Monte Climb
Privacy Policy
Working draft. This policy describes how Monte Climb handles your information today. A lawyer is reviewing it, and it will be updated, including the legal name and address of the business, before Monte Climb takes payments. Questions in the meantime: info@monteclimb.com.
The short version
- Your plan is saved to your Monte Climb account, so it is on each of your devices.
- When you ask William, our AI guide, a question, your message and the plan details he needs go to Anthropic to write the reply. Anthropic does not use them to train its models.
- If you connect a bank, Plaid handles the connection. We keep an encrypted connection token, never your bank login.
- Card payments are handled by Stripe. We never see your card number.
- We don’t sell your information or share it for advertising.
- You can ask us to delete your account and everything in it at any time.
1. Who we are
Monte Climb (“we”, “us”) runs this website, www.monteclimb.com, and the Monte Climb retirement-planning app. [The legal name and mailing address of the business will be added here.] You can reach us at info@monteclimb.com.
2. What we collect, where it is kept, and why
| What | Where it is kept | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your account: email address; your name and profile picture if you sign in with Google; a password if you create one (our sign-in provider stores it scrambled, and we never see it). | Supabase, our database and sign-in provider | To sign you in and keep your plan yours. |
| Your plan: what you enter or confirm, such as ages and dates of birth, names you give for yourself and your family, filing status, state and ZIP code, income, savings and account balances, spending, Social Security, pensions, property, debts, and the plan’s settings. | Your Monte Climb account (Supabase), where only your signed-in account can read it, and your device | To run your plan and keep it on each of your devices. |
| Conversations with William, your investment holdings, edits on the 1040 worksheet, and files in William’s Files folder. | Your device only (your browser’s storage) | So the app remembers them on that device. |
| Documents you share with William or import, such as statements, tax forms or pictures. | Sent to Anthropic to read; the file and what was read are kept on your device. We don’t store them on our servers. | To read the figures you asked us to use. |
| Bank connections, if you choose to connect. Plaid collects your bank login on its own page. | We keep an encrypted connection token and the bank’s name (Supabase). Balances and holdings come to your browser for you to review; the balances you apply are saved with your plan. | To refresh the balances you connected. |
| Payments. Stripe collects your card details. | We keep your subscription status, trial and renewal dates, Stripe customer and subscription IDs, and a record of the renewal terms you agreed to (the exact wording, the Terms version and the time). Stripe keeps the payment details. | To run your subscription and to show what you agreed to. |
| Usage counters: how many AI requests your account made and what William’s replies cost us each day. | Supabase, under your account’s ID | To keep the service within fair limits. |
| Feedback you send from the app: your message, the name and email you give, the page you were on and your browser type. | Delivered to us by email (Resend) and text message (Twilio) | To read and answer it. |
| Which ad or link brought you to this website: the campaign tags and ad click ID in the link (such as utm_source or gclid), the website you came from, and the day. | A first-party cookie named mc_attr on monteclimb.com, kept 90 days; attached to your checkout and, if you sign up with email, to your account | To learn which ads and links work. Advertising pixels from Meta and Google run only if you accept them in the cookie banner (see “Cookies, analytics and advertising” below). |
| Where you first came from: the campaign tags in the first link that brought this browser here (utm source, medium and campaign), the website you came from, the page you landed on, and the day. We also count visits and free Verdicts by where they came from. | A first-party cookie named mc_ft on monteclimb.com, kept 90 days and never overwritten; saved with your account when you create one. The counts go to our own marketing tool (Growthline) as totals per day and source, with no IP address, cookie or other identifier. | To learn which searches, posts and links bring people who find Monte Climb useful. |
| Blog email sign-ups: the email address you enter on the blog, the post you signed up from, and where you first came from. | Our own marketing tool (Growthline). No emails have been sent yet; before the first one, we will name the email service here. | To email you new posts. Ask us and we delete your address. |
| Technical data: your IP address, browser and device type, and the pages you load. | Standard server logs at our hosting providers (Vercel and Cloudflare). Our fonts load from Google Fonts, which also receives your IP address. | To deliver the pages and keep the service secure. |
The microphone button in the chat uses your browser’s built-in speech recognition. Some browsers, Chrome for one, do that on the browser maker’s servers. Your voice is not sent to us; only the text it becomes, when you send it.
