Privacy Policy

PaidLane is operated by J2DIGITAL (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2026/636581/07, a company registered in South Africa with its registered office at 18 Sandown Road, Unit D12 Montego Bay, Cape Town, Western Cape, 7441, South Africa. We are the responsible party under POPIA and the data controller under the GDPR for the information described in section 2 as your own account data.

Contact us about anything in this policy at hello@paidlane.app. That address reaches a person, and you do not need an account to use it. It is also the address for access, correction and deletion requests.

Our Information Officer, appointed under POPIA section 56, is Juan Jonck, reachable at the same address.

If you already have a PaidLane account and your question is about using the app rather than about your data, the support form is quicker.

This is the most important section, because it decides who is responsible for what.

Your own account data. When you sign up, we decide how your account information is used, so we are the controller (POPIA: responsible party) of it. This policy governs it.

Your customers' data. When you add a customer, write them a quote or send them an invoice, you decide what is collected and why. You are the controller; we are the processor(POPIA: operator), acting on your instructions. We do not use your customers' details for our own purposes, we do not market to them, and we do not sell them to anyone.

The terms on which we do that processing — our security duties, our sub-processors, breach notification, and what happens to the data when you leave — are set out in our Data Processing Agreement. It forms part of your agreement with us automatically, so you do not need to sign anything separately, and it is the document your own customers' lawyers will ask you for.

If you are a customer of a tradesperson who uses PaidLane and you want your details corrected or deleted, ask the tradesperson who quoted you — they control that record. If you cannot reach them, write to us and we will pass it on and help them act on it.

From you, when you sign up and set up: your email address; your business name, trade, address, contact details, tax number, payment instructions and logo if you upload one.

What you put in:your customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers and addresses; the quotes, invoices, jobs, payments and notes you create; your price list.

When a customer of yours accepts a quote: the name they type, the date and time, and their IP address. We keep the IP because an acceptance is the record that a price was agreed, and it is the only evidence that the person who clicked was where they said they were.

When a customer declines a quote: the reason they give, if they choose to give one. It is shown to you and to nobody else.

The IP address of anyone who opens a quote or invoice link — briefly, and only to count requests so the public pages cannot be hammered. Those counters are deleted automatically within a day and are never tied to a name.

Automatically: a log of actions taken on your documents (sent, viewed, accepted, paid), and server error reports if something breaks.

Payment details: never.Card numbers are entered on Lemon Squeezy's checkout and never reach our servers. See §5.

• To provide the service — creating your documents, sending them, chasing unpaid invoices. Basis: performance of our contract with you (GDPR art 6(1)(b)).
• To take payment for your subscription. Basis: contract, and our legal obligation to keep tax records.
• To keep the service working and secure — error reports, rate limiting, abuse prevention. Basis: our legitimate interests in a service that stays up (art 6(1)(f)).
• To answer you when you contact support. Basis: contract and legitimate interests.
• To measure whether the product works — how many businesses sign up, how many send a first quote, how often quotes get accepted. We look at these as counts and rates across all accounts, to decide what to build next. Basis: our legitimate interests in improving the service (art 6(1)(f)).
• To send you a short series of setup emails over your first two weeks, explaining how to get your first quote out. There are four of them, they stop by themselves, and every one says to reply if you would rather not hear from us — which stops them. Basis: contract, and our legitimate interests in you getting the thing working.

Under POPIA the equivalent grounds are section 11(1)(b) (necessary to carry out the contract) and section 11(1)(f) (our legitimate interests).

We do not use your data or your customers' data for advertising, for building profiles of individuals, or for automated decisions about anyone, and we do not sell it.

We use a small number of suppliers to run the service. Each is bound by a written data processing agreement to process data only on our instructions. The current list is:

• Supabase — the database, sign-in and file storage. This is where your records live. United States.
• Vercel — hosting and delivery of the app. United States, with static files served from a global network of edge locations.
• Resend — sending email: your quotes and invoices to your customers, payment reminders, setup emails and our replies to you. United States.
• Sentry— server error reports, so we find out when something breaks. United States. We have deliberately turned off the collection of request headers, cookies, request bodies and IP addresses, so error reports do not carry your customers' details.
• Lemon Squeezy — subscription payments. They act as Merchant of Record, which means they are the seller for your subscription and an independent controller of the payment data you give them — not our processor. Their own privacy policy governs it. What comes back to us is your subscription status, plan, trial end and renewal date, plus the customer and subscription identifiers needed to match a payment to your account — never card details. United States.

The same list, with the detail a controller needs, is in the Data Processing Agreement, and that is where we commit to telling you before it changes.

We will also disclose data if the law requires it. If PaidLane is ever sold, your data would transfer with it and you would be told beforehand.

