Privacy Policy

Your privacy is important to us. It is early.tools' policy to respect your privacy and comply with any applicable law and regulation regarding any personal information we may collect about you, including across our website, https://early.tools, and other sites we own and operate.

Personal information is any information about you which can be used to identify you. This includes information about you as a person (such as name, address, and date of birth), your devices, payment details, and even information about how you use a website or online service.

In the event our site contains links to third-party sites and services, please be aware that those sites and services have their own privacy policies. After following a link to any third-party content, you should read their posted privacy policy information about how they collect and use personal information. This Privacy Policy does not apply to any of your activities after you leave our site.

Who Is Responsible

The controller responsible for your personal information under the GDPR is:

Operator

Neuklick GmbH, which runs early.tools

Registered office

1090 Vienna, Austria

Company register

FN 647595x, Commercial Court Vienna (Handelsgericht Wien)

VAT ID

ATU82110948

Managing director

Julian Paul Svoboda

Supervisory authority

Magistrat der Stadt Wien, MBA 9/17

Chamber

Vienna Economic Chamber (WKO Wien)

Trade rules

Austrian Trade Regulation Act (Gewerbeordnung), at ris.bka.gv.at

Email

julian@early.tools

We have not appointed a data protection officer, as we are not required to. Every privacy question reaches the same address above.

Information We Collect

Information we collect falls into one of two categories:"voluntarily provided" information and"automatically collected" information.

"Voluntarily provided" information refers to any information you knowingly and actively provide us when using or participating in any of our services and promotions.

"Automatically collected" information refers to any information automatically sent by your devices in the course of accessing our products and services.

Log Data

When you visit our website, our servers may automatically log the standard data provided by your web browser. It may include your device's Internet Protocol (IP) address, your browser type and version, the pages you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on each page, and other details about your visit.

Additionally, if you encounter certain errors while using the site, we may automatically collect data about the error and the circumstances surrounding its occurrence. This data may include technical details about your device, what you were trying to do when the error happened, and other technical information relating to the problem. You may or may not receive notice of such errors, even in the moment they occur, that they have occurred, or what the nature of the error is.

Please be aware that while this information may not be personally identifying by itself, it may be possible to combine it with other data to personally identify individual persons.

Device Data

When you visit our website or interact with our services, we may automatically collect data about your device, such as:

• Device type
• Geo-location data

Data we collect can depend on the individual settings of your device and software. We recommend checking the policies of your device manufacturer or software provider to learn what information they make available to us.

Personal Information

We may ask for personal information - for example, when you subscribe to our newsletter or when you contact us - which may include one or more of the following:

• Name
• Email
• Social media profiles

User-Generated Content

We consider"user-generated content" to be materials (text, image and/or video content) voluntarily supplied to us by our users for the purpose of publication, processing, or usage on our platform. All user-generated content is associated with the account or email address used to submit the materials.

Please be aware that any content you submit for the purpose of publication will be public after posting (and subsequent review or vetting process). Once published, it may be accessible to third parties not covered under this privacy policy.

Transaction Data

Transaction data refers to data that accumulates over the normal course of operation on our platform. This may include transaction records, stored files, user profiles, analytics data and other metrics, as well as other types of information, created or generated, as users interact with our services.

Legitimate Reasons for Processing Your Personal Information

We only collect and use your personal information when we have a legitimate reason for doing so. In which instance, we only collect personal information that is reasonably necessary to provide our services to you.

Collection and Use of Information

We may collect personal information from you when you do any of the following on our website:

• Register for an account
• Purchase a subscription or one-time paid product.
• Sign up to receive updates from us via email or social media channels
• Use a mobile device or web browser to access our content
• Contact us via email, social media, or on any similar technologies
• When you mention us on social media

We may collect, hold, use, and disclose information for the following purposes, and personal information will not be further processed in a manner that is incompatible with these purposes:

• to provide you with our platform's core features and services
• to enable you to customize or personalize your experience of our website
• to contact and communicate with you
• for analytics, market research, and business development, including to operate and improve our website, associated applications, and associated social media platforms
• for advertising and marketing, including to send you promotional information about our products and services and information about third parties that we consider may be of interest to you
• to enable you to access and use our website, associated applications, and associated social media platforms
• for internal record keeping and administrative purposes
• to comply with our legal obligations and resolve any disputes that we may have
• for technical assessment, including to operate and improve our app, associated applications, and associated social media platforms

We may combine voluntarily provided and automatically collected personal information with general information or research data we receive from other trusted sources. For example, If you provide us with your location, we may combine this with general information about currency and language to provide you with an enhanced experience of our site and service.

