Privacy Policy
The short version
The free tools on this site work without an account and without sending us anything. If you choose to make an account, we hold your email address and a list of which tools you've finished, and nothing else. If you buy Application Assist, we hold what you upload and tell us for your review, and delete it on a set timetable (below). We don't sell personal information, we don't pass your details to agents or landlords, and we don't ask for anything we don't need.
What we collect
- Using the free tools: nothing. What you type into the checklist, the affordability calculator, the move-in cost calculator and the rest is worked out in your browser and stays on your device. It is not sent to us.
- Account holders: your email address, and a record of which of the free tools you've completed. That's the whole account. No documents, no identity information, no income figures, and nothing you entered into any calculator.
- Checklist subscribers: your email address, and a record of your consent to receive the checklist plus five application-tip emails. If you join the Application Assist launch list and choose to answer, how many people will be on your application, used only to plan pricing and review capacity.
- People we set up ourselves: if you ask us to set you up (say you rang or emailed), the team keeps a customer record: your name, your email, a phone number if you gave one, when we invited you to sign in, and our notes. It's kept until you ask us to delete it, and it never holds documents.
- Share links (“give a mate $20 off”): every Application Assist order gets a short random code, and the share link carries only that code, not your name, email or anything about your application. If a friend buys through your link, their purchase records the code, so the team can see that a sale came through your link (and you'd be named to the team, not to the friend). The friend's browser remembers the code for 30 days so the discount still applies if they come back later; nothing about the friend is sent to you. To send you the $20, the team refunds part of your original payment, and that refund is recorded against it.
- Partner codes (an agent gave you a code): some real estate agents and property managers hand out a Front of the Pile code. The link carries only the code, nothing about you. If you buy using it, your purchase records the code so the partner can be credited for the referral; the partner is shown counts and amounts only, never your name, your email or anything about your application. Your browser remembers the code for 90 days so the discount still applies if you come back later. Only one code works at a time: a partner code and a mate’s code never combine.
- The chat panel: what you type into it, and the answers. Email addresses and any run of eight or more digits are taken out of your message before it is sent anywhere, so a phone or account number you type by habit does not leave your browser. Your browser also keeps a short random code so the conversation hangs together across pages; it is not your name and not an advertising identifier. No IP address is recorded. Conversations are deleted after 90 days. More below.
- Tool feedback: when a free tool finishes, it asks whether it did what you needed. The tap is a count with no name on it, like any other visit count. If you also type a line, we keep the line, the tool’s address and the day; it is deleted after 90 days and tied to your account only if you were signed in when you sent it. It never asks for an email address.
- Playbook buyers: your name, email and payment confirmation. Card details are handled entirely by our payment provider. We never see or store them.
- Application Assist customers: the application documents you choose to upload through your private dashboard (which may include identity documents, income evidence and references); what you tell us about your application: the names of the people applying with you, how each of you is paid (the type only; we never need to know which Centrelink payment), the property, rent and closing date if you have one, and the messages you send us; your phone number, only if you'd like a call; the email address of anyone you add to your order so they can sign in, and each person's choice about what the others can see; and the pack we write for you. The team also keeps working notes on your order and a timeline of it (for example, when a file was added to which slot, never what was in it).
Accounts, and what an account actually does
An account does two things: the list of tools you've finished follows you between your phone and your laptop, and any plan you choose to save is kept for you. There is no password. You sign in with a one-time code we email you, which means there is no password for us to store or lose.
What syncs to your account is the list of tool names you've completed. What you type into a tool stays on your device, unless you press Save to my account on a result. Then we keep that result, and the numbers and choices you gave the tool (never a name, email, address or income figure), in your account until you delete it. Only you can see a saved plan; the team can't. If you never sign in, nothing about you is stored anywhere but your own browser.
Making an account is not agreeing to receive marketing. Those are two separate choices, with two separate boxes, and neither is ticked for you.
How we use it
To deliver what you bought or requested: sending the checklist and tips, delivering the Playbook and its 12 months of update emails, performing your Application Assist review, and, if you have an account, keeping your file in step across your devices. We do not sell personal information, and we never share your application documents with agents, landlords or anyone else.
Application Assist documents
Documents are accepted through the private dashboard on this site, which you open by signing in with a one-time code sent to the email address you paid with. Please don't email documents to us. If some arrive that way, we move them into your dashboard and delete the email. Before uploading you'll be told exactly what's needed and what to black out: licence and passport numbers, tax file numbers, bank account numbers, and irrelevant transactions wherever possible (Queensland agents cannot request transaction statements anyway). Your files are stored encrypted in Sydney, Australia, in an area that only you, anyone else on your order, and our review team can open. That infrastructure (Supabase, Sydney) is SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 certified; Front of the Pile itself, as a small business, is not audited to those standards. They are used solely to perform your review and are deleted within 60 days of the review being delivered; the review itself stays on your dashboard until then.
