Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated October 2026.

BuildThread ("BuildThread," "we," "us") provides a service that helps general contractors, subcontractors, and homeowners track decisions, questions, tasks, and change requests that arise over the course of a residential construction project, by reading messages sent through SMS, MMS, email, and the BuildThread web and mobile apps.

Information we collect

• Account information you provide at signup: name, email, company/organization details.
• Project and contact information a contractor enters: subcontractor and homeowner names, phone numbers, email addresses, trades, and project addresses.
• The content of messages sent through a project's SMS, MMS, email, or in-app channel — including message text, attachments (photos, documents), and metadata such as sender, timestamp, and channel.
• Usage data such as pages visited and actions taken in the web or mobile app.

How we use information

• To extract structured items — questions, decisions, selections, tasks, change orders, and blockers — from project messages, using third-party AI providers (see "Third parties" below), and to present those items back to the project's general contractor, subcontractors, and homeowner.
• To route inbound messages to the correct project and deliver outbound updates and digests.
• To operate, maintain, and improve the service, and to respond to support requests.
• To comply with legal obligations and enforce our terms.

How we share information

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share mobile phone numbers or other personal information with third parties for their own marketing purposes. We share information only with:

• Other parties on the same project — a general contractor, subcontractor, and homeowner on a shared project can see items, messages, and citations relevant to that project, by design of the service.
• Service providers (subprocessors) who perform functions on our behalf under contract, strictly to provide the service: our database and authentication provider, our SMS/MMS carrier, our email delivery provider, the AI providers used for message extraction and semantic search, and our error-monitoring and analytics providers. These providers are contractually restricted from using your information for any purpose other than providing services to us.
• If required by law, subpoena, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of BuildThread or others.

When more than one contractor has your details. If a contractor records an email address or phone number that you have verified on your own BuildThread account, we show you an invitation to link that contractor's job to your account, and nothing is shared until you accept. We never tell a contractor which other contractors you work with, never share your contact details between them, and your consent to receive messages from one contractor is never treated as consent for another. If you tell us an address is not yours, we stop sending to it and tell the contractor only that the address is wrong.

Support access to your account

To investigate a problem or respond to a support request, authorized BuildThread maintainers may view the service as a specific user would see it (“support access”).

• Support access is read-only and time-limited (30 minutes). It never uses or reveals your password, and nothing can be sent, changed, or approved on your behalf.
• Each use is recorded with the reason it was needed. Company owners and administrators can review when support viewed an account in their company, and why, under Settings → Support access, and you can see the times your own account was viewed in your profile.
• Only maintainers who have signed in with two-factor authentication can use support access.
• Maintainers may also access data directly, under the same two-factor requirement, to operate and secure the service. What is recorded depends on what a page shows, not on which page it is:
  • Recorded. Each time a maintainer opens a page that shows the contents or use of a company, job or account, that is recorded. That includes messages, items, files, contacts and crew, which phone number a job uses, and how many messages it received and when. Where one page lists that kind of information for several companies at once (for example, which jobs hold which phone numbers and how many texts each received), we record that the page was opened and which companies and jobs it showed.
  • Not recorded individually. Lists and search results that only identify records are not. These show names, email addresses and basic account facts: when an account or company was created, when a login last signed in, and how many members or jobs a company has.
  • Never shown. Maintainers do not see passwords, authentication secrets or payment card numbers.
• We may add maintainer pages over time. They follow these rules, and we will update this section if the rules change.

SMS and MMS messaging

If you are added to a project's SMS/MMS communications by a general contractor, the following applies:

• No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Sharing of mobile opt-in data and consent is not shared with any third party for their own marketing purposes, and mobile numbers are used only to operate the service described above.
• Message frequency varies based on project activity — you may receive a one-time disclosure message when added to a project thread, and additional messages tied to project questions, decisions, or updates as they occur. There is no fixed number of messages per day, week, or month.
• Message and data rates may apply. Standard messaging rates from your carrier apply to messages sent and received.
• You may reply STOP at any time to opt out of further messages, START to resume, or HELP for assistance. Opting out of SMS does not delete your existing message history from the project record, which the other project parties continue to rely on.

Data retention

We retain project messages and extracted items for as long as the associated project or account is active, and as needed to comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements.

• When a project or a company is deleted, its data is first hidden from everyone and then permanently removed after a 30-day waiting period.
• Records of text-message opt-outs (STOP) and of the consent a contact gave, including the phone number and the name it belongs to, are kept after deletion so that we can honor messaging preferences and meet our legal obligations.
• Files that were saved to a contractor’s own Dropbox or Google Drive are in that account, not ours, and BuildThread does not delete them.
• A disabled account is deactivated rather than erased, because the records it authored remain part of the job history.

Your choices

You can opt out of SMS/MMS messages at any time by replying STOP. You can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal information by contacting us at the address below, subject to our need to retain project records for other parties on a shared project.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent to privacy@build-thread.net.