PaidLane is operated from South Africa. Your records and your customers' records are stored and processed in the United States— specifically, the database, authentication and uploaded files sit in Supabase's us-east-1 region in Northern Virginia, and the application, email and error reporting run on infrastructure in the United States as listed in §5.

If you or your customers are in the EU or UK, that is a transfer outside the EEA and the UK. It is made under the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (GDPR art 46(2)(c)) and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, which are built into the agreement we have with each supplier in §5 and into our own Data Processing Agreement with you. We have assessed the transfers and apply the additional measures described in §10.

If you or your customers are in South Africa, the transfer is permitted under POPIA section 72(1)(a): each recipient is bound by a written agreement that upholds principles substantially similar to POPIA's conditions for lawful processing, and that restricts onward transfer on the same terms.

You can ask us for a copy of the transfer safeguards we rely on at any time, and we will send them.

PaidLane loads no third-party analytics, advertising or tracking scripts at all — there is nothing in the app watching what you do and reporting it elsewhere. (We do count our own totals from the records described in section 4; that happens on our servers, not in your browser.) Because every cookie we set is strictly necessary for the app to work, we do not ask for cookie consent — there is nothing optional to consent to. The cookies are:

• sb-…-auth-token — keeps you signed in.
• pl_checkout_started and pl_checkout_pending — remember that you have been to the checkout, so you are not locked out of setup while our payment provider confirms it. Both expire after six hours.
• pl_trial_notice — remembers that you have dismissed the notice explaining your trial ended, so it is not shown again.

The app also stores things on your own device so you can work with no signal: a copy of your customer and price lists, the quote you are part-way through, and any finished document still waiting to upload. Signing out clears the copied lists, but not work that has not been sent yet — deleting a finished quote to tidy up would destroy the job you just did. It uploads and clears itself as soon as the device has signal again.

We keep your records for as long as your account exists. If your subscription lapses, your data is not deleted — the app becomes read-only and you can still read and export everything. That is a permanent commitment and it is written into our Terms so you can hold us to it.

Some things are cleared sooner, without being asked:

• Rate-limiting counters — the IP addresses in §3 that count requests to public quote and invoice links: deleted within 24 hours.
• Server error reports — deleted by Sentry on its own 90-day schedule. They carry no request headers, cookies, bodies or IP addresses to begin with.
• Backups — held on a rolling cycle and entirely replaced within 30 days, so anything deleted from the live database is gone from backups within a month at the outside.

If you ask us to delete your account, write to hello@paidlane.app and we will remove your business, your customers, your documents and your uploaded files within 30 days, and confirm when it is done. There is no self-service delete button yet; this is a request we carry out by hand, which is why we commit to a date rather than to an instant. Export first — deletion is not reversible.

One exception, and it is a legal obligation rather than a choice: records of what you paid us are kept for 5 yearsafter the end of the tax year they fall in, as South Africa's Tax Administration Act section 29(3) requires. Those are our own billing records — what you paid for your subscription — and not your quotes, invoices or customers, which are deleted with the account.

Under the GDPR and POPIA you may ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, or hand it to another provider. You may also withdraw consent where we relied on it, and object to processing based on our legitimate interests.

You do not have to ask us for a copy. Every account can export its customers, quotes and invoices as spreadsheets at any time, from the More screen — including after a subscription has lapsed. That is a deliberate, permanent feature, not a concession.

To exercise any other right, write to hello@paidlane.app. We will respond within 30 days, and it costs nothing. We may ask you to confirm who you are first, so that somebody else cannot use this to get at your records.

If you are unhappy with our answer you may complain to a regulator. In South Africa that is the Information Regulator; in the EU or UK, your national supervisory authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office. We would rather you told us first, but you are not obliged to.

Every record is separated by account at the database level, so one business cannot read another's data even if the application has a bug. Traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS and data is encrypted at rest by our hosting providers. Card details never reach our servers. Access to production data is limited to the people who run the service, over multi-factor authenticated accounts, and error reports are stripped of headers, cookies, request bodies and IP addresses before they leave the server.

One deliberate exception: your business logo is served from a public web address, because it has to render inside the PDFs and emails your customers open without an account. The address is long and unguessable, but it is not access-controlled — so do not put anything in that field you would not print on an invoice.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal information we will notify you and the relevant regulator as the law requires — under POPIA section 22 as soon as reasonably possible, and under the GDPR within 72 hours of becoming aware of it. Where you are the controller and we are your processor, we tell you without undue delay so that you can make your own notification; the timing and detail of that are in the Data Processing Agreement.

PaidLane is a tool for running a business and is not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from children, and we will delete any such data we discover.

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. For anything that materially affects your rights or how we use your data, we will tell you in the app or by email at least 30 days before it takes effect, so you have time to object or to leave. The current version is in force from 5 August 2026.