Privacy policy

What we collect

What we need to compare electricity plans for your home and run your account:

• Account: your email address and name, through our sign-in service.
• Signing in: we run sign-in ourselves, on our own server at auth.kilohound.com (Authentik, operated by Bivalogic). It keeps your email address and name; a password, if you set one, stored only as a salted hash (never the password itself); the public key of each passkey you add (the private key never leaves your device); the one-time links and codes we email you to sign in, confirm a new account, reset a password or confirm a change on Sign-in & security, which expire after 10 minutes to 24 hours; and a log of sign-in events (the time, your IP address and the approximate location looked up from it, and your browser), kept 90 days.
• A check without an account: the ZIP, usage and plan you enter, tied to a random value in a cookie rather than a name or email, and which version of the notice on the check you saw and when. We keep it 30 days after your last visit (see “How long we keep it”).
• Your homes: for each, the name you give it, its ZIP code and utility, and any move you plan (the new ZIP code, the date, and the usage you expect there). When a home moves, its usage at the old address stays with it as history.
• Your electricity usage: a Smart Meter Texas export or monthly readings from your bills. 15-minute usage can show when people are home; we use it only to price plans for you.
• Your current plan: its Electricity Facts Label (or link) and contract end date.
• Files you upload (a usage export or a facts label PDF): we read the numbers out of them and discard the file. A PDF sits in a temporary file on our server only while it’s being read.
• Your plan history: the plans you’ve entered over time and our past estimates for your home, so we can show what switching has saved. It’s deleted with your account.
• Settings: your alert and email choices, plan filters, and any home battery or flexible load you tell us about.
• Your authorization: which version of the data authorization on the check you accepted, and when.
• Membership: its status and dates, whether it was bought or came with an invite code, how many extra homes it includes, and the customer and subscription IDs and any promotion code from Stripe, our payment processor. Your card details go to Stripe and never reach us.
• Invite codes: the code you redeemed and when.
• The launch list: your email address, the page you joined from, an allowlisted campaign tag (like “newsletter”), the version of the consent line you saw, and when.
• Referrals: your referral code, and who referred you.
• The alerts and emails we send you, and anything you write to us, including complaints and privacy requests.

What we never collect

We do not ask for or store Social Security numbers, bank or card details, or the password to your electricity account. We never enroll you in a plan, so we never need them.

Sensitive data

We don’t collect what Texas privacy law calls sensitive data: racial or ethnic origin, religion, health, sexuality, immigration or citizenship status, genetic or biometric data, precise geolocation, or data about a child we know is under 13. If we ever needed any of it, we would ask for your consent first.

Your usage isn’t sensitive data under that law (it leaves data from utility meters out of “precise geolocation”), but 15-minute readings can show when people are home and awake, so we treat them as private: they’re used only to price plans for your home, never shared beyond the service providers below and never sold.

Smart Meter Texas data

We don’t connect to Smart Meter Texas or hold your login there. You download your own usage export from smartmetertexas.com and upload it to us (or type 12 monthly readings from your bills). We keep the dates and kWh readings, use them only to price plans for your home and to send the emails you’ve turned on, and delete them with your check or your account. Upload usage only for a home whose electricity account you hold or are allowed to manage.

How we use it

To compare electricity plans for your home, to send the emails you’ve turned on (for example, an alert when a switch saves at least $60 a year after fees), to run and bill your membership and send the billing notices it requires, to answer your questions and complaints, to keep the service secure, and to meet our legal obligations. If you join the launch list, we email you once when KiloHound opens, and nothing else.

We don’t use your data for targeted advertising, and we don’t profile you to make decisions that have legal or similarly significant effects on you. Our recommendation is the math on your own usage, for you to act on or not.

