Privacy Policy

Last updated: 30 August 2026

Plan Advice ("we", "us") operates planadvice.com.au. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, and how we handle it, consistent with the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs).

1. Information we collect

• Account details — your name, email address and a hashed password when you create a free account.
• Property and proposal details — the address you analyse and the development details you enter. Note that property addresses and planning controls are public information.
• Purchase records — what you bought, when, the amount, and any discount applied. Card details are collected and processed by Stripe; we never see or store your full card number.
• Reports, chat and file notes — the reports we generate for you, your Planning Advisor conversations, and any notes you save to your documents.
• Contact messages — enquiries you send via our contact form, including your email address so we can reply.
• Usage data — pages visited and product interactions, collected via analytics to improve the Service, plus standard technical logs (IP address, browser type) for security and rate limiting.

2. How we use your information

• To generate and deliver the reports and advisor answers you request.
• To store your purchased documents in your account vault and keep your advisor conversations available.
• To process payments, apply discounts, and send transactional emails (report delivery, password resets, receipts).
• To respond to your enquiries and provide support.
• To secure, monitor and improve the Service.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not send marketing emails without your consent.

3. Who we share information with

We use a small number of trusted service providers to run the Service:

• Stripe — payment processing.
• Brevo — transactional email delivery (reports, password resets, contact-form forwarding).
• AI model providers — your proposal details and questions are processed by AI models to generate reports and advisor answers. These providers process the data to provide the service to us, not to advertise to you.
• Google Maps — address lookup and property imagery.
• Cloud hosting and storage providers — our database and document storage.
• Analytics — aggregated product-usage analytics.

Some of these providers store data outside Australia (for example in the United States). Where that happens, we take reasonable steps to ensure your information is handled consistently with the APPs. We may also disclose information where required by law.

4. Cookies and local storage

We use essential cookies and browser storage to keep you signed in and to remember in-progress purchases (for example, resuming your analysis after payment). Analytics may use identifiers to understand product usage. We do not use third-party advertising cookies.

5. Data retention

How long we keep your information depends on whether you have an account. This mirrors clause 11 of our Terms & Conditions.

• Account holders — we retain your account data, reports, file notes and advisor conversations for as long as your account remains active, with no set time limit. If you close your account, we delete or de-identify your personal information within 90 days, except where the law requires us to keep certain records for longer — financial records are kept for 5 years for tax purposes.
• Guest purchases (no account) — where you buy a report without creating an account, we store that report and your associated details for up to 12 months from the date of purchase so you can retrieve it if you return. You can create a free account within that period to keep it indefinitely instead. After 12 months we remove personally identifying information (name, email and payment details) from our records, and retain the anonymised report and property/proposal data for internal quality assurance and for evaluating our report accuracy against determined development applications.
• Free analyses — an analysis you run without purchasing is held against your account or browser so you can resume it, and is removed on the same basis as above.
• Contact messages — kept for as long as needed to handle your enquiry and for a reasonable period afterwards for support history.
• Technical and security logs — retained for a short period for security, abuse prevention and rate limiting.

Anonymised and aggregated data — for example how often a control is triggered, or how our predicted outcomes compare with real council determinations — is retained indefinitely. It no longer identifies you and is used to measure and improve accuracy. You can ask us to delete your account and associated personal information at any time (see section 8).

6. Team plans and shared workspaces

If you hold a seat on a multi-seat professional plan, the reports, address folders and file notes produced by any seat are visible to every other active seat on that plan, and the plan owner and any administrators can see the same workspace. Your name and email are visible to your team so work can be attributed. If your seat is removed, or the subscription ends, you keep the reports you produced and lose access to the rest of the team's work — see clause 4 of our Terms & Conditions. Before inviting someone to a seat, make sure you are authorised to share the property, proposal and client information in that workspace with them.

7. Security

Passwords are stored hashed, access to production systems is restricted, admin access is protected with two-factor authentication, and traffic is encrypted in transit (HTTPS). No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable steps to protect your information from misuse, loss and unauthorised access.

8. Access, correction and deletion

You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information by contacting us via the Contact us page from the email address associated with your account. We will respond within a reasonable period. If you are unsatisfied with our response, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au).

9. Children

The Service is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their information.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be posted on this page with an updated date.

11. Contact

Privacy questions or requests? Reach us via the Contact us page.