Privacy Policy
What Approval Paths collects, why, who it goes to, how long we keep it, and how to get it deleted.
Last updated 9 September 2026.
The short version
Approval Paths is a self-assessment tool. You tell us what you want to buy and what your finances look like, and we score how ready you are to apply for it. We never pull your credit, we are not a lender, we are not a credit repair service, and we do not sell your information.
What you give us
- Contact details: your name, email address and a US phone number, collected before we build your results.
- What you are trying to do: the goal (a vehicle, a home, a credit card or a personal loan), the amount, any down payment or trade-in, and your timeline.
- Figures you type in yourself: your credit score range, credit utilization, how long you have had credit, recent inquiries, late payments, collections, your income and your monthly debt payments.
- Account details if you create one: your email and a password, which we store only as a salted hash and can never read back.
- Anything you send us by email or upload, such as a profile image.
What we collect while you use the site
- Pages you visit and steps you reach in the calculator, tied to a first-party cookie so we can see where people get stuck.
- Your IP address, used to apply rate limits and block abuse.
- Whether you opened or clicked one of our marketing emails, if you agreed to receive them.
- Records of what you paid for: the amount, the date, the plan and the identifiers Stripe gives us.
What we never collect
We do not run a credit check. We make no soft pull and no hard pull, we are not a consumer reporting agency, and we receive nothing from Experian, Equifax, TransUnion or any other bureau. Every figure in your result comes from what you typed in. We also never see or store your card number: payments happen on Stripe's own checkout page.
How we use it
- To calculate your Approval Score, your blockers and your plan.
- To create and secure your account, and to send you the emails the service needs to work, such as verification and receipts.
- To take payment and manage your subscription.
- To answer you when you contact support.
- To understand, in aggregate, which parts of the product work and which do not.
- To send you marketing email, only if you asked for it, and only until you unsubscribe.
Who else sees it
Only the companies that make the service run, and only what each of them needs:
- Stripe, to take payment and manage subscriptions. Stripe receives your name, email and payment details directly from you.
- Our email provider, to deliver the messages we send you.
- Cloudflare, which serves the site, filters bots and provides privacy-preserving traffic analytics.
We do not sell your information, we do not rent it, and we do not hand your profile or your score to lenders. Some units on the site are paid placements and are always marked Sponsored; advertisers pay for the space and receive nothing about you.
Cookies we set
- A sign-in cookie that keeps you logged in, for 30 days.
- A visitor cookie that links you to the results you paid for, so you can come back to them.
- An analytics cookie that counts one visit per person per day.
- A referral cookie, for 90 days, if you arrived through someone's invite link.
These are strictly first-party. We run no advertising trackers and no cross-site profiling.
How long we keep it
- Your account and everything in it stays until you delete it.
- The contents of emails we have already sent are wiped after 30 days; only the fact that we sent them remains.
- Encrypted backups are kept for 14 days and then destroyed.
- Records of money paid and refunded are kept for as long as tax and accounting rules require, with your name and account removed once you delete your account.
Deleting your account
Go to Account, then Settings, and choose to delete your account. You will be asked for your password. When you confirm, we cancel any active subscription, delete your Stripe customer record, sign you out everywhere, and permanently remove your account, your scores, your goals, your action items, your saved profile and the contact record we captured when you first used the calculator.
What survives is the financial record of what you paid, with your name and account detached from it, because we are required to keep it. If you would rather we deleted something specific, write to us and we will tell you honestly whether we can.
Your other choices
- You can see and correct everything on your profile from your account at any time.
- You can unsubscribe from marketing email with the link at the bottom of any one of them, and we will not send another.
- You can ask us for a copy of what we hold on you by writing to us.
Security
The site is served only over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed with argon2id. Sign-in sessions are random tokens stored hashed, never as plain text. Payment card details never touch our servers. Access to the database is restricted to the machine that runs the site.
Children
Approval Paths is for adults. It is not directed at anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a minor has given us information, tell us and we will delete it.
Where we operate
Approval Paths is a United States service, built for US lending, and the information you give us is processed in the United States.
Changes
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects what we do with information we already hold, we will tell people who have accounts by email before it takes effect.
Contact
Questions about privacy, or a request about your own information, go to [email protected].