Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Welcome to the Payment Approval Checker (referred to as "we," "our," or "us"). We are committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your information when you visit our website at softstar.ink/payments/ and interact with our Payment Approval Checker tool.

By using our service, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this policy.

2. Information We Collect

We collect information to provide and improve our service. The types of information we may collect include:

• Interaction & Usage Data: We collect details about how you use our interactive checker, including the use cases, business status, needs, and platforms you choose. This data is processed locally on your client device or processed in aggregate to deliver risk assessments and is not linked to your personal identity.
• Anonymous Case Submissions:If you use our optional "Share Your Case" feature to submit payment platform rejection cases, we collect details about the targeted platform, your business status, rejection reasons, and your product description.
• Email Address: Providing an email address in our case submission form is entirely optional. If provided, we only use it to follow up regarding your case. We explicitly advise that you do not submit sensitive credentials, bank details, API keys, or compliance documents.

3. Cookies and Analytics Tracking

We use light analytics tools (such as Google Analytics or Plausible) to monitor traffic and understand how users interact with our features. These tools track general information such as referrer pages, page visits, session duration, and interactive check completions.

You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, refusing cookies will not impair your use of our core checker functionality.

4. How We Use Your Information

The information collected is used for the following purposes:

• To provide, operate, and maintain the Payment Approval Checker.
• To improve and optimize our risk-matching logic, ruleset, and interface.
• To compile, format, and publish aggregated, fully anonymized case studies that help other indie hackers navigate payment onboarding.
• To correspond with you, if you choose to provide your email address and request direct assistance or clarify a case submission.

5. Data Security and Retention

We prioritize the security of your data. We implement industry-standard administrative and technical security measures to protect any data we process.

We retain anonymous check statistics and de-identified case submissions indefinitely to build our policy database and improve content. If you provide an optional email address, we retain it only for as long as necessary to complete our correspondence, after which it is deleted or securely archived.

6. Third-Party Service Providers

We may employ third-party companies and tools to facilitate our operations. These include form management providers (such as Tally or Formspree) for managing case submissions and cloud hosting providers. These third parties have access to your submitted data only to perform these tasks on our behalf and are obligated not to disclose or use it for any other purpose.

7. GDPR and CCPA Privacy Rights

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have specific rights regarding your data, including the right to request access, correction, deletion, or transfer of personal data we hold. Since we focus heavily on anonymized interaction data, we may require additional context (such as your submitted email address) to process request verifications.