When more than one person is on an order
The person who books can add the people applying with them. Someone who uploads their own gets an invite from the person who added them, not from us, and signs in with their own email. Each person chooses what the others on the order can see: their figures and documents, their figures only, or neither. Everyone sees names and progress; nobody sees another person's email address except the person who added them. Anyone on the order can add a file for someone else (unless that person turns it off), but only that person, whoever added it, and the review team can open it. A person can take themselves off an order at any time, which deletes their part of it the same day; the others keep theirs. Anything another person already downloaded is theirs.
Calls and messages
If you'd like the 15-minute call, your phone number is held by the review team only, never on the part of the order the others can see, and deleted when your order closes. After a call the team keeps a short note: the date, how long, what was agreed. Messages on your dashboard, and any emails you send us, are kept with your order and deleted with it. Emails we send you only say there's something new, never names, figures or details.
How the team checks your documents
The review team marks each item on your list as it checks it: fine, needs another look, or a problem to build around. If an item needs another look, a short note about it appears on that item on your dashboard (for you, and for anyone who uploads for you), and adding a new file sends it back to the team. The other marks and the team's notes aren't shown to anyone else. All of them are kept with your order and deleted with it. When something isn't working for you, a team member can open your dashboard exactly as you see it, read only, so they can see what you see; each time they do, it's noted on your order. Your income summary can be downloaded as one PDF with its documents behind it: that file is put together in your own browser from documents you can already open, and we don't keep a copy of it. On screen, both on the team's dashboard and on yours, documents show blurred until someone chooses to look at them, and blur again after a minute without any activity. To keep your files easy to find, the team may give each one a short name, like “Payslip 1”, or move a file you put under the wrong item to the right one; those names are kept with your order and deleted with it, and every move is noted on your order.
How the team works with your documents
The team opens your documents in the browser, from the dashboard. If a file has to be downloaded to work on it, it goes into one working folder on an encrypted computer, and that folder is emptied when your order closes. To translate a document that isn't in English, organise income figures, or draft wording, the team may use paid AI tools (Claude from Anthropic, and ChatGPT from OpenAI) on accounts set so your information isn't used to train their models. We give them only what the task needs, a person checks every figure and every word, and we delete those conversations when your order closes. The calculators and tools on this site don't use AI at all: what you type into them is worked out in your browser.
The about-me drafting tool (optional)
Your dashboard may offer a tool that drafts the “about me” for your application from a few questions. It's labelled on the page, and you don't have to use it. You can write it yourself. If you do use it, the answers you type into its six questions, and only those, are sent to Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic in the United States, through Anthropic's business service. Anthropic doesn't use them to train its models and deletes them within 30 days, unless it has to keep them longer for safety or legal reasons. Long numbers and email addresses are taken out before anything is sent. The tool never sees your documents. We don't keep your answers; the draft is only saved if you choose to save it to your list, and it's then deleted with the rest of your order. We record that you used it and when (nothing else) to limit it to six drafts a day, and that record goes when you leave the order or it closes.
What these standards mean
SOC 2 Type 2: an independent auditor examines a company's controls for security, availability and confidentiality, and confirms they actually operated over a period of months, not just that they exist on paper (that's the difference between Type 1 and Type 2).
ISO 27001: the international standard for how an organisation manages information security: policies, access, risk, incident handling. Certified means an accredited auditor has checked the whole system and re-checks it on a schedule. Both of these are listed on Supabase's security page. For a sense of what they mean in practice: Canva, Xero and Atlassian each hold the same two certifications for their own platforms.
PCI DSS Level 1: the card industry's security standard. Level 1 is the strictest tier, assessed every year by a qualified auditor. Stripe holds it (Stripe's security page). Stripe is the same payment company behind Atlassian, Canva and Xero, and over a million businesses across Australia and New Zealand, which is why your card number goes to Stripe and never touches this site.
These are the providers' certifications, not ours. Front of the Pile is a small business and isn't audited to those standards. What we add on top is a private area only the people on your order and the review team can open, deletion within 60 days, and no analytics on the dashboard.
