Privacy notice
Last updated 5 October 2026
In short
- We use your information only to run the free check, prepare your IHT400 pack and look after your account. We do not sell it and we show no advertising.
- Account numbers, sort codes, National Insurance numbers and similar numbers are painted out of your documents before they are stored and before our AI provider reads them.
- Uploaded documents are deleted 7 days after you first download your pack (30 days after upload at most if you do not buy), or at once when you delete them. The inventory is kept for 90 days.
- Our company, our server and most of our service providers are in the USA. Section 8 explains how these transfers are protected. Before your first upload we also ask for your explicit agreement.
- Statistics: until you choose, page views are counted without cookies; after “Reject”, your browser sends nothing.
1. Who we are
EstateTally is software run by:
Northpine Labs LLC
Postal address: not yet published. Please write to us by e-mail; if you need a postal address for a letter, we will give it to you.
E-mail: [email protected]
Contact form: send us a message
We decide how and why your personal data is used, so we are the “controller” under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018. The UK GDPR applies to us even though we are based outside the UK, because we offer our service to people in the UK (Article 3(2) UK GDPR).
Our representative in the United Kingdom (Article 27 UK GDPR): not yet appointed. Until one is appointed, please contact us directly — we deal with requests from the UK ourselves.
Registration with the Information Commission (ICO): registration number not yet available.
2. Information about the person who has died
The UK GDPR protects information about living people. Information about someone who has died is not personal data under the UK GDPR (see the ICO’s guidance What is personal data?).
Estate papers almost always contain information about living people as well: you as executor, joint account holders, beneficiaries and other family members. We treat everything in the estate workspace as personal data and protect it in the same way.
3. What we collect and why
| What | Why we use it | Lawful basis (UK GDPR Article 6(1)) |
|---|---|---|
| Free check: your approximate answers (date of death, rough values, yes or no questions). No names and no documents. | To show your result, to e-mail it to you if you ask, and to improve the questions. | Our legitimate interest in offering a free tool you chose to use (f); sending the result at your request (b). |
| Documents you upload, and what our software reads from them: who the letter is from, a description, values and dates. | To build the estate inventory, fill in the forms, run the checks and produce the pack. | Contract with you, including the steps before it such as the free preview (b). |
| What you type in the estate workspace: names, addresses and details the forms ask for (the will, a spouse, gifts, the home, the executors). | The forms need them. | Contract (b). |
| Your e-mail address and sign-in. | To send sign-in links, receipts and the messages you choose, and to let you come back to your estates. | Contract (b). |
| Payment: Stripe handles your card. We receive the payment status, the amount, a payment reference and your e-mail address — never your card number. | To take payment, make refunds and keep accounting records. | Contract (b); legal obligation to keep accounting records (c). |
| Optional e-mails: deadline reminders, one “your draft is saved” message, rule-change updates and a request for a review. | Only if you ask for them. Every one has an unsubscribe link. | Consent (a). |
| Messages to us (contact form, complaints, reports of an error in a form, reviews): your e-mail address, your message and, if you give it, the estate reference. | To answer you, to correct errors and to improve the service. We ask before publishing any review. | Our legitimate interest in answering and improving the service (f); our legal duty to deal with data protection complaints (c). |
| Statistics: page views and steps such as “check completed”, with types and counts only — never amounts, names, dates or anything read from your documents. | To see which pages help and where people get stuck. | Before you choose: our legitimate interest, which you can object to at any time with “Reject” (f). After “Accept”: consent (a). |
| Technical data: IP address, browser type and the time of each request. | To deliver the site, prevent abuse (request limits are counted in memory, not stored) and protect against attacks. | Our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure (f). |
You do not have to give us any information, but without the documents or answers we cannot prepare the pack.
4. How we protect your documents
- Painting out. Before a document is stored or read by the AI, our software paints over account numbers, sort codes, card numbers, IBANs, National Insurance numbers, policy, member and scheme references and other long runs of digits. The original file is not kept. Our AI provider is told never to repeat such numbers, and any that slip into its answers are removed.
- We never ask for these numbers. The forms you download stay editable, and the pack lists the boxes for you to complete by hand, such as the National Insurance number and bank details on the IHT400.
- Encryption. Stored pages are encrypted with AES-256-GCM, with a separate key for each file. The inventory, your answers and e-mail addresses are encrypted in our database.
- Access. Only the browser in which you started the estate, or you after signing in with your e-mail address, can open it. Knowing the address of an estate page is not enough.
- Deleting. You can delete a single document, all documents (“Delete documents”) or a whole estate at any time in your estate workspace.