Security of Your Personal Information

When we collect and process personal information, and while we retain this information, we will protect it within commercially acceptable means to prevent loss and theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification.

Although we will do our best to protect the personal information you provide to us, we advise that no method of electronic transmission or storage is 100% secure and no one can guarantee absolute data security.

You are responsible for selecting any password and its overall security strength, ensuring the security of your own information within the bounds of our services. For example, ensuring any passwords associated with accessing your personal information and accounts are secure and confidential.

How Long We Keep Your Personal Information

We keep your personal information only for as long as we need to. This time period may depend on what we are using your information for, in accordance with this privacy policy. For example, if you have provided us with personal information as part of creating an account with us, we may retain this information for the duration your account exists on our system. If your personal information is no longer required for this purpose, we will delete it or make it anonymous by removing all details that identify you.

However, if necessary, we may retain your personal information for our compliance with a legal, accounting, or reporting obligation or for archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific, or historical research purposes or statistical purposes.

Specific periods:

• Account and listing data: while your account exists, and deleted within 30 days of account deletion.
• Payment records: as long as tax and accounting law requires (up to 7 years).
• Connected-app access: access tokens expire after one hour and renewal tokens after 30 days; expired tokens are deleted shortly after, and a disconnected app's records 30 days after you disconnect it.
• Connected-app usage counts: 13 months. Search text sent through a connected app: 6 months.
• Records of contact-detail requests: 2 years, so we can answer a founder's questions and investigate misuse.

Connected Apps (MCP)

You can connect an AI assistant, such as Claude or Cursor, to your early.tools account through our MCP server. You choose to do this: the app sends you to early.tools, you sign in, and you approve what it may do. You can disconnect any app at any time under Connected apps on your account page, and it loses access on its next request.

When you connect an app, we process:

• the app's name and the address it returns you to after approval;
• access tokens for that app, which we store only in scrambled (hashed) form, so they cannot be read back even by us;
• what the app asks early.tools on your behalf: which tool it called, when, how long it took, and, for searches, the search text and number of results;
• a daily count of calls, used to apply usage limits;
• changes the app proposes to your listings, sponsorship, newsletter bookings or profile: the old and new values, whether you approved or discarded them, and when. Nothing is changed until you approve it. We keep these records for six months.

We use this to provide the service, apply limits, prevent abuse, and learn which features people use. The app you connect receives the results of what it asks, and its own privacy policy governs what it does with them. Our legal basis is the performance of our contract with you, and our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure and improving it.

Founders Listed on early.tools

early.tools lists early-stage products and the people who build them. If you are one of those founders, we may hold information about you even if you never signed up.

What we hold

• Public profile: your name, photo, short bio, public social profiles (such as X and LinkedIn), website, and the products you built.
• Professional details: role, company, location, company size and funding stage.
• Business contact details: work email addresses, and in some cases phone numbers, including whether a provider verified them.

Where it comes from

From what you or your team submitted to early.tools; from public sources such as your product's website, public social profiles, GitHub, Product Hunt, Hacker News and startup accelerator directories; and from the enrichment provider Prospeo.

Who sees what

Your public profile is visible to everyone once one of your products is live on early.tools. Professional details are visible to paying members. Contact details are never shown in lists: a member can request them for one founder at a time, up to a daily limit, and we keep a record of every such request. Members may only use them in line with our Terms of Service and applicable law, including anti-spam law.

Why, and your choices

We rely on our legitimate interest in running a directory of early-stage products that helps their founders be found, and helps early adopters, investors and partners reach them. You can object at any time: email julian@early.tools and we will remove your contact details (or your whole profile if you ask), stop enriching it, and tell you whether and how often your contact details were requested. You can also ask us to correct anything, or claim your listing to edit it yourself.

Children's Privacy

early.tools is for people aged 16 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone younger; if you believe a child has given us their details, email us and we will delete them.

