Privacy Policy

Freeman Flow is operated by Freeman Flow Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 16508031), whose registered office is at Flat A, 194 Windmill Lane, Greenford, UB6 9DW, United Kingdom. We are the data controller for the personal data described here.

We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration number ZC007359. You can reach us about anything in this policy at hello@freemanflow.com.

When you create an account: your name, email address, phone number, and — if you have one — your company name. You choose at signup whether you are posting work or looking for it; an account is one or the other, never both.

If you are a contractor: anything you add to your profile — a description of your business, the trades you cover, photographs of your work, your town, county and postcode area, and any website or social links you choose to give.

If you post a job: the full address and postcode of the property, a description of the work, your budget range, any photographs or drawings you upload, and a planning reference if the job has one.

When you buy credits: a reference to the payment, how many credits it was for, and any discount code used. We never see or store your card details. Payment is taken by Stripe on their own pages, which also ask for your billing name and address so that they appear on your VAT invoice. Stripe keeps those with the invoice; we do not copy them.

When you use the site: messages you send to people you are connected with, and a cookie that keeps you signed in. We do not use advertising or analytics cookies, and we do not track you across other websites.

If you arrive from one of our adverts: the link in the advert carries a short code naming that advert. We count how many times each advert's link is opened, without recording who opened it. If you then create an account, we record against your account which advert it was, so that we can tell which adverts bring people to Freeman Flow. That record is deleted with your account. Nothing is stored on your device to do this, and nothing about you is sent to the company that showed the advert.

When a job ends: we ask one question, of the client and of every contractor who paid to reach that job. We ask the client whether they found a builder through Freeman Flow, and which one; we ask each contractor whether they won the work. We record the answer, and we record that we asked. Answering is optional, and nothing about your account changes whether you answer or not.

Behind all of it: the companies that host the site keep the ordinary records any web service keeps — that a request was made, when, from which internet address, and by which browser. They exist so the site can be kept running and defended, they are not used to build a picture of you, and they are deleted on those companies' own schedules rather than ours.

This is the part most people actually want to know, so it is set out in full.

On the public job board, contractors browsing work see the title you gave the job, the job type, the town and the county, the budget range, whether planning has been verified, whether drawings exist, how many contractors have taken a slot, when you posted it, whether contractors can unlock it straight away or have to ask you first, and roughly the first 300 characters of the description. They do not see your name, your address, your postcode, your phone number or your email address.

Three things you write yourself are visible before anyone pays — the title, the opening of the description, and the trade you type in if you pick “Something else”. Keep all three general: “Loft conversion, four bedrooms” rather than anything naming the street or the household. We automatically remove phone numbers, email addresses, web addresses, postcodes and street addresses written the usual way from them wherever we spot them. We cannot catch every way of writing an address, so please leave it out.

The rest becomes visible only when a contractor pays to connect with your job, and only to that contractor: your name, your address, your postcode, your phone number, your email address, the whole of the description, and any photographs or drawings. At most 3 contractors can connect to any one job.

Our terms allow that contractor to use those details only to quote for your job and to carry it out. They are not permitted to advertise anything else to you, add you to a mailing list, or pass your details to anybody else, and once the details reach them they are answerable in their own right for what they do with them.

A contractor asking permission stays anonymous until you accept. If you decline, never answer, or the job comes down before you decide, they never learn who you are and their credit is returned to them.

Contractor profiles — including portfolio photographs — are visible to a client only once the two of you are connected.

What you tell us about how a job ended is not shown to the other side. A client is never told what a contractor said about their job, and a contractor is never told what a client said, including whether somebody else was named. Those answers are read by us alone.

We can read every job posted and every message sent on the platform. We do this to resolve disputes, to investigate reports of abuse or fraud, and to comply with the law. It is not automated advertising profiling, and we do not sell it — but you should use the platform knowing that a private message here is not private from us.

If you would rather someone could not contact you at all, you can block them, which stops messages in both directions and takes their jobs off your board. You can also delete a conversation from your own view; that hides it from you and does not delete the other person's copy.

We use a small number of service providers, each doing one job:

Supabase hosts the database, the login system and uploaded files. Vercel hosts and serves the site. Stripe takes payments and issues VAT invoices; Stripe is the controller of its own payment records. Resend delivers our emails.

PlanNexus checks planning references against the public planning register. When a job includes a planning reference, we send the property postcode to that service to look it up. Nothing else about you or the job is sent.

Twilio sends the code that confirms your phone number: once before your first job goes on the board, and again each time you change the number afterwards. We send them the number and nothing else — no name, no address and nothing about the job — and they send you a text message, or ring the number and read the code out if it is a landline. Twilio is a US company and processes this outside the UK, under the safeguards described in section 9. We do this because a builder pays to be given your number, so it has to be one that reaches you.

Sentry receives a report when something goes wrong in the software — what failed, and where in our code — so that we find out about faults rather than waiting to be told. It is set up not to send your personal details, and contact details are stripped out of the text of a report before it leaves us.

If the business changes hands — sold, merged, or its assets bought — the personal data described here would move with it, because an introduction service without its accounts is not something anybody could carry on running. Whoever took it over would be bound by this policy until they told you otherwise, and we would tell you it had happened.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.

A job and everything attached to it are deleted 90 days after the last contractor connected to it. All of it: the job, its photographs, drawings and description, the whole conversation, and every picture sent inside that conversation. We write to both sides 7 days beforehand, so there is time to save anything worth keeping.

