Privacy Policy

Effective: [EFFECTIVE DATE] · Last updated: September 12, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains what information ScorpEase LLC (“Keystead,” “we,” “us”) collects through Keystead Vault (the “Service”), how we use and protect it, and the choices you have. By using the Service you agree to this Policy.

1. Information we collect

Information you give us

• Account information — your name, email address, and password (stored only as a hash by our authentication provider) when you create an account; if you turn on two-factor authentication, your authenticator enrollment and hashed one-time recovery codes; and your notification preferences (deadline reminders).
• Vault content — everything you choose to enter or upload: business details (e.g., EIN, entity type, formation state, state entity ID, business address and phone), tax profile and estimated-payment records (including state sales-tax registrations and filing dates), annual-report filings, tax-return history (tax year, form, due and filed dates, preparer), key contacts and owners (including ownership percentages), service providers, insurance policies (carrier, policy number, coverage, agent, beneficiary), recurring tasks, documents, notes, successor instructions, and pointers to where your logins are kept (the platform, username, and which password manager or location holds the credential — not the passwords themselves). Documents you upload — such as tax returns — may contain sensitive personal information, including Social Security numbers. A personal-taxes vault holds your estimated-payment records and personal returns.
• Sharing information — the email addresses (and optional names) of people you invite to a vault.
• Information about other people. Much of what you enter in a vault is about people other than you — key contacts, owners, successors, emergency contacts, service providers, insurance agents and beneficiaries, and the people you invite. That can include their names, roles, email addresses, phone numbers, and ownership percentages. You are responsible for having the right to enter and share their information (see our Terms). It is visible to everyone you give access to the vault, appears in exports and handoff documents you generate, and, for the contacts you flag for a successor, in the Successor View. People whose information appears in a vault can contact us as described in §7.
• Payment information — collected and processed by Stripe on Stripe-hosted pages. Our systems receive and store only your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers and subscription status; card details stay with Stripe. We check the billing country Stripe reports at checkout to apply our US-only rule, but we do not store it. We can view the card brand and last four digits in Stripe’s dashboard, but we never receive or store your full card number. We send Stripe your email address, account ID, the number of businesses you own, and, if a partner firm referred you, that firm’s referral code.
• Support communications — messages you send us.

Information an accountant or advisor gives us about you

• A CPA or other advisor who uses Keystead can set up a vault for your business before you have an account, entering your business details and your email address, and then invite you to claim it. Until you claim it, the advisor holds and can edit that vault. If it is never claimed, we warn the advisor after about five and a half months and delete it after six months. When you claim it (by signing up with the email address it was addressed to), the vault becomes yours and the advisor stays on with editor access until you change or remove it. If the advisor is a Keystead referral partner, their referral code is recorded on the vault so they can be credited if you subscribe. Advisors who are tax preparers attest that they hold the client authorization the law requires (including IRC §7216) before doing this. We also switch our AI return reader off on any vault an advisor sets up for you — return text from it is never sent to our AI provider unless you turn that on after the vault becomes yours.

Information collected automatically

• Technical data — we do not run analytics or advertising trackers. Our hosting and authentication providers keep standard server and sign-in logs (IP address, browser type, request timestamps), and we record when you last signed in. We use your IP address only to rate-limit abuse. Within a vault, edits and access changes are recorded in the vault’s change log (see §6).
• Error and diagnostic data — if the app hits an error, our server forwards the error message, a stack trace, the page path, and your account ID to our monitoring provider (Sentry) so we can fix it. Vault content is never included.
• Local storage & essential cookies — we use browser storage to keep you signed in and remember display preferences. If you arrive through a partner firm’s referral link, we set a first-party cookie (keystead_ref, kept for 30 days) so that firm can be credited if you later subscribe; the code is passed to Stripe with your subscription. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

2. How we use information

• To provide, maintain, and secure the Service and your vault;
• To read fields from a tax return you upload, so we can pre-fill your vault (see §3);
• To process your subscription and payments (via Stripe);
• To send service emails — deadline reminders (on by default; you can turn them off in Account Settings), vault invitations and claim invitations, advance warnings before an inactive or unclaimed vault is deleted, security and account notices, and billing receipts and notices from Stripe;
• To provide support and respond to your requests;
• To detect, prevent, and investigate fraud, abuse, and security incidents;
• To comply with legal obligations.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use your data to train AI models. We do not use your vault content for advertising.

3. AI processing and tax documents

If you upload a tax return so Keystead can fill in details for you, the PDF is read on our own server. Before any text is sent to our AI provider (Anthropic), our server strips anything that looks like a Social Security number, card number, or bank or account number (business EINs are kept, because they are what we are looking for). This redaction is automatic and best-effort — it can miss an unusually formatted number — and it is not a full anonymization: the rest of the return text, including names, addresses, and dollar amounts, is sent so the AI can identify the business fields. The redacted text is used solely to identify fields for that one upload, and you review the results before anything is saved. The original PDF never leaves our server and is not sent to the AI provider. If you keep the file, the app saves it exactly as you uploaded it to that business’s Tax Return History, protected by your vault’s access controls and our providers’ encryption at rest — upload a redacted copy, or delete the file afterward, if you would rather not keep an SSN on file. If the PDF is password-protected, the password is used once to open it and is not stored. Scanned or image-only PDFs cannot be read this way.

