Privacy Policy

This policy covers salarysmith.com: what happens to the figures you type into a calculator, what an optional ledger account stores, what our payment and advertising partners see, and the choices you have. Money figures are sensitive, so the short version goes first.

1. Your figures stay in your browser

Every calculator on this site — paycheck, mortgage, loan, 401(k), savings, self-employment tax, offer comparison and the rest — runs entirely in your browser. Your salary, your debts, your contribution rate and your state are used by JavaScript on the page to compute a result on your own device. None of it is transmitted to us, and none of it is recorded, unless you are signed in and explicitly save a result to your ledger.

You can verify this the way you would verify any such claim: open your browser's developer tools, watch the Network tab, and run a calculation. Nothing leaves. You can also disconnect from the internet after the page loads and every calculator still works.

We never see your income unless you deliberately save it.

2. If you create an account

An account is optional and exists for one purpose: to keep a dated ledger of results across visits, which is what powers the history and the vs-last comparisons. If you create one, we store:

• Your email address, used to identify the account, send sign-in links and confirmations, and contact you about the account itself.
• Authentication credentials. Your password is salted and hashed before it is stored, and is never stored or visible in readable form.
• Ledger entries you explicitly save — the calculator used, a headline figure, the full set of inputs behind it, any name you gave the entry, and the date. Nothing is saved automatically. A calculation you do not save is not recorded anywhere.

Because ledger entries contain the inputs, a saved paycheck result includes your salary and filing status. That is what makes the history useful, and it is the reason saving is always an explicit action rather than a default.

Accounts and ledger entries are held by Cloudflare, on Cloudflare's D1 database infrastructure. Their handling is governed by Cloudflare's privacy policy. Every query is scoped to the signed-in account, so an account can only ever read its own entries. Confirmation, password-reset and email-change messages are sent through Brevo, our transactional email provider — see Brevo's privacy policy.

Deleting your account from Settings removes your account record and every ledger entry attached to it, immediately and permanently. We keep no shadow copy and cannot restore a deleted entry.

3. Assay Master membership and payment

Payment is handled entirely by Stripe. Card details are entered on Stripe's own pages and never touch this site or our database. What we store against your account is a Stripe customer reference and the state of the subscription — whether it is active and when the paid period ends — which is all the site needs to know whether your ledger is open.

Cancelling, swapping cards and invoices all live on Stripe's billing page, reachable from Settings. Stripe processes your payment information as an independent controller under its own privacy policy.

4. Advertising, analytics and cookies

SalarySmith is free because it carries display advertising; the Assay Master tier removes it. For everyone else, ads are served by third parties, which set cookies and similar technologies in your browser. Specifically:

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this and/or other sites on the internet.
• You may opt out of personalised advertising at Google Ads Settings, or opt out of a third-party vendor's use of cookies for personalised advertising at aboutads.info/choices and, in Europe, at youronlinechoices.eu.
• If you have not opted out of third-party ad serving, cookies of other vendors or ad networks may also be used to serve ads on this site.

Advertising runs in its own frames and has no access to the figures you type or to your ledger. Because calculations never leave your device, your salary cannot be used to target advertising here. Blocking these cookies does not break any calculator.

Some pages also carry affiliate links — paid placements marked with an advertising disclosure above them. If you follow one and open an account or subscribe, SalarySmith may receive a commission from that company at no cost to you. Following the link hands you off to that company, whose own privacy policy governs what happens next; they may set their own cookie to attribute the referral. We are not told who you are, and we never pass on anything you typed into a calculator. Nothing on this site is chosen because it pays — no figure, no ranking, and no recommendation anywhere is affected by a commercial relationship.

Separately, we count page views using Cloudflare Web Analytics, which tells us which calculators people use. It sets no cookies, does not fingerprint your device, and does not follow you to other sites; visitor data from the EU is excluded entirely. What it reports back to us is counts — pages, referrers, countries — never individuals, and never anything you typed into a calculator.

5. Other data we hold

• Server request logs. Our hosting provider records standard metadata for each request — IP address, user agent, referring page, timestamp — for security and aggregate traffic counts.
• Contact form messages. If you write to us, the message and your email are handled by Formspree, our form provider, and forwarded to us by email under its own privacy policy. Formspree holds the dashboard copy for up to 30 days and then ages it out automatically; the notification email in our inbox we keep only as long as answering you requires, and you can ask us to delete it sooner.
• Browser local storage. Calculators may remember a preference or two on your own device. That never reaches us.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share your ledger with anyone.

6. Your rights in the EEA and UK (GDPR)

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, you have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to processing of your personal data, the right to data portability, and the right to complain to your national supervisory authority. Our lawful bases are: contract for operating an account and a membership you asked for; legitimate interest for security logging and aggregate traffic measurement; and consent for personalised advertising cookies, collected through Google's consent management platform before such cookies are set.

Account deletion is self-service in Settings and takes effect immediately. For anything else, write via the contact page and we will act within 30 days.

7. Your rights in California (CCPA/CPRA)

We do not sell personal information for monetary consideration. Under the CPRA, third-party advertising cookies used for cross-context behavioural advertising may count as "sharing"; you can opt out through the links in section 4, or by enabling Global Privacy Control in your browser, which we honour. California residents may request disclosure or deletion of the personal information we hold — in practice your email, your ledger entries and server logs.

8. Children

SalarySmith is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. If you believe a child has created an account or written to us, tell us and we will delete it.

9. Security

The site is served over HTTPS. Every ledger query is scoped to the signed-in account, so one account cannot read another's entries, and card details never enter our systems at all. The strongest protection, though, is architectural: the calculators do not transmit your figures, so the overwhelming majority of what people type into this site is never held by anyone. If you find a security issue, the contact page reaches the developer directly and reports are welcome.

10. Changes and contact

Material changes to this policy will be reflected in the date at the top of this page. SalarySmith is operated by Studio Ropewalk, LLC, a limited liability company registered in North Carolina, United States. Privacy questions and data requests go through the contact page and are answered within 30 days.