Cookies, analytics and advertising
This website sets three small cookies of its own: mc_attr and mc_ft, described above, and mc_vs, which lasts only until you close your browser so that a visit is counted once. Visits are counted with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and does not follow you to other sites. Advertising cookies are set only after you choose Accept in the cookie banner at the bottom of the page, and only by two companies: Meta (the Meta pixel) and Google (the Google Ads tag). They record that your browser visited this site and, if you came from one of our ads, which ad, so that we can see which ads work and show our ads to people like our visitors; Meta and Google use what they receive under their own privacy policies. If you decline, nothing is set beyond remembering your answer, and the site works the same either way. To change your mind at any time, use the Cookie choices link in the footer of every page; declining there also deletes the advertising cookies on this site. If your browser sends the Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as a decline without asking.
3. How William, our AI guide, uses your information
William is an AI built on Anthropic’s Claude. For each reply, your message, the recent conversation and the details of your plan that he needs to answer are sent to Anthropic. Anthropic uses them to write the reply, does not use them to train its models, and deletes them within 30 days by default. It may keep them longer only where it needs to enforce its usage policy or the law requires it. The figures William quotes are computed by Monte Climb’s own engine from your plan.
If you add your own Anthropic API key in William’s settings, the key stays on your device. It travels with each request to our server, which passes it to Anthropic for that request only and never stores or logs it. Those requests are billed to your Anthropic account and governed by your agreement with Anthropic.
4. Who helps us run the service
We share information only with the companies that run parts of the service for us, and only what each needs:
- Supabase: database and sign-in.
- Anthropic: William’s replies and reading the documents you share.
- Plaid: bank connections, only if you connect one.
- Stripe: payments and subscriptions.
- Vercel hosts the app and our marketing tool (Growthline), which keeps the visit counts and blog email sign-ups; Cloudflare hosts this website and the sign-in page.
- Google: “Sign in with Google”, if you use it, and the fonts this site loads.
- Resend and Twilio: delivering the feedback you send us.
We don’t sell your personal information, and we don’t share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, except through the Meta and Google advertising cookies described in section 2, which run only if you accept them and stop when you decline. We may disclose information when the law requires it, to protect the rights and safety of our users or others, or as part of a merger or sale of the business, in which case this policy continues to apply to it.
5. How long we keep it
- Your account and plan: until you delete them or ask us to.
- A bank connection: until you disconnect it. Disconnecting in the app removes the connection at Plaid and deletes our token.
- Subscription and payment records: as long as tax and consumer law require. The record of the renewal terms you agreed to is kept for at least three years.
- Feedback: as long as we need it to answer and improve the app.
- The
mc_attrandmc_ftcookies: 90 days, or until you clear your cookies.mc_vs: until you close your browser. - Visit counts: as daily totals per source, with nothing that identifies you. Blog email sign-ups: until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete them.
- Advertising cookies, only if you accepted them: set by Meta (
_fbp, 90 days) and Google (_gcl_au, 90 days), or until you decline under Cookie choices. Your Accept or Decline itself is remembered for 12 months.
6. Your choices and rights
- See and correct your plan at any time in the app.
- Disconnect a bank at any time on the Connections page.
- Delete your account. Email info@monteclimb.com from the address on your account. We will delete your account, your plan and any bank connections within 30 days and tell you when it is done. Payment records we must keep by law are kept only for that purpose.
- Get a copy of what we hold about you: email us and we will send it.
Depending on where you live, you may have rights under state privacy laws, including California’s, to know what we collect, to get a copy, to correct it, to delete it, and to opt out of its sale or sharing. We don’t sell personal information. The only “sharing” as those laws define it is the advertising cookies in section 2, which run only if you accept them; to opt out, decline in the cookie banner or under Cookie choices in the footer, or turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser, which we honor. To use any of these rights, email us; we will answer within the time the law allows and will not treat you differently for asking.
7. Security
Every connection to Monte Climb is encrypted (HTTPS). Your plan in our database can be read only by your signed-in account. Bank connection tokens are encrypted (AES-256-GCM), and card details never reach our systems. No service is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your information, we will tell you as the law requires.
8. Children
Monte Climb is for adults. It is not meant for anyone under 18, and we don’t knowingly collect information from children.
9. Where your information is processed
Monte Climb is built for people in the United States. Your information is processed in the United States and in other countries where our service providers operate.
10. Changes to this policy
When we change this policy we will post the new version here with a new date. If a change matters to how your information is used, we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect.
11. Contact
Email info@monteclimb.com.