Who we share it with

We don’t sell your data, share it for advertising, or share it with electricity providers. Before you hand over your ZIP and usage, the check asks you to authorize sharing it, and its authorization (quoted at the end of this list) names the service providers that receive what you enter there. Everyone who handles your data for us, on our behalf and for the purposes above:

• Hosting: during the beta the service runs on a server we operate in the United States, with nightly encrypted database backups in Amazon Web Services. Everything you give us is stored there.
• Amazon Web Services: backups and file storage, and email delivery through Amazon SES, which receives your email address and the emails we send you.
• Have I Been Pwned: when you set a password, we check it against its list of passwords exposed in data breaches. Only the first 5 characters of a hash of your password leave our server, never the password, so the service can’t learn it.
• Stripe: payments, if you buy a membership. It receives your email address, your payment details and the address it needs to work out sales tax, and handles payment data under its own privacy policy.
• The authorization reads: “By continuing, you authorize KiloHound (Bivalogic LLC) to share what you give us only with the companies that run the service for us: Amazon Web Services, for backups, file storage and email (Amazon SES), and Stripe, for payments if you buy a membership. We run our own servers and our own sign-in. We never share it with electricity providers and never sell it.”

When the law requires it

We disclose information when the law requires it, for example in answer to a subpoena or a request from the Public Utility Commission of Texas. When you follow a link to a provider’s site to enroll, that provider’s privacy policy applies to what you give it.

Cookies

We set a cookie to keep you signed in, a short-lived one while you sign in, and one that remembers a referral link you followed. Our sign-in page, auth.kilohound.com, sets its own cookies to run sign-in and keep you signed in there for up to 14 days, and keeps the email you typed in your browser’s session storage for 10 minutes so you can switch how you sign in. If you run the free check without an account, a cookie holds a random value that finds your check again; it expires 30 days after your last visit, and signing in or deleting the check removes it. Your light or dark theme is kept in your browser’s local storage, and a ZIP code you type on the home page stays in your browser’s session storage until you finish setup. We use no advertising or tracking cookies.

Site analytics

To see which pages help people and where they get stuck, we count visits with Umami, an open-source analytics tool we run on our own servers, so no analytics company receives this data. It sets no cookies.

For each page view it records the page’s address (without anything after the “?”, except a link’s utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign tags, recorded only when they are one of our own campaign labels such as “newsletter”, otherwise as “other”), the website that linked you (its address only, not the page), the page title, your browser, operating system, device type, screen size and language, and your approximate location (country, region and city), looked up from your IP address on our server. Analytics doesn’t store your IP address. Visits are grouped under a random-looking identifier derived from your IP address and browser, which changes every month. We also count a few steps, such as starting a savings check, adding usage, seeing its answer, being asked to sign in, saving a check to an account or opening checkout, labelled only with which button was used, the kind of membership, the kind of answer (for example, switch now or wait), why sign-in was asked for (alerts, saving or the plan) and whether the check had an account.

Analytics never receives your email address, name, account, ZIP code, address or usage. If your browser sends Do Not Track, nothing is recorded. We keep the visit records for up to 24 months, then delete them; what we look at are aggregate reports (counts of visits and steps). The records aren’t tied to your account and we don’t try to work out who you are from them, but details like your browser, device and city could in principle help single out a visit, so we treat them as personal data. They aren’t deleted when you delete your account; if you’d like yours looked for and removed, write to us.

Server logs

Like most websites, our servers log each request: the time, the page or API address, the result, and the IP address it came from. We use these logs for security and to fix problems, and keep them for 30 days.

Where it lives and how we protect it

Your data is stored in the United States, encrypted in transit, and our backups are encrypted. Sign-in runs on our own server, in the same place. Payments are processed by Stripe, which runs its own services and may process data in other locations under its own safeguards.

Access is limited to the people who run KiloHound, and they must use a second factor to administer sign-in. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes, so nobody, us included, can read them.

How long we keep it

Your account data stays while you have an account. When you delete your account, we remove it from our live database right away; our encrypted backups roll over within 7 days (42 days during the beta) and server logs within 30.

