Privacy Policy
Last updated September 19, 2026
Who we are
HootQuill is operated by Xplicit Tech Solutions, 6799 Main St, Cherry Creek, NY 14723. Reach us at support@hootquill.com.
Two kinds of data, handled differently
Account data is information about the people who use HootQuill: name, email address, organization, and authentication records. We are the controller of this data.
Customer content is what you put into HootQuill — your clients, your pricing, your agreements, and the signatures collected on them. We process this on your behalf and at your direction. We do not sell it, mine it, or use it to train anything.
What we collect and why
- Account and authentication details, to sign you in and secure the account.
- Content you create — clients, catalog items, quotes and agreements.
- Signature evidence: for each signer, the timestamp of consent and of signing, IP address, browser user agent, and a cryptographic hash of the exact document shown. This exists to make signatures defensible, and it is retained with the agreement. Where you have connected your own signing service, that service collects this evidence and issues its own certificate; we record what it reports to us alongside our own trail.
- Documents you upload. You may bring your own PDF rather than generating one from a template. We store the file as uploaded and the file as executed, and we do not read, index or analyse their contents.
- Operational logs and an immutable audit trail of actions taken in the product, used for security, support and dispute resolution.
Subprocessors
We rely on these providers to deliver the service:
- Supabase — database and authentication (United States).
- DigitalOcean — application hosting (United States).
- Wasabi Technologies — document and backup storage (United States).
- Resend — delivery of the emails we send on your behalf, including signing invitations (United States). If you connect your own Resend account, mail is sent through yours instead.
- Google Analytics — usage measurement on our website and in the product (United States). See Analytics and cookies below for exactly what is and is not sent.
Everything above is used for every account, so it is named here. We will give notice before adding a subprocessor that handles customer content.
Services you connect yourself are different. HootQuill can pass content to a third party you choose — an electronic signature service, for example — but only once you connect it, and nothing is connected by default. Whatever you have turned on is listed, by name, under Settings → Integrations in your account, which is the only place that can answer the question for your account rather than in general.
Analytics and cookies
We ask first. Google Analytics is not loaded, and no analytics cookie is set, until you have said yes. Refusing is one click, the same as accepting, and the site works identically either way. If your browser sends “Do Not Track” or a Global Privacy Control signal we treat that as a no and do not ask at all.
You can change your mind at any time — — and withdrawing is as easy as giving it. We store your answer, the date you gave it and which version of this policy it applied to, so we can show what you agreed to. If this section changes materially, we ask again.
We use Google Analytics to understand which parts of the product are used and where people get stuck. Advertising features are switched off, so the data is not used to build an advertising profile or to retarget you.
What is sent: the page you are on, how you arrived, approximate location from your IP address, device and browser, and the fact that an action such as sending a document occurred — along with your plan and an opaque identifier for your organisation, so we can tell whether a feature is used by one account or by many.
What is never sent: your name, your email address, your clients’ names, document titles, prices, or anything typed into a document. Addresses that identify a specific record are stripped before they leave your browser, so a signing link, an invitation link and a document reference are replaced by the page they belong to rather than the page itself. A signing link is a credential, and it is never transmitted.
The cookies we set
| Cookie | What it is for | Kept for |
|---|---|---|
| sb-…-auth-token | Keeps you signed in. Strictly necessary — without it there is no way to know the account is yours. | Until you sign out |
| hq_session | Tells our website that this browser is signed in, so it can offer “Go to app” instead of a login form. Holds no identity — the value is the digit 1. | 30 days |
| hq_consent | Remembers your answer to the cookie question, so we do not ask on every page. Set whether you say yes or no. | 12 months |
| _ga, _ga_… | Google Analytics, to tell a returning visit from a new one. Only set if you accept. | Up to 2 years |
An analytics blocker will also prevent the collection, and nothing in the product depends on it working.
When you connect another service
Connecting a service under Settings → Integrations sends content to it at your direction. For a signing service that means the document itself, the name and email address of each recipient, and our reference for the document so the two systems can recognise each other. The screen says what a given service receives before you connect it.
That account is yours, not ours. What the provider keeps, for how long, and under whose terms is between you and them — including after you disconnect, when anything already sent stays in their account. Deleting something in HootQuill does not delete it there.
We still file the executed document and its audit trail on our side, so removing an integration does not cost you the record.
Retention
While you are using your account, we keep your agreements and their audit trail. Their value as evidence depends on being available long after signing, so nothing expires on a timer.
If an account goes unused for 12 months, we pause sending and email you. You can still sign in, read, download and export everything in it. Turning sending back on takes one click. We write to you before that happens, not after.
If it stays unused for 24 months, we delete the contents of its agreements. We send a final notice at least 30 days beforehand, naming the date, and signing in at any point stops the clock. Accounts with an active subscription are never affected by this, however quiet they go.
What we keep even then is the record that each agreement existed — who signed it, when, and its fingerprint. That is the evidence, and it is what lets a copy you hold be verified against our record years later. What we no longer hold is the document itself.
The audit trail is permanent. It is append-only and hash-chained, so entries cannot be altered or removed — by you, or by us. That is deliberate: a log someone can edit is not evidence. It means the trail outlives both the documents it describes and the account that created them, and it is what lets us confirm that a copy you hold is the genuine one.
You can export everything at any time, from Settings → Company. One file: your clients and contacts, your catalog, every quote, every agreement with who signed it and when, the full activity trail, and the signed PDFs. Nothing in it needs HootQuill to read.
Deleting an agreement does not remove it from backups immediately; backup copies age out on their own schedule. Where a file has been written to immutable storage it cannot be removed before its retention period expires — that immutability is what makes it evidence, and it applies to us as much as to you.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Tenant data is isolated at the database level, and the audit log is append-only and hash-chained so that alteration is detectable. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.
Your rights
You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data by writing to support@hootquill.com. If you are a signer rather than an account holder, contact the organization that sent you the agreement — they control that record, and we act on their instructions.
Children
HootQuill is not intended for anyone under 18.
Changes
We will post material changes here and, for account holders, notify you by email before they take effect.