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 provider, WorkOS.
• 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 home: ZIP code and utility.
• 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.
• Membership: its status, tier and dates, 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.

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.

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, 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.

Who we share it with

We don’t sell your data, share it for advertising, or share it with electricity providers. Only these service providers handle it, on our behalf and for the purposes above:

• Amazon Web Services: hosting, our database and file storage, and email delivery (Amazon SES).
• WorkOS: sign-in.
• Stripe: payments. Stripe also handles payment data under its own privacy policy.

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. 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 membership price tier, 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.

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

Our database and files are in Amazon Web Services data centers in the United States, encrypted at rest and in transit. Sign-in is processed by WorkOS and payments by Stripe, which run their own services and may process data in other locations under their own safeguards.

Access is limited to the people who run KiloHound. We never store a password: WorkOS handles sign-in.

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 and server logs within 30. 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 roll over within 7 days and server logs within 30. “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 and rights

Stop plan alerts (switch alerts 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.

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.

Texas residents have rights under the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act, including to see, correct, delete and get a copy of their personal data. Write to support@kilohound.com; we answer within 45 days, and if we turn a request down you can appeal by replying to our answer.

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. 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.

Earlier versions are available on request from support@kilohound.com.