5. Automated reading and calculations
Our AI provider suggests lines for the inventory from your documents. Every suggestion is shown next to the part of the document it came from, and you confirm or correct it. The tax figures are worked out by fixed rules from the law and HMRC’s published guidance. None of this is a decision about you with legal or similarly significant effects under Article 22 UK GDPR: you decide what goes on the forms, and HMRC decides the tax.
6. Who processes your data for us
We use these service providers. They act on our instructions under data processing terms, except Stripe, which is also responsible in its own right for payment processing and fraud prevention.
| Provider | What they do for us | Where |
|---|---|---|
| OVHcloud (OVH US) | Runs our server and database, including the encrypted document pages. | USA (Virginia) |
| Cloudflare, Inc. | Network, domain name system and protection against attacks; stores the encrypted backups of our database. | USA and Cloudflare’s worldwide network |
| Anthropic, PBC | Reads the painted-out page images of your documents and suggests inventory lines. Anthropic’s Commercial Terms of Service (effective 17 June 2025) say: “Anthropic may not train models on Customer Content from Services.” | USA |
| Stripe | Takes your payment. See Stripe’s privacy policy. | USA |
| Resend, Inc. | Sends our e-mails. | USA |
| PostHog, Inc. | Counts how the site is used (statistics), in its US cloud. | USA |
We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers. We may disclose information where the law requires it.
7. Our company is in the USA
EstateTally is run by a company in the USA, so the information you give us is held in the USA from the start. The UK GDPR still applies to everything described in this notice, and the transfers to our service providers are protected as section 8 explains.
8. How transfers to the USA are protected
- UK–US “data bridge”. Where a provider is certified to the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, the transfer is covered by the UK’s adequacy regulations for the USA (The Data Protection (Adequacy) (United States of America) Regulations 2023). When we checked the Data Privacy Framework List on 5 October 2026, Stripe, PostHog and OVHcloud were listed as active, and Cloudflare and Resend as active with re-certification under review.
- Anthropic is not on the Data Privacy Framework List. For Anthropic we rely on the International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, issued by the Information Commission, which forms part of Anthropic’s data processing terms. You can ask us for a copy.
- If a provider’s listing lapses, we will rely on the UK safeguards in that provider’s data processing terms or stop the transfer.
- Your explicit agreement before uploading. Before your first upload, the upload page asks you to tick a separate box: “I agree to my documents being processed in the USA as described above.” Without the tick, nothing is uploaded and you can type the values in yourself. We ask because US law may allow US public authorities to access data held in the USA, and protections may be harder for you to enforce there than in the UK (Article 49(1)(a) UK GDPR). You can withdraw this agreement by deleting your documents.
9. How long we keep information
| Information | How long |
|---|---|
| Uploaded document pages | 7 days after you first download your pack; if you do not buy, 30 days after upload at the latest; or at once when you delete them. |
| Estate inventory and your answers | 90 days after payment, or 90 days after your last change if you do not buy; or at once when you delete the estate. |
| Free check answers | 90 days. |
| Messages, complaints, error reports and reviews | 12 months after we close them, unless you agree to a review being published. |
| Rule-change e-mail sign-ups | Until you unsubscribe. |
| Payment records (amount, date, payment reference — no inventory or documents) | As long as tax and accounting law requires us to keep them. When an estate is deleted, the e-mail address is removed from its payment record. |
| Database backups | 14 days. Backups never contain uploaded documents, so deleted information disappears from them within 14 days. |
| Statistics | Kept in PostHog for as long as they help us understand how the site is used. They contain no amounts, names, dates or document content. |
10. Your rights
Under the UK GDPR you have the right to:
- get a copy of your personal data (access);
- have it corrected (rectification) or deleted (erasure);
- restrict how we use it, or receive it in a portable format;
- object to our use of it on the basis of legitimate interests — including statistics, by choosing “Reject”;
- withdraw your consent at any time (this does not affect what we did before).
The quickest way to delete is the delete buttons in your estate workspace, or sign in to your estates. For anything else, e-mail us or use the contact form. We reply within one month.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with how we have used your information, please tell us first: choose “Complaint” on the contact form. We acknowledge complaints within 5 working days (the law allows up to 30 days). You can also complain to the Information Commission (ICO), the UK regulator for data protection: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.
11. Cookies
We use two cookies that are needed for the service and, only with your permission, statistics storage. The cookie notice lists them. You can change your statistics choice at any time: .
12. Other points
- The service is meant for adults dealing with an estate. It is not intended for children.
- If we change this notice, we update the date at the top. If a change matters for how we use information you have already given us, we tell you by e-mail before it takes effect.