4. When we share information

We share information only as follows:

• With people you choose. When you share a vault, the people you invite see it at the role you give them. A viewer or editor (an advisor or co-owner) sees the full vault, including uploaded files, the change log, and the list of everyone who has access. A successor sees only a limited, read-only “start here” view assembled on our server — business identifiers, your instructions, the contacts and providers you flag for them, insurance summaries, login pointers, notes, deadlines, and document and file names (no file downloads), plus who else has access and your personal-taxes summary if you shared that vault too — until an owner or editor promotes them to full access. Granting access to a firm by email domain gives that role to everyone who signs in with a confirmed email at that domain, including people who join the firm later, until the grant is removed. Editors can also invite, change, and remove access and promote a successor, not only you; every access change is recorded in the change log with who made it. You can change or revoke any access at any time, and anyone you invite can remove their own access (which leaves a dated record visible to you and to your successor). The Successor View is provided only while your subscription is active.
• With subprocessors that operate the Service on our behalf, under contract and only as needed (see §5).
• For legal reasons — to comply with law, valid legal process, or to protect the rights, safety, and security of our users, the public, or Keystead.
• In a business transfer — if Keystead is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, information may transfer as part of that transaction; we’ll notify you of any change in control of your data.

5. Subprocessors

We rely on a small set of vetted providers. We aim to keep this list current; material changes will be reflected here.

Data is processed and stored in the [United States — confirm hosting region with Supabase/Render].

6. Data retention and deletion

We keep your information for as long as your account exists, so that your vault is there when you — or a successor — need it. If you build a vault and never subscribe, it becomes read-only but is kept until you delete it or it becomes eligible for automatic deletion (below). You can delete an individual vault at any time (Delete Business in the vault’s settings); that removes its contents, its change log, everyone’s access to it, and its uploaded files from storage. You can also delete your entire account from Account Settings (type DELETE to confirm; two-factor authentication is required if you have it turned on). Account deletion takes effect immediately and cannot be undone: it deletes every vault you own and their files, removes every share you granted or were granted, and permanently disables your sign-in. We keep an anonymized account record (no name or email) so that edits you made in other people’s vaults remain in their change logs, attributed to a deleted account; your email address is redacted from those logs. Stripe keeps its own billing records as its terms and the law require, and deleted data may persist in our providers’ backups for a limited period before it ages out.

Automatic deletion. We also delete data we no longer have a reason to keep: (1) a vault an advisor set up for a client that is never claimed is deleted six months after it was created — the advisor is warned by email about two weeks before; and (2) a vault with no subscription, no successor, and no one else with access, whose owner has not signed in for about two years, is scheduled for deletion — we email the owner first and delete no sooner than 30 days later, and signing in cancels it. Vaults with an active subscription, a successor, or shared access are never deleted automatically.

For integrity, the per-vault change log is append-only and retained with the vault as a security and continuity record. It stores which fields changed, the previous and new values, who changed them, and when (including changes to who has access, which include the invited person’s email) — not copies of your uploaded documents. The log is deleted when its vault is deleted. When someone deletes their account, their email address is redacted from change logs on other people’s vaults, but the entries themselves remain. [Counsel: confirm the audit-log retention period (WISP A6) and the erasure position for entries on other owners’ vaults.]

7. Your rights and choices

You can access and update most information directly in the app, delete a vault or your whole account yourself (see §6), and while your subscription is active you can export your vault as a PDF, a CSV, or an open-format backup of your vault data (uploaded documents are downloaded individually from the vault; vaults shared with you can always be exported). Regardless of subscription status, you can request a copy of your personal information at any time using the address below. Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of your personal information, and to appeal a decision about a request. To exercise these rights, contact us at privacy@keysteadvault.com; we will verify your request and respond as required by law. We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.

[If you have California users: add the CCPA/CPRA categories-collected disclosure, “Do Not Sell/Share” (we don’t sell), and the sensitive-personal-information handling notice. Add other state disclosures as counsel advises.]

8. Security

We protect your information with row-level data isolation enforced inside the database, encryption in transit (HTTPS with HSTS) and provider-managed encryption at rest, optional two-factor authentication that is enforced at the database layer, best-effort redaction of sensitive identifiers before AI processing, private file storage with short-lived download links, and an append-only change log, among other measures. We have not yet completed a SOC 2 audit or an independent third-party security assessment; our security testing to date has been internal. A plain-language overview is on our Security & Trust page. No method of storage or transmission is 100% secure, but we work hard to protect your data and to notify you promptly if a breach affecting it occurs.

Who at Keystead can see your vault. Encryption at rest is provided by our infrastructure providers and protects the stored data itself. It is not end-to-end encryption — Keystead holds the keys, which is what makes the Successor View, deadline reminders, and the tax-return reader possible at all. It also means a very small number of Keystead personnel can access vault contents using administrative credentials. We do that only to operate and secure the Service, to investigate a problem you or one of our providers reports, or to run the deletion jobs described in §6 — never to browse your records. Our support tooling is built to answer account and subscription questions from metadata alone, without opening vault contents.

9. Other

Children

The Service is for business use and is not directed to anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

Public demo

The demo accounts are shared and read-only: nothing you type or upload in the demo is saved to our database or file storage, and it disappears when you leave the page. Please don’t enter real personal information in the demo.

Changes to this Policy

We may update this Policy as the Service evolves. We’ll change the “Last updated” date and, for material changes, provide additional notice.

10. Contact us

ScorpEase LLC — Keystead Vault
[Legal mailing address]
Privacy: privacy@keysteadvault.com · Security: security@keysteadvault.com · Support: support@keysteadvault.com