Privacy Policy
Last updated: November 2026
1. Information We Collect
When you create an account, we collect your .edu email address, name, and profile photo (provided via Clerk authentication). When you use Quadlance, we also collect:
- Profile data: bio, university affiliation, major, graduation year, skills, social links (GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter, website)
- Listing data: titles, descriptions, prices, categories, and uploaded images
- Messages: content exchanged between users
- Transaction data: payment amounts, status, Stripe account info, and, for a project marked as done outside Quadlance, the value you choose to report (seen only by the two parties and Quadlance administrators)
- Referral data: referral code, referral attribution (who referred you)
- Business data: company name, website, industry, and description (for business clients)
- Email capture submissions: email address and source page, collected from visitors who sign up for launch notifications
- Email preferences: your opt-in/opt-out choices for message, transaction, digest, marketing, and category alert emails, including which listing categories you subscribe to
- Email opt-outs: if you unsubscribe from promotional email, your email address and when and how you opted out
- Activity data: last login time, used for engagement features like weekly digests and re-engagement emails
- Usage data: pages visited, features used, session recordings (via PostHog)
2. How We Use Your Information
- To operate and improve the Quadlance marketplace
- To process payments and payouts
- To send transactional emails (payment confirmations, new messages, deliveries, disputes)
- To send periodic digest and re-engagement emails (each has an Unsubscribe link, and you can opt out from Settings)
- To send category alert emails when new help-wanted listings match your subscribed categories (each has an Unsubscribe link, and you can manage subscriptions from Settings)
- To send launch announcements to people who joined our waitlist (each has an Unsubscribe link)
- To honor email opt-outs
- To verify your .edu student status
- To detect and prevent fraud, abuse, and policy violations
- To analyze usage patterns and improve the product
3. Third-Party Services
We use the following third-party services:
- Clerk: Authentication and user management
- Stripe: Payment processing and seller payouts
- Neon: PostgreSQL database hosting
- Resend: Email delivery (transactional and promotional)
- PostHog: Product analytics and session recordings
- Sentry: Error tracking and monitoring
- Upstash: Redis-based rate limiting and deduplication
- Vercel: Application hosting and file storage (Vercel Blob)
Each service processes data according to their own privacy policies. We only share the minimum data necessary for each service to function.
4. Data Retention
We keep your account data while your account is active. Transaction records are kept for 7 years for tax and legal compliance. If you delete your account, we remove your profile within 30 days: your name, email address, photo, school, bio, skills, links, company details and portfolio, plus any waitlist signup with your email address.
We close your listings and take them out of browse and search. A listing's page still opens from a direct link, because orders and reviews point to it. Your order records stay, and so do the reviews, messages and quotes you exchanged with other people on Quadlance, since they're part of those people's records too. On those, "Deleted user" replaces your name and photo, but what you wrote doesn't change.
Email opt-outs are the one exception to removing your email address. If you unsubscribe from promotional email, we keep your email address and when you opted out, even after you delete your account, so the opt-out keeps working. We use it only to avoid emailing you.
5. Your Rights
You have the right to:
- Access the personal data we hold about you
- Request correction of inaccurate data
- Request deletion of your account and personal data
- Export your data in a portable format
- Opt out of analytics tracking
- Unsubscribe from promotional email at any time, with the Unsubscribe link in any of those emails or in Settings
To exercise any of these rights, email us at support@quadlance.com.
6. Cookies & Tracking
We use essential cookies for authentication (via Clerk) and optional analytics cookies (via PostHog). We also set a referral tracking cookie (httpOnly, 30-day expiration) when you visit a referral link, which is used to attribute your signup to the referring user. We do not sell your data or use it for advertising. You can disable analytics tracking in your browser settings.
7. Security
We implement industry-standard security measures including encrypted connections (HTTPS), secure authentication, and access controls. Payment data is handled entirely by Stripe and never touches our servers.
8. Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy periodically. We will notify you of material changes via email. Continued use of Quadlance after changes constitutes acceptance.
9. Contact
Privacy questions? Email us at support@quadlance.com.