Privacy · updated 28 August 2026
What we store, and for how long
Trawlia is a search API. It is operated by a sole trader. This page describes every category of personal data the service holds, why it holds it, and when it is deleted.
Your account
Signing up stores your email address and a hash of your password. The password itself is never stored and cannot be recovered from the hash. Your email is used to verify the address, to send password resets, and to contact you about the service. It is not used for marketing and is not sold, rented, or shared with advertisers.
API keys are stored as hashes, alongside a short prefix and any name you give them. A key cannot be recovered from what we store, which is why one is displayed only once, when it is created.
IP addresses
Sign-in and sign-up attempts record the requesting IP address, used only to rate-limit those two endpoints. Without it, the free tier can be farmed and passwords can be guessed at machine speed.
These rows are deleted automatically once they pass the rate-limit window, which is one hour. They are not used to build a profile, and they are not retained as an access log.
Your searches
Your searches are stored for 30 days, then deleted. This page said the opposite until 28 August 2026, and the change is deliberate rather than a correction: the history is what powers the search log in your dashboard, so you can see what your agent actually asked for and what came back.
Each row holds the query, the parameters you sent, the URLs and titles returned, how long it took, what it cost you and any error. It does not hold the page content - that lives in the page cache described below, keyed by URL and not linked to the account that caused the fetch.
A row is readable by the organisation that made the search and by us. Deletion at 30 days is enforced by the same scheduled job that prunes everything else on this page, and deleting your account deletes your searches with it.
Pages fetched while answering searches are cached by URL so the same page is not fetched repeatedly. That cache holds public web pages, is not linked to the account that caused the fetch, and is deleted after 30 days.
What we do keep is a count: how many searches, extractions, answers and browser fetches your account made, per day and per month. That is what the credit balance is computed from. It is a number, not a history of requests.
Payments
Payments are handled by Polar, acting as merchant of record. Card details are entered on Polar's systems and never reach ours. We receive and store the email address on the order and the identifier of the order itself, which is what links a payment to an account.
Analytics
Two systems measure this website, and they do not ask the same thing of you. Both are described here because documenting only the gentler one would misrepresent what visiting this page actually does.
Ours runs on our own server. It sets no cookies and stores no durable identifier for a visitor. IP address and user agent are used to derive a daily, salted, one-way visitor hash and are then discarded - neither is written to any table. The salt rotates every day, so the same person is a different value tomorrow. It honours Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control, and records nothing at all when either is set.
Google Analytics is also embedded, and it does not work that way. It stores cookies on your device holding an identifier that persists across visits, and it reports your visit to Google, who process it as a third party under their own terms. This is why this page no longer tells you that nothing is stored on your device: since Google Analytics was added, something is.
Blocking it works, and is worth being precise about. An extension that blocks
googletagmanager.com, or a browser that blocks third-party analytics,
stops it. Do Not Track does not - Google Analytics does not act on
that signal, whatever our own analytics does with it. Beyond Google Analytics, no
other third-party analytics service and no advertising or retargeting service is
embedded on this site.
Sub-processors
| Who | What for | What they receive |
|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Hosting and outbound email | Everything stored above; your email address for verification and reset messages |
| Polar Software | Payments, as merchant of record | Your email address and payment details, entered directly with them |
| Cloudflare | Serving this website | Standard request metadata for the website only, not for API traffic |
| Website analytics (Google Analytics) | That you visited a page on this website, and a cookie identifier that persists across your visits. Website only - no API traffic, no account data, and never your email address. | |
| Anthropic | Answer synthesis, when you request it | The query and the retrieved page text for that request. Not currently enabled. |
Your rights
You can ask for a copy of the personal data held about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for your account and its data to be deleted. Deletion removes the account, its keys, its usage counters and its membership records. We may keep the minimum record of a payment that tax law requires.
Ask by writing to the address on the contact page. We answer within 30 days.
Breach
If we discover a breach affecting your personal data, we will tell affected account holders by email, describing what happened and what we know, without waiting until the investigation is finished.
Changes
Material changes to this page will be announced by email to account holders before they take effect. The date at the top is the last revision.