Disclosure of Personal Information to Third Parties

We may disclose personal information to:

• a parent, subsidiary or affiliate of our company
• third-party service providers for the purpose of enabling them to provide their services, including (without limitation) IT service providers, data storage, hosting and server providers, ad networks, analytics, error loggers, debt collectors, maintenance or problem-solving providers, marketing providers, professional advisors, and payment systems operators
• our employees, contractors, and/or related entities
• our existing or potential agents or business partners
• credit reporting agencies, courts, tribunals, and regulatory authorities, in the event you fail to pay for goods or services we have provided to you
• courts, tribunals, regulatory authorities, and law enforcement officers, as required by law, in connection with any actual or prospective legal proceedings, or in order to establish, exercise, or defend our legal rights
• third parties, including agents or sub-contractors who assist us in providing information, products, services, or direct marketing to you
• third parties to collect and process data
• an entity that buys, or to which we transfer all or substantially all of our assets and business

Third parties we currently use include:

• Vercel (website hosting and file storage)
• Supabase (database, hosted in the EU)
• Stripe (payments)
• Resend (sign-in links, account emails and the newsletter)
• Umami, self-hosted by us (privacy-friendly website analytics)
• Better Stack (server logs and error monitoring)
• Anthropic (AI that drafts a listing from a URL you submit)
• Firecrawl, Apify and Brave Search (reading public web pages and public launch sources)
• Prospeo (enrichment of founder profiles, see “Founders listed on early.tools” below)

Your Rights and Controlling Your Personal Information

Your choice: By providing personal information to us, you understand we will collect, hold, use, and disclose your personal information in accordance with this privacy policy. You do not have to provide personal information to us, however, if you do not, it may affect your use of our website or the products and/or services offered on or through it.

Information from third parties: If we receive personal information about you from a third party, we will protect it as set out in this privacy policy. If you are a third party providing personal information about somebody else, you represent and warrant that you have such person's consent to provide the personal information to us.

Marketing permission: If you have previously agreed to us using your personal information for direct marketing purposes, you may change your mind at any time by contacting us using the details below.

Access: You may request details of the personal information that we hold about you.

Correction: If you believe that any information we hold about you is inaccurate, out of date, incomplete, irrelevant, or misleading, please contact us using the details provided in this privacy policy. We will take reasonable steps to correct any information found to be inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, or out of date.

Non-discrimination: We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of your rights over your personal information. Unless your personal information is required to provide you with a particular service or offer (for example processing transaction data), we will not deny you goods or services and/or charge you different prices or rates for goods or services, including through granting discounts or other benefits, or imposing penalties, or provide you with a different level or quality of goods or services.

Notification of data breaches: We will comply with laws applicable to us in respect of any data breach.

Complaints: If you believe that we have breached a relevant data protection law and wish to make a complaint, please contact us using the details below and provide us with full details of the alleged breach. We will promptly investigate your complaint and respond to you, in writing, setting out the outcome of our investigation and the steps we will take to deal with your complaint. You also have the right to contact a regulatory body or data protection authority in relation to your complaint.

Unsubscribe: To unsubscribe from our email database or opt-out of communications (including marketing communications), please contact us using the details provided in this privacy policy, or opt-out using the opt-out facilities provided in the communication. We may need to request specific information from you to help us confirm your identity.

Use of Cookies

We use"cookies" to collect information about you and your activity across our site. A cookie is a small piece of data that our website stores on your computer, and accesses each time you visit, so we can understand how you use our site. This helps us serve you content based on preferences you have specified.

The cookies and browser storage we use:

• Sign-in session (essential): keeps you signed in. Set only when you sign in, removed when you sign out.
• Preferences (essential): your light or dark theme and similar settings, kept in your browser only.
• Analytics: Umami, which we host ourselves, counts visits without cookies and without tracking you across sites.
• Payments: Stripe sets its own cookies on its checkout pages to prevent fraud.

Business Transfers

If we or our assets are acquired, or in the unlikely event that we go out of business or enter bankruptcy, we would include data, including your personal information, among the assets transferred to any parties who acquire us. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any parties who acquire us may, to the extent permitted by applicable law, continue to use your personal information according to this policy, which they will be required to assume as it is the basis for any ownership or use rights we have over such information.

Limits of Our Policy

Our website may link to external sites that are not operated by us. Please be aware that we have no control over the content and policies of those sites, and cannot accept responsibility or liability for their respective privacy practices.

Changes to This Policy

At our discretion, we may change our privacy policy to reflect updates to our business processes, current acceptable practices, or legislative or regulatory changes. If we decide to change this privacy policy, we will post the changes here at the same link by which you are accessing this privacy policy.

If the changes are significant, or if required by applicable law, we will contact you (based on your selected preferences for communications from us) and all our registered users with the new details and links to the updated or changed policy.

If required by law, we will get your permission or give you the opportunity to opt in to or opt out of, as applicable, any new uses of your personal information.