Reviews
After your review is delivered, you can rate it and say how it went on your dashboard. We keep your rating, your words and your email (so we can find your review if you ask us to change or remove it). If you tick that we may quote you, the website shows your words, the name you chose (or “A customer”) and the month, never your email. We never edit what you wrote. A review we can't show (for example, one that names someone) stays private, and its rating still counts in the average we show. You can delete it yourself from your dashboard at any time, or ask us and we will; a deleted review is gone, including from the average.
The chat panel
The panel in the corner of the site is an automated assistant, and it says so before you type anything. It answers questions about what Application Assist includes, what it costs, how long it takes, how documents are handled and how refunds work, from a fixed set of facts taken off this site. It is not one of the tools, it does no calculations, and it never sees a document. The calculators on this site still use no AI at all.
What it will not do. It does not give tenancy, legal or financial advice, does not judge whether an application will be approved, and cannot see your order. When a question is one of those, it says so and the page offers you an email box instead. That is the same list of exclusions published on the service scope page.
Where what you type goes. Your message, with email addresses and long numbers already taken out, is sent to Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic in the United States, through Anthropic's business service. Anthropic does not use it to train its models and deletes it within 30 days, unless it has to keep it longer for safety or legal reasons. A copy of the conversation is kept in our own database in Sydney, readable only by the review team, and deleted after 90 days.
If you leave your email. It is kept with that conversation, and the conversation is emailed to the team so a person can answer you. Nothing else happens with it: it does not join the mailing list, and we do not pass it on.
When a person replies. Since 13 October 2026 the team can answer you in the panel itself, not only by email. Their reply appears in the same conversation the next time the panel is open, and is emailed to you as well if you left an address and have not already seen it on screen. Which member of the team wrote a reply is recorded against it, so we can answer for what we told you. If you reply to that email rather than in the panel, it reaches our mailbox as ordinary email and is not added to the conversation.
Please keep personal and financial details out of the panel. It is for questions about the service, and anything about your own application is better dealt with by email, or on your dashboard once you have one.
Email marketing and consent
You only receive emails you signed up for. Every marketing email includes a working one-click unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing is honoured immediately. We record when and how you gave consent. If you unsubscribe we keep your address on a suppression list, because that is the only way to make sure we don't email you again.
Where your information is held, and who else handles it
Some of the services we use to run this site are based outside Australia. We're naming them because you're entitled to know which companies and which countries are involved:
- Supabase: accounts, the saved tool list, and the documents Application Assist customers upload for their review. The database and the document storage are physically located in Sydney, Australia, on infrastructure certified to SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 (Supabase's certifications, not ours). The company we contract with is Supabase Pte. Ltd., registered in Singapore, and its own policy notes that information may be transferred to, stored in or processed in Singapore and the United States.
- Resend (Resend, Inc., United States): sends the sign-in emails, and the emails about your order that we send from the team dashboard (that your dashboard is open, your list is ready, a reminder, an invite to sign in). It handles your email address and the message in order to deliver it.
- MailerLite (MailerLite, Inc., United States, with subscriber data stored in the European Union): the checklist and application-tip emails.
- Netlify (United States): hosts the website itself.
- Stripe (Stripe Payments Australia Pty Ltd, part of Stripe, Inc., United States; PCI DSS Level 1): takes payment when you buy something. Your card details go to Stripe and never to us; we see your name, email address, what you bought, and the last four digits of the card.
- Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (ChatGPT), both United States: used by the team on Application Assist orders as described above, on paid accounts set so your information isn't used to train their models. Anthropic also runs the optional about-me drafting tool on the Assist dashboard, if you use it, and the automated assistant in the chat panel on this site.
Under Australian privacy law we remain accountable for how these companies handle information we give them, whatever their own terms say. If one of them mishandled your information, that is our problem to answer for, not something we can point elsewhere on.
How long we keep things
- Account email and saved tool list: while your account exists. If you close it or ask us to delete it, we destroy the data and finish removing the account within 30 days.
- Application Assist documents: deleted 60 days after your pack is delivered. Two weeks before, we check in: got a place (deleted within days), still looking (kept 30 more days, up to 120 days after delivery), or delete it now. If an order closes because we didn't hear from you for 30 days, anything uploaded is deleted 60 days after it closes. The pack stays on your dashboard until deletion.
- Everything else about an Application Assist order: what you told us, the review, the team's working notes, notes about you, and the email addresses of anyone you added: removed at the same time as your documents. What stays is a bare record of the order (your email, the dates, how many people it covered and the payment reference), kept for our tax records (below), with nothing about what was in your application.
