Privacy
Close Enough lets you look up Victorian addresses for free, without an account. If you sign in, we save your addresses, search history, deep reports, and credit balance. We sell nothing. If you join a waitlist, your email address goes straight to our mailing-list service and we keep no copy. You can export and delete your account from Settings, and both are immediate.
Close Enough is a free Victorian address-liveability tool. Lookups work without an account. Optional accounts unlock saved addresses, search history, and deep reports. Nothing is for sale: deep reports, Pro and agent plans are on a waitlist, and joining one passes only your email address and the feature you chose to Lotl Subscribe. The mobile app can use your device GPS when you ask it to, but never stores your location.
What we collect
We collect and store the following kinds of data, each with its own retention and legal basis:
- Account: Your sign-in identity is managed by Lotl Auth, our authentication service (auth.lotlsoft.com). Lotl Auth stores your email, your name if you provided one, and a hash of your password (argon2id). Sign-in issues a short-lived JWT access token (15 minutes) and a refresh token (30 days). Email verification and password resets go through transactional email (Resend).
- Saved addresses: Addresses you save to your account, with whatever label and notes you attach. They appear in your dashboard so you can re-open them later.
- Deep reports: Each deep report you generate is stored against your account so you can re-open it without paying again. You can delete a report at any time; deletion is immediate. The short AI summary at the top of a report is written from the report's address and liveability data. AI features go through Lotl AI, our AI gateway service (ai.lotlsoft.com). Lotl AI forwards the prompt to DeepSeek by default, or to OpenAI for some features, such as web search. Image generation, where an app offers it, goes to fal or OpenAI. Anthropic is used only when a feature asks for it by name. Text embeddings are computed on a model we host ourselves, or by OpenAI if that model is not configured. For each request Lotl AI stores the app id, agent id, your user id if the app sends one, the provider and model, token counts, latency, cost, finish reason, any error, and any extra details the app attaches to the request. It does not keep the prompt or the response text. The provider receives the prompt, not your user id, and processes it under its own API terms; OpenAI's API terms exclude API data from model training.
- Search history: Your recent free and deep lookups so the app can show 'recents' and rerun a search. We also cache geocoded coordinates briefly so repeated lookups don't re-charge the geocoder.
- Device location: Only used when you tap 'Use my location' in the mobile app. The coordinate is sent to the geocoder, converted to an address, and discarded. Nothing about your location is stored.
- Credits and purchases: Your credit balance, every spend, every starter grant, every referral redemption, and any purchase or Pro subscription from before we stopped selling, visible to you in Settings as a transaction ledger. Purchase records are kept for tax and dispute resolution even if you delete your account.
- Usage telemetry: Anonymous usage events, performance gauges, and error reports are sent to Lotl Observe, our observability service (observe.lotlsoft.com). Lotl Observe stores error messages, stack traces, request URLs, user-agent strings, telemetry events, and per-event metadata. It does not store the contents of your application data. We process this under legitimate interests: Lotl Observe is in-house, no third-party analytics or session replay is involved, and identifiers are pseudonymous. Account deletion removes your associated telemetry. Project-specific: telemetry doesn't include your saved-address contents or deep-report results.
- Sales attribution and commissions: The sales-partner program closed on 23 October 2026 and records nothing new. Attribution and commission records from before then are kept for the retention period below and are visible to admins only.
- Feedback messages: Feedback you send via the in-app form is stored unredacted so we can read it. Don't paste passwords, account numbers, or anything sensitive — we'll see it.
- Waitlist email address: Only if you join a waitlist. We pass your email address, and which feature you want, straight to Lotl Subscribe, our mailing-list service, and keep no copy here. It emails you a link to confirm, and nothing happens unless you click it. Every email it sends has a one-click unsubscribe.
What we don't collect
We deliberately don't collect or store any of these:
- Continuous location data — the mobile 'Use my location' button geocodes a single coordinate and discards it
- Behavioural fingerprinting, session replay, or third-party tracking pixels
- Information from people who haven't created an account (anonymous lookups stay anonymous)
Cookies
We don't use cookies for tracking. We use localStorage to keep you signed in and remember UI preferences.
Third parties
These external services receive some of your data:
- Atlas of Living Australia — biodiversity occurrence data for the address area (server sends a coordinate-bounded query)
- Australian Bureau of Statistics — council boundaries and socio-economic indexes (SEIFA) for the address area (our server sends the address's coordinates or council name, nothing about you)
- CartoDB — browser-side basemap tiles for the map widgets (the tile URLs encode your map viewport)
- DeepSeek and OpenAI (via Lotl AI) — the AI-written summary on deep reports (receives the address and its liveability data)
- DigitalOcean — server hosting for the Close Enough service
- Esri ArcGIS Online — hosts the Vicmap property parcels and ABS census profiles we look up for the address (our server sends the address's coordinates, nothing about you)
- Geoscience Australia — topographic map tiles around the address for deep reports (our server requests the tiles covering the address, nothing about you)
- Google APIs — address geocoding, places, air quality, and Street View imagery
- NSW Government (Data.NSW) — public toilets near the address, from the National Public Toilet Map it hosts (our server sends the address's coordinates and a search radius, nothing about you)
- Open-Elevation — free elevation lookup for the address coordinates
- OSRM routing service — walking, cycling, and driving route distance calculations (only when self-hosted OSRM isn't available; production typically routes via Google)
- Resend — transactional email delivery
- Stripe — nothing is sold; Stripe holds the records of any web checkout started before we stopped selling
- Victorian Department of Transport and Planning (VicPlan) — planning zones and overlays (flood, bushfire, heritage) at the address (our server sends the address's coordinates, nothing about you)
Where your data is stored
Close Enough runs on DigitalOcean's Sydney region; your data stays in Australia. Google APIs (geocoding, places, air-quality, Street View imagery) process address queries from their global infrastructure. Stripe holds the records of any checkout started before we stopped selling, in their region (typically the US); Resend delivers email through Amazon SES infrastructure. The AI summary on a deep report is written by DeepSeek or OpenAI, reached through Lotl AI, our AI gateway, and both process the request outside Australia. Esri's ArcGIS Online, which hosts some of the map layers we look an address up in, may process the address's coordinates outside Australia. We don't transfer data internationally beyond those processor relationships.
Children's data
Close Enough is intended for adults researching liveability of Melbourne addresses. We don't knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If we learn we've stored data from a child, we'll delete it.
If something goes wrong
If we ever discover a data breach affecting your account, we'll email you within 72 hours and tell you what was accessed and what we're doing about it.
Your rights
You can export everything we hold about you (Settings → Export) and delete your account at any time (Settings → Delete account). Deletion cascades through saved addresses, search history, deep reports, telemetry, and feedback. Purchase records are retained for tax and dispute reasons. We don't anonymise on delete; we remove.
Contact
Questions about privacy? Email [email protected].
Last updated: 2026-10-23 · Version 2026.10.23.