Additional Disclosures for General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance (EU)

Data Controller / Data Processor

The GDPR distinguishes between organisations that process personal information for their own purposes (known as"data controllers") and organisations that process personal information on behalf of other organisations (known as"data processors"). Neuklick GmbH, which operates early.tools, is the Data Controller for the personal information described in this policy, including information about founders listed on early.tools. You can reach us using the details in the Contact Us section.

Legal Bases for Processing Your Personal Information

We will only collect and use your personal information when we have a legal right to do so. In which case, we will collect and use your personal information lawfully, fairly, and in a transparent manner.

Our lawful bases depend on the services you use and how you use them. This means we only collect and use your information on the following grounds:

Consent From You

Where you give us consent to collect and use your personal information for a specific purpose. You may withdraw your consent at any time using the facilities we provide; however this will not affect any use of your information that has already taken place. You may consent to providing your email address for the purpose of receiving marketing emails from us. While you may unsubscribe at any time, we cannot recall any email we have already sent. If you have any further enquiries about how to withdraw your consent, please feel free to enquire using the details provided in the Contact Us section of this privacy policy.

Performance of a Contract or Transaction

Where you have entered into a contract or transaction with us, or in order to take preparatory steps prior to our entering into a contract or transaction with you. For example, if you purchase a product, service, or subscription from us, we may need to use your personal and payment information in order to process and deliver your order.

Our Legitimate Interests

Where we assess it is necessary for our legitimate interests, such as for us to provide, operate, improve and communicate our services. We consider our legitimate interests to include research and development, understanding our audience, marketing and promoting our services, measures taken to operate our services efficiently, marketing analysis, and measures taken to protect our legal rights and interests.

Compliance with Law

In some cases, we may have a legal obligation to use or keep your personal information. Such cases may include (but are not limited to) court orders, criminal investigations, government requests, and regulatory obligations. If you have any further enquiries about how we retain personal information in order to comply with the law, please feel free to enquire using the details provided in the Contact Us section of this privacy policy.

International Transfers Outside of the European Economic Area (EEA)

Our database is hosted in the EU. Some of the providers listed above are based in the United States, notably Vercel, Stripe, Resend and Anthropic, so personal information can be processed there. Each transfer is covered by an adequacy decision (the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, for providers certified under it) or by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply.

Your Rights and Controlling Your Personal Information

Restrict: You have the right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal information if (i) you are concerned about the accuracy of your personal information; (ii) you believe your personal information has been unlawfully processed; (iii) you need us to maintain the personal information solely for the purpose of a legal claim; or (iv) we are in the process of considering your objection in relation to processing on the basis of legitimate interests.

Objecting to processing: You have the right to object to processing of your personal information that is based on our legitimate interests or public interest. If this is done, we must provide compelling legitimate grounds for the processing which overrides your interests, rights, and freedoms, in order to proceed with the processing of your personal information.

Data portability: You may have the right to request a copy of the personal information we hold about you. Where possible, we will provide this information in CSV format or other easily readable machine format. You may also have the right to request that we transfer this personal information to a third party.

Deletion: You may have a right to request that we delete the personal information we hold about you at any time, and we will take reasonable steps to delete your personal information from our current records. If you ask us to delete your personal information, we will let you know how the deletion affects your use of our website or products and services. There may be exceptions to this right for specific legal reasons which, if applicable, we will set out for you in response to your request. If you terminate or delete your account, we will delete your personal information within 30 days of the deletion of your account. Please be aware that search engines and similar third parties may still retain copies of your personal information that has been made public at least once, like certain profile information and public comments, even after you have deleted the information from our services or deactivated your account.

Which Information You Have to Give Us

Browsing early.tools needs nothing from you. An account needs an email address, because that is how you sign in. A purchase needs the payment details Stripe asks for, and the billing details tax law requires us to keep. A submission needs the product's details. Without them we cannot provide that particular service; nothing else is required by law or contract.

Automated Decisions

We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects (Article 22 GDPR). AI drafts listings and suggests a product's stage, and a person reviews both.

Your Right to Complain

You can complain to a data protection supervisory authority, in particular in the EU country where you live or work, or where you believe the GDPR was breached. Ours is the Austrian Data Protection Authority (Datenschutzbehörde), Barichgasse 40-42, 1030 Vienna, dsb.gv.at. We would appreciate the chance to deal with your concern first, so please contact us before you do.

Contact Us

For any questions or concerns regarding your privacy, you may contact us using the following details:

Email julian@early.tools, or write to the operator at the address under “Who Is Responsible” above. We answer requests about your rights within one month.