Privacy Notice — Upgrade Ladder
October 12, 2026
At a glance
You can get an estimate without telling us who you are. We keep what you enter, we analyze it to make the estimates better, and we may present findings about groups of homes — never a record of yours on its own.
- No name, street address, email address or phone number is needed to get an estimate. Only your email address is needed if a report is purchased.
- Card payments are handled by Stripe. Your card details never reach us.
- We keep a record of every calculation (what was entered and what came back) and analyze it internally.
- We may present statistics about groups of homes to utilities, program administrators, regulators and similar bodies, including as part of paid work. Any group of fewer than 10 homes is withheld.
- We do not sell your information, and we run no advertising trackers on the site.
The rest of this notice is the detail behind those five lines.
Who we are
The Home Energy Upgrade Ladder is operated by Brolte, LLC, a South Dakota limited liability company. Brolte, LLC is the business responsible for the information described in this notice.
The tool is at www.brolte.com/upgrade-ladder/ and is offered to households in the United States.
Privacy questions, requests and complaints: Gregory.Brown@brolte.com, 25 First Ave. SW, STE A, Watertown, SD 57201 USA
What we collect
We collect what the calculation needs and a record of each run. We do not ask for your identity, and we do not run analytics or advertising scripts.
| What | What it contains | What it does not contain |
|---|---|---|
| Calculation inputs | Your home's characteristics, your state and, where offered, a sub-state region, your monthly energy bills, optionally your monthly kWh, therms, and/or other provided fuels, whether you are on budget billing, and energy efficiency upgrades you have already made or plan to make | Name, street address, zip code, email address, phone number |
| Usage log | A record of every calculation: the inputs above, the results, a random run id, marketing-source tags (UTM codes and the site that referred you), any changes to default calculation values, any referral code used, and which report was purchased, if any. | Name, email address, street address, IP address, card details, Stripe identifier |
| Checkout records | If you buy a report, your calculation inputs held alongside the Stripe checkout session so your report link keeps working for 60 days | Card details |
| Payment details | Stripe asks for your email address for the receipt (and, for a card, usually the cardholder's name and billing ZIP code). We can see these in our Stripe account and use them only for that purchase: receipts, refunds and questions. We don't copy them into our own systems | Card numbers, which never reach our systems |
| Browser storage | Your form entries, run id, and campaign tags, kept in your browser's own session storage so the form survives a reload within a visit. After any purchase, the report access code and the payment reference. | Third-party cookies, analytics scripts, advertising pixels, externally hosted fonts |
| Error logs | The request method and an error message when something breaks | The contents of your request |
| Infrastructure logs | Our web server is configured to keep no access log. Amazon Web Services, which hosts the service, may keep its own operational logs under its own terms; these can include IP addresses, which are frequently stored on the server short-term to prevent abusive traffic. | — |
Be aware that in some circumstances, your state, your home's characteristics and your bills can be a distinctive combination even with no name attached, and US property records are public in most states. So we treat the usage log as information about a person rather than as anonymous data, and this notice describes it on that basis.
Why we use it
Four purposes, and no others.
- To give you your estimate and report. Your inputs run through the calculation and come back as a summary or, if you buy one, a report you can reopen from its link for 60 days.
- To check and improve the estimates. We analyze the collected calculations internally, comparing what the model predicts against what people enter, and studying how homes, bills and upgrade choices vary, so the recommendations get better over time.
- To produce findings about groups of homes. Described in the next section.
- To see which links and campaigns bring people to the tool. Counted only in totals.
What we do not do with it: we do not advertise to you, we do not track you across other sites, we do not build a profile of you, and we do not use your data to make any decision about you beyond producing the estimate you asked for. The estimate is information for you to act on, not a decision we make about you. It is not a quote, an audit or a guarantee, and the report shows the source behind each figure.
Findings about groups of homes
We may present statistics about groups of homes to utilities, energy-efficiency program administrators, regulators and similar bodies, for evaluation and analysis. This may form part of paid analytical or consulting work.
What we present. Figures about groups (e.g., typical bill levels, how common a given home characteristic is, or which upgrades rank highest) reported at state level, or sub-state level where the option is given to users.
What we do not present. Your individual record. No individual calculation, report or checkout record leaves Brolte, other than to the providers listed in the next section that run the service for us.
The safeguards in place. Findings are reported at state level, or sub-state level where the option is given to users, and any group of fewer than 10 homes is withheld rather than reported.
What we commit to. We will not try to work out which household any figure came from, we will not publish a figure we believe could single out one home, and we will not attempt the re-identification of any household based on the information held.
Who else sees it
Three kinds of recipient, and no others.
Providers that run the service for us. Amazon Web Services hosts the application and holds the nightly backups. Stripe takes payments. These providers handle the data to run the service, not for purposes of their own, with the exception of Stripe, which also acts on its own account as a payment processor and has its own privacy policy.
Recipients of group findings. Statistics, as described above. Not records.
Where the law requires it. In response to a valid legal demand, or where we need to protect our rights or someone's safety.
We do not sell your information. We do not disclose an individual record to a utility, a program administrator, a regulator or anyone else. We do not share your information for advertising, and there are no advertising or analytics trackers on the site to share it through.
How long we keep it
| What | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Checkout records | 60 days from purchase, then deleted. Your report link stops working at that point. |
| Usage log | 12 months from creation, then irreversibly reduced to an aggregate table of summary data fields. Individual records are deleted at the time of reduction. |
| Error logs | 12 months from creation. |
| Database backups | Nightly, held in storage in the same US region. Backups held for 60 days and then deleted. |
| Browser session storage | Until you close the tab or clear it yourself. It never reaches us. |
Records deleted or reduced on this schedule can remain in database backups for up to 60 days, until those backups are deleted.
Where it is stored
Your information is stored and processed in the United States. The service runs on a single Amazon Web Services server in a US region, with nightly database backups to Amazon S3 storage in the same region. Payments are handled by Stripe. We do not store your information anywhere else outside the United States. Brolte, LLC is a South Dakota company and the service is offered to households in the United States.
Your choices
Because we never ask who you are, we usually cannot connect a stored record to you. That cuts both ways: it is why we hold so little, and it is why there is a real limit on what we can do when you ask us to find or delete something.
- Your form entries. Close the tab, or clear your browser's session storage. They never reach us.
- A report you bought. Send us the report link or your Stripe receipt and we can find the checkout record and/or delete it.
- A calculation you did not buy. Send us the run id from your result page and we can find that entry. Without it, a usage log entry holds no name, email address or IP address, so in most cases we have no way to tell which entry was yours — we would rather say so than imply we can.
- Questions or complaints. Write to us at the address above. We will acknowledge your message and tell you the outcome.
Depending on where you live, state law may give you specific rights — to know what we hold, to get a copy, to correct it, to have it deleted, and to appeal if we refuse. We will not charge you, or give you a worse service, for exercising a right.
Children
The Upgrade Ladder is for people making decisions about a home they live in or own, and it is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has entered information, write to us and we will delete what we can identify.
Security
The strongest protection here is how little we hold. Card details never reach our systems. The usage log carries no name, email address or IP address. Our web server is configured to keep no access log, and the application logs errors only — a request method and a message, never what you typed. The database is backed up nightly to storage in the same US region. The data that are retained are encrypted when in transit and multi-factor authentication is always utilized on the host account.
No service can promise that information is perfectly secure, and we do not make that promise. If a breach affects your information and we are legally required to inform you, for a free calculation we have no way to contact you; for a purchase we would use the email you gave Stripe.
Changes, and how to reach us
If we change this notice we will change the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use information we have already collected (e.g., a new purpose, a new kind of