We count from the connection rather than from the job closing. A job closes 90 days after it is posted, but the builder who won it is often still working months later — counting from the close would delete the conversation of the two people this site actually worked for.

Where no contractor ever connected, the job is deleted 90 days after it was posted — the same day its listing ends, since a listing also runs 90 days. Nobody paid to reach you, there is no conversation to keep, and there is no warning email for it because there is nothing to save; the notice that the job had come off the board has already been sent.

A file you upload but never attach is deleted within three days. A photograph or drawing is uploaded just before the job, message or profile it belongs to is saved. If that save never happens — a job that was not posted, or a message that could not be sent — nothing uses the file, and it is deleted.

Afterwards we keep a record of the job, but not the job. That record holds who posted it, what kind of work it was, the budget range and the county, when it was posted and how it ended, which contractors paid to connect, how many of them were blocked, and how many reports were made. It holds no address, no description, no photographs and no messages. We keep it because a client who posts the same job again and again to collect contractors' details is only visible across jobs, and because it is what lets us refund the contractors they cost — neither of which is possible once the jobs themselves are gone.

If we suspend an account, we keep a one-way fingerprint of the phone number on it. Not the number: a scrambled form of it that cannot be turned back into a number, and that is checked only when somebody proves a number on another account. It is what stops a suspension being undone by signing up again, and it is deleted if the suspension is lifted. Nothing of the kind is kept for any other account.

The answer to how a job ended outlives the job as well. It is kept as who answered, what they said, which contractor was named if one was, and when — with no address, no description and nothing from the conversation. We keep it because the only honest way to say how often builders here win work is to count it over years, and a figure that emptied itself every 90 days would say nothing at all. If you delete your account, your name comes off it like everything else.

A job somebody has reported is kept in full until we have finished looking into it. Nothing about it is deleted while a report about it is open, whatever the dates above say. Everything stays — the description, the photographs, the drawings, the conversation and the pictures sent inside it — because that is the material a complaint is judged on, and deleting it on schedule would mean deciding a dispute with the evidence thrown away. Once the report is settled the ordinary dates apply again: the job is deleted on the date above, or 7 days after the report was settled if that date has already passed, whichever is later. Both sides are warned 7 days beforehand either way. A job nobody has reported is deleted on the dates above as normal.

A report somebody made about a job outlives that job. It keeps what was said, who said it, who it was about, and the title the job was given — the one part of a job that was already shown publicly on the board. It keeps nothing else of the job: not the description, not the address, not the photographs, not the conversation. We keep it because a count of complaints is not evidence, and because a report you cannot identify is a report nobody can act on. Deleting your account still removes reports you made and reports made about you.

Records of money — what was bought, what was spent, what was refunded — are kept for at least six years, because tax law requires it. If you delete your account these records stay, with your identity removed from them.

Your account is kept until you delete it. Deleting it removes your profile, your contact details, the address and postcode on every job you posted, and the photographs on your profile straight away, and closes any job you still have open. A job nobody had paid to see is deleted outright, with its photographs and drawings.

What outlives the account is what somebody else already paid for or took part in, and your name comes off all of it. A job a contractor has paid to see stays, without your name, contact details or the address from the job, until the 90 days above have run. Messages you sent stay in the other person's copy of the conversation for the same period, with your name detached: we cannot unsend a letter, and a conversation is the evidence if the two of you fall out. Records of money stay too, with your identity removed.

What you put there yourself stays as you put it for that same period: the description you wrote, your messages, and the photographs and drawings you uploaded. Removing the address from a job does not change what is inside those files, so a drawing whose title block carries the address, or a photograph that shows the house, still carries it. Nor can deleting your account recall anything you gave somebody away from the site.

Most of it is because we cannot run the service for you otherwise — in data protection terms, performance of our contract with you. That covers your account, your jobs, connecting you with the other party, and taking payment.

Keeping records of money is a legal obligation. Reading messages to settle disputes and to keep the platform free of fraud and abuse rests on our legitimate interests in running a marketplace people can trust. So does keeping a fingerprint of the number on a suspended account: a suspension that anybody can undo by signing up again protects nobody. So does checking, when a client confirms a phone number, that no other client account already has it confirmed: one number for one client is what keeps invented jobs off the board. So, equally, does asking how a job ended and keeping the answer: we cannot price a credit fairly, or tell a builder what to expect here, without knowing how often the work is won. So does noting which advert, if any, brought you to us: it is how we decide where to spend on advertising. Job alert emails are sent because you asked for them, and stop the moment you turn them off.

You can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict what we do with it, object to our legitimate interests, or ask for it in a portable form. Write to hello@freemanflow.com and we will respond within one month.

Two limits worth stating honestly. We cannot delete records the law requires us to keep, though we can remove your identity from them. And we cannot delete a message from the other person's copy of a conversation, any more than we could unsend a letter.

If you think we have handled your data badly, please tell us first — but you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, and you do not need our permission to do it.

Our database and email delivery are hosted in the European Union. Some of our providers are US companies and may access data from outside the UK; where they do, transfers are covered by the standard safeguards those providers offer, such as the UK addendum to the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

If we change this policy in a way that affects you, we will say so on the site and update the date at the top. Continuing to use Freeman Flow after that means the new version applies.