Data Practices

What we store on your behalf

When a caller dials a phone number you connected to PorchBell, we store the following for that conversation:

• Audio recording of the full call, including the mandatory disclosure clause that plays at the start.
• Transcript of the conversation, generated from the audio by our speech-to-text provider.
• Caller phone number as reported by the telephony provider, plus the timestamp and duration of the call.
• Outbound SMS that Mae or you sent in response to the call (text-back-on-missed, appointment confirmation, follow-up).
• Customer record that we build up over time — name, contact info, appointment history, and notes you have added.
• Appointment entries Mae booked on your calendar or on a connected external calendar.

Everything in this list lives in your account and is scoped to your business with row-level security. Other PorchBell customers cannot read your data. PorchBell staff only access it for support, abuse investigation, or to fix a bug you reported, and we log every access.

What we do not store

• We do not store credit card numbers. Payments go directly to Stripe. PorchBell only sees the last four digits and brand for display.
• We do not store the contents of calls or messages that are not part of your PorchBell-managed phone line.
• We do not store browsing data about your callers, marketing identifiers about them, or anything you have not explicitly entered.

Encryption

Audio, transcripts, and database rows are encrypted at rest on our infrastructure provider (Supabase, which runs on AWS). Traffic between you, your callers, our telephony providers, and our servers uses TLS in flight. Backups are encrypted with the same standards.

Retention

The default retention is the lifetime of your account. You can shorten that two ways:

• Per call: delete a single recording or transcript from the inbox view in your dashboard. The audio is removed within 24 hours. The transcript is removed immediately, and the call entry itself stays so your call-history counts remain accurate.
• Account-wide: set a retention window in Settings (90 / 180 / 365 days, or indefinite). Anything older is removed automatically by a daily cleanup job.

If you close your account, we delete your call recordings, transcripts, and customer records within 30 days. Billing records and audit logs are kept for as long as we are required by law to keep them.

Your export and delete rights

From your dashboard you can:

• Export all of your account data as a single ZIP file.
• Delete any individual call, transcript, customer, or appointment.
• Request full account deletion, which queues the wipe and emails you a confirmation when it completes.

If you do not see one of these controls in your dashboard yet, email hello@porchbell.com and we will action it manually within one business day.

No model training on your data

PorchBell does not use your call recordings, transcripts, customer records, or appointment data to train any language model. Our third-party voice and language providers operate under the same commitment for the data we send them. We negotiate this in writing with every provider before we route a single call through them.

We do use aggregate, fully de-identified statistics about call volume, latency, and reliability to improve the product. That data does not include caller identities, conversation contents, or business identifiers.

Subprocessors

The third-party services we use to run PorchBell are listed in the Privacy Policy. The short version: a telephony provider for phone numbers and SMS, a voice orchestration provider for Mae, a speech-to-text provider for transcripts, a database and authentication provider, an email-sending provider for operator notifications, and an error monitoring provider. Each one is under contract to handle the data only on our instructions.

Where to ask about your data

Email hello@porchbell.com with the subject line Data request and we will reply within one business day.