Privacy

Bidding needs no account

There is no sign-up, no login and no profile to place a bid. Bidstore does not ask for your name or email to rank a listing.

Payment runs through Stripe Checkout. Stripe collects your card and, for its own receipt, an email address — that goes to Stripe, not into Bidstore's database. Bidstore never sees or stores your card number.

What the board stores

Bidstore's database holds three things, and none of them are about you:

• Listings — an app's App Store id, name, developer, description, icon, screenshots, rating and the current bid amount. All of it is pulled from Apple's public App Store lookup, never typed in by a bidder.
• Bids — the App Store id, the amount, what Stripe actually charged, and the Stripe event id that fulfilled it. No name, email or payment detail is stored with a bid.
• Clicks — a timestamp and the App Store id someone clicked through to. No IP address, no device id, no visitor id — in this table. Page views are counted separately, below.

Page views, without a cookie

Bidstore also counts page views, and does it without a cookie. Each visitor is identified by a SHA-256 hash of their IP address, their browser's user-agent string, and a random salt that gets thrown away and replaced every day. Because the salt changes daily, the same person visiting today and tomorrow produces two unrelated hashes that can't be linked to each other. The raw IP address is never stored — only the hash.

For each page view, the database keeps the hashed id, the path visited, a timestamp, the referring site's hostname (never the full URL, so no query strings are captured), and a two-letter country code that Cloudflare derives from the visit. Those country codes are aggregated and published on the /stats page — a visit becomes part of a public, country-level count, even though nothing that identifies who made it is ever kept.

A view is counted once per page, per visitor, per half hour. Reloading a page, or leaving it and coming back, does not add to the total — the published figure is how many times a page was read, not how many times a browser asked for it. Coming back later in the day counts again.

The referral cookie

Bidstore sets three cookies in total. The first is bs_ref. Visiting a partner's link at /r/{handle} sets it to that partner's handle, so that if you go on to bid, the checkout can credit the right partner. It carries no other data, is not readable by page scripts, and expires after 60 days.

Partner program

Joining as a partner is opt-in and separate from bidding. Claiming a handle stores your email and handle, so we can send a one-time sign-in link and identify your referrals. Signing in sets the second cookie, bs_partner, holding a session token — it keeps you signed in to your dashboard for up to 60 days and carries nothing else.

We record clicks on your referral link and the earnings they generate (amount and status only) so your dashboard can show them to you. Your login and session tokens are never stored in readable form — only a one-way hash of each is kept, and the raw token is shown to you once. Payouts, when they start, will go out through Stripe.

Live chat

The third cookie, bs_chat_visitor, links your browser to your live-chat conversation if you start one. It carries only that link, is not readable by page scripts, and expires after a year.

Who else sees data

Stripe processes every payment and holds your payment details under its own privacy policy. Resend delivers the partner sign-in email and sees the email address it's sent to. Apple's public App Store lookup is the source for listing content — we don't send it anything about you. Cloudflare hosts the site and its database.

Bidstore runs no third-party ad trackers, analytics scripts or pixels. Its own page-view analytics, described above, sets no cookie and keeps no persistent identifier.