Your sign-in account on auth.kilohound.com (your email address, name, any password hash, your passkeys and your sessions) is kept while your KiloHound account exists. Deleting your KiloHound account deletes your sign-in account there too. If our sign-in server can’t be reached at that moment, we keep only that sign-in account’s ID (no email or name) and retry automatically until it’s deleted. Its sign-in event logs, which record the account’s email address with each event, are deleted after 90 days either way, and the sign-in server’s backups roll over on the same schedule as ours above; after that, nothing about you remains there.

What stays after you delete your account: Texas rules for electricity brokers (16 TAC §25.486(l)) require records that show the rules were followed, kept at least 2 years. So a few minimal records are kept separately from your account for 2 years, then deleted: your data authorizations (which version, and when), the disclosures we gave you and when, payments and refunds, and complaints (a complaint is kept while it’s open and for at least 2 years after it’s closed). They’re used only to show we followed the rules, for example to the Public Utility Commission of Texas. Stripe, our payment processor, keeps its own payment records as the law requires.

A check run without an account is kept 30 days after your last visit to it (each visit starts the 30 days again), so you can come back to it. Then a job that runs once a day deletes it from our live database, so it can take up to a day longer; backups and server logs roll over as above. “Delete my answers now” on your result deletes it right away. If you create an account or sign in from that browser, the check moves into your account and is kept like the rest of your account data.

The launch list keeps your address until you unsubscribe (the link is in the email) or ask us to remove it.

Your choices

Stop plan alerts (switch alerts, and the fee-free and contract-end reminders) or the monthly check-up with the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of any of them, which works without signing in, or in Settings. Delete your account in Settings.

Some emails aren’t optional while you have a paid membership: the payment confirmation, the reminder before your membership renews, and notices about a refund you asked for (that we received the request, and when the refund is issued). They’re part of the membership’s billing and legal terms, so they’re sent whatever your email settings say and have no unsubscribe link. Turning renewal off or deleting your account stops future renewal reminders.

A check without an account carries no name or email, so we can only find it through the browser that ran it: delete it there with “Delete my answers now”, or it’s deleted on its own as described above.

Your privacy rights

Under the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act you have the right to:

• confirm whether we process your personal data, and see it;
• correct it if it’s wrong;
• delete it (apart from the records described under “How long we keep it”);
• get a copy of the data you gave us in a portable, machine-readable file (your usage and plan as CSV or JSON, for example);
• opt out of the sale of your data, of targeted advertising, and of profiling that has legal or similarly significant effects. We do none of these, so there’s nothing to switch off, but you can still tell us and we’ll record it.

How to use your rights, and appeals

Email support@kilohound.com from the address on your account (or tell us how to recognize your check) and say what you’d like. We may ask you to confirm the request from that address before we act on it. It’s free up to twice a year. We answer within 45 days; if we need longer, we tell you why within those 45 days and take at most 45 more.

If we turn down any part of a request, we tell you why and how to appeal. To appeal, reply to our answer with “Appeal” in the subject. We decide within 60 days and tell you in writing what we decided and why.

If we deny your appeal, you can complain to the Texas Attorney General: https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/consumer-protection/file-consumer-complaint/consumer-privacy-rights

Children

KiloHound is for adults. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 18; if you think we have, write to us and we’ll delete it.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we post the new version here with its version number and the day it takes effect, and keep the earlier versions below. For a material change, we email everyone with an account at least 30 days before it takes effect. Using KiloHound after that day means you accept the new version; if you don’t, you can stop using KiloHound and delete your account.

Version 5 took effect on Oct 17, 2026, during the beta, before any membership was sold.

Version 4 (effective Oct 16, 2026, replaced Oct 17, 2026)Version 3 (effective Oct 14, 2026, replaced Oct 16, 2026)Version 2 (effective Oct 13, 2026, replaced Oct 14, 2026)Version 1 (effective Oct 4, 2026, replaced Oct 13, 2026)