

Some providers above process data outside the European Economic Area. Each transfer relies on an adequacy decision of the European Commission (including the EU-US Data Privacy Framework for certified US companies) or on the Commission's standard contractual clauses, as stated for each provider. Write to [email protected] for a copy of the safeguards.

How long we keep it

Account, projects, listing profiles, submissions and proofs

While your account is open. Deleted or anonymised within 30 days after it is closed, except what follows.

Orders, invoices, payment and billing records, terms acceptance

10 years from the end of the financial year, as French accounting law requires (Commercial Code, art. L123-22).

Emails received from directories

Their text and links are deleted 180 days after they arrive. A short record (sender, subject, date, what it changed) stays in the submission's history while the project exists.

Pages SubmitiumBot fetched (crawl logs)

180 days.

Directory accounts created for your product

While the project exists. The password is stored encrypted.

Sign-in sessions (IP address, browser)

Deleted when you sign out, when an expired session is next used, and when your account is closed.

Usage counters for fair-use limits

While your account is open.

Server logs

Up to 90 days.

Messages to support

Up to 3 years after our last exchange.

Your rights

You can ask to access your data, correct it, delete it, restrict its use, receive it in a portable format, and object to uses based on our legitimate interest, including reminders. You can also tell us what should happen to your data after your death. To close your account and delete your data, or for any other request, write to [email protected] from the address of your account. We answer within one month and may ask you to confirm your identity. Invoices and payment records are kept for the period the law requires even after your account is closed.

If you think we have not handled your data properly, you can complain to the CNIL, the French data protection authority: cnil.fr, 3 place de Fontenoy, TSA 80715, 75334 Paris Cedex 07, France.

Cookies and browser storage

We use no analytics, advertising or social media cookies, so we don't ask for cookie consent. We only use what the service needs:

Session cookie

Set by our API for submitium.com once you sign in, to keep you signed in. It lasts 7 days and is renewed while you use the app.

Google sign-in cookie

When we offer Google sign-in: a short-lived cookie that protects the sign-in while it happens.

Browser storage submitium.cart.<project>

Kept on your device only: the directories you picked and haven't paid yet, so the cart survives a reload.

Browser storage submitium.picks

Kept on your device only: the number of directories you chose on the pricing page, read once after you sign up, then deleted.

Browser storage submitium.tracked.<step>

Kept in the open tab only: a sign-up step or an order already counted by our audience measurement, so a reload doesn't count it twice.

We count visits with Umami, which we run ourselves on our server in Germany (Hetzner). It sets no cookie and keeps nothing on your device. It records the page (without its query string and without the identifiers of the app), the referring site, the browser, the type of device, the language, the country, how fast the page loaded, and the steps of signing up and ordering. It does not keep your IP address, and nothing in it identifies you or follows you across sites. The figures are kept as statistics. Pages of our back office are not counted.

The payment page is run by Stripe on checkout.stripe.com, which sets its own cookies to prevent fraud, under Stripe's policy. The badge wall we install on your site is plain HTML your server includes: it sets no cookie and runs no script of ours. Your visitors' browsers load each badge image from the directory that provides it.

Security

Data travels over HTTPS. Passwords are stored as hashes, and the passwords of directory accounts are encrypted. Access to customer data is limited to the people who operate Submitium. If a breach puts your data at risk, we will tell you and the CNIL as the law requires.

If you run a directory

We keep public facts about the directories we submit to (name, address, submission process, badge programme, Domain Rating) and the emails they send to our project inboxes. Our crawler fetches public pages as described on the SubmitiumBot page. To ask about this data, write to [email protected]; for anything else, [email protected].

Changes

We will update this policy when our practices or providers change, and change the date at the top. We tell account holders by email about changes that matter to them. Our terms of sale and legal notice complete this policy.