Proposal data notice

Share with contributors

Copy the message below when asking friends or colleagues for sample proposals:

Hi — I'm building proposal review and fee-benchmark tools for interior designers at IDCO (idcoapp). I'm collecting a small set of real proposals from trusted designers to calibrate the system.

Before you share anything, please read how we handle proposal data:
https://idcoapp.vercel.app/legal/proposal-data

Short version:
• Voluntary — only share if you're comfortable.
• Please keep project city and state in the document — we use location for localized benchmarks.
• Redact client names, street addresses, and contact details if you can.
• We use proposals to improve benchmarks and review checklists — not for marketing or resale.
• You can ask us to delete your contribution at any time.

Happy to answer questions before you send anything.

Purpose

Interior Design Collective (IDCO) is developing member tools — including AI-assisted proposal review and fee benchmarking — for residential interior designers. To make those tools accurate, we are collecting a limited set of real proposals from volunteer contributors (including friends, colleagues, and family in the design community).

This notice explains what we collect, how we use it, and what choices you have. It applies whether you upload through idcoapp, paste text into the proposal review tool, or send materials to us directly (email, shared drive, etc.).

What you might share

A proposal may include fee schedules, scope of work, procurement language, payment terms, and sometimes client or project identifiers. PDFs and pasted text are both in scope.

We do not need client contact information for this research. Please redact or remove client names, street addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses before sharing when you can. Please leave project city and state in the document — we use location for localized fee benchmarks and do not ask you to remove them.

How we use your proposal

• Run it through our proposal review analysis to test scoring, checklist coverage, and benchmark gaps.
• Manually review outputs against the source document to improve prompts, fee tables, and review criteria.
• Derive non-identifying statistics (fee bands, checklist patterns, score distributions) for benchmark calibration. We do not publish your document or attribute it to you without separate written permission.
• Improve idcoapp for IDCO members. We do not sell proposal content to third parties.

What we store

Proposal documents (full text and PDFs) are not saved in our application database. Content is transmitted to our server for analysis, processed in memory, and sent to our AI provider to generate a report. The report is returned to your browser session.

To improve fee benchmarks and proposal review over time, we store anonymized structured signals in our database when you use the fee calculator or proposal review tool while signed in. These rows do not include your proposal text, uploaded PDFs, finding prose, or client-identifying details.

• Fee calculator: market region (if you select one), project-shape answers (room counts, construction level, etc.), and numeric outputs (fee bands, hours).
• Proposal review: numeric score, checklist status counts (ok / gap / missing), estimated hours, unbilled revenue bands, hourly rate bands, and market region (if you select one).
• Opt-in account saves (fee calculator and proposal review): when you choose “Save to my account”, we store a user-linked copy of your results so you can reopen them. Proposal saves store the analysis report only — not your proposal text or PDF.
• We do not store your user ID in these benchmark telemetry rows. Rows are used for aggregate benchmark research, not for marketing or resale.
• Server logs may record technical metadata (timestamps, error codes) tied to a member account. Logs do not intentionally include full proposal text.
• If you send a proposal to us outside the app (email, shared folder), we may keep a copy in a private research workspace until calibration for this program is complete or you ask us to delete it.

Member save history vs benchmark telemetry

idcoapp treats these as two separate product tracks. They use different storage, privacy expectations, and future features — and must not be conflated in implementation or copy.

• Benchmark telemetry (live today): when you use the fee calculator or proposal review while signed in, we may store anonymized structured signals in benchmark_event rows — project-shape answers, numeric fee/hour bands, checklist counts, optional market. No user ID is stored on those rows. You cannot reopen a past session from telemetry; staff use aggregates only (with minimum sample sizes per market).
• Optional member save history: you can opt in to save a fee estimate or proposal review result to your account (user-linked rows you can list and reopen). That requires explicit in-product consent and clear labeling — separate from anonymous telemetry.
• Proposal documents: full proposal text and PDFs are not saved in our application database today, regardless of telemetry or any future save-history feature.

For implementers: see docs/member-history-vs-telemetry.md in the idcoapp repository.

Service providers

Proposal content is processed using third-party infrastructure we rely on to operate idcoapp:

• Anthropic — AI analysis of pasted text and PDFs (API terms apply to data sent for inference).
• Vercel — application hosting; requests pass through their platform.
• Neon — database for member accounts, app configuration, and anonymized benchmark telemetry rows (not full proposal documents).

We choose providers with standard security practices. We do not authorize them to use your proposal for their own model training beyond what their published API/data policies describe.

Retention

• In-app analysis: full proposal content is not retained in our database after the request.
• Anonymized benchmark telemetry (fee calculator and proposal review signals described above): up to 24 months, then deleted or aggregated further.
• Direct submissions (email, drive): up to 24 months, unless you request earlier deletion.
• Anonymized aggregate statistics may be kept longer because they cannot reasonably be traced back to you or your client.

Benchmark limitations

Benchmarks and review scores reflect IDCO’s corpus and member usage patterns. They are calibrated toward upscale residential interior design and skew toward designers who choose to use idcoapp — not a representative sample of the entire industry or every market.

Localized market tags (US and Canadian metros) help us research regional patterns, but published benchmarks may still blend national defaults until we have enough anonymous events in a market to report localized bands responsibly.

Your choices

• Participation is voluntary. You may decline or stop at any time.
• You may request deletion of copies we hold outside the ephemeral in-app flow by emailing us (see Contact).
• You may share a redacted or sample proposal instead of a live client document.
• Using the in-app tool requires an IDCO member login; contributing offline does not.

Contact & changes

Questions, deletion requests, or concerns: Quinn Casey — quinn@idco.studio.

We may update this notice as the product evolves. The "Last updated" date at the top reflects the current version. Material changes will be communicated to active contributors when practical.