- Chat conversations: deleted 90 days after the last message, along with your browser's random chat code and any email address you left in the panel. If you asked for a person, the copy emailed to the team lives in our mailbox like any other email you send us.
- Visit counts: deleted 90 days after the visit. These are counts, with no name or address attached to them at any point — see “Our own visit counter” under Analytics and advertising.
- Tool feedback: a typed line is deleted 90 days after it was written. The taps are visit counts like any other.
- Email subscribers: while you're subscribed, plus a suppression-list record after you unsubscribe so we can honour it.
- Purchase and tax records: kept as long as Australian tax and company law requires, which is currently five to seven years depending on the record. These are held by our payment provider and accountant, plus the bare order record described above.
- Backups: a copy of our database is taken each night and kept for up to 60 days, held by the team in Australia on an encrypted computer; Supabase keeps its own short-cycle backup in Sydney as well. These copies hold the records described above (who ordered, names, email addresses, phone numbers, messages, the team's notes), never the documents you upload. Those exist only in the Sydney storage and are never copied out. Because of this, something deleted from the live system can remain in a backup for up to 60 days before it ages out; backups are only ever used to restore the service after a loss, never to look anyone up.
Analytics and advertising
This site uses Plausible Analytics to count page visits and button clicks in aggregate. Plausible sets no cookies, stores no personal data, and does not track you across other websites; we see totals (for example, how many people finished the twenty-second test), never who you are or what you typed. Nothing you enter into a tool is sent to analytics.
Advertising. We pay for ads so renters searching for this kind of help can find us, and the site carries Google’s conversion tag on every page to make that spending measurable. If Front of the Pile advertises on Facebook or Instagram, Meta’s pixel does the same job there. Unlike Plausible, these set a cookie and can recognise your browser on other sites that use the same tag. What they tell us is narrow: that someone who arrived from one of our ads went on to buy a review. Neither ever receives your name, your email address, or anything you typed into a tool.
Your choice, and what happens before you make it. A banner asks before any of that is switched on. Until you answer it, Google’s tag loads but is told to store nothing and to build no advertising profile, and the Meta pixel does not load at all. Choose “No thanks” and it stays that way. Choose “That’s fine” and you can undo it by clearing this site’s data in your browser, which brings the banner back. Plausible is unaffected either way, because it is cookieless and holds nothing about you. You can also limit what Google does with its tag at My Ad Center, what Meta does with its own at Meta ad preferences, or block third-party cookies in your browser. The site works normally either way.
Where your first visit came from. Your browser keeps a short note of how you first arrived: a source name like “Google”, “Instagram” or a campaign name, the first page you landed on, when, and the first free tool you started. It stays in your browser. If you make an account, that note is saved with your account once, so we can see which places and tools lead people to Application Assist. It's never used for advertising, never shared, and it's on your account page with everything else (deleting your account deletes it).
Our own visit counter (added 15 October 2026). Alongside Plausible, this site keeps its own count of visits in our database in Sydney, because the figures we need from Plausible now sit behind a more expensive plan. It records the page you are on, a source name like “Google” or “Direct / None”, whether the window is phone, tablet or desktop size, and the few button-press events already listed above. It does not record your IP address, your browser's user agent, your name, your email, or anything you type into a tool or a form — and the address of the page is recorded without its query string, so anything after a “?” is dropped before it is sent. To count one browser once a day without being able to follow it from one day to the next, your browser combines a random code of its own with today's date and sends only a one-way hash of the two: the code itself never leaves your browser, and tomorrow's hash cannot be matched to today's. Switched off along with everything else if you add ?noanalytics=1 to any address on this site. Counts only, kept 90 days.
Access, correction and deletion
If you have an account, you can see everything it holds on your account page, and delete it from there yourself.
One limit worth stating plainly rather than burying: deleting from that page destroys your saved data immediately, but your email address remains on the sign-in record until we remove it by hand. Email us and we'll finish the job. We'd rather tell you that than claim a cleaner deletion than we actually perform.
For anything else, such as what we hold about you, corrections, or deletion of information that isn't tied to an account, email hello@frontofthepile.com.au. We aim to respond within 14 days.
Keeping it safe
Account data is protected so that each person can only ever reach their own records. This is enforced by the database itself, not just by the website. The review team signs in with an emailed code and then a personal PIN, and a reviewer can open only the orders assigned to them. We deliberately collect as little as possible, because information we never collected is information that cannot be lost.
Complaints
Raise privacy concerns with us first at the address above. If you're not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au).
Changes to this policy
If we change what we collect or who handles it, we update this page and change the date at the top. The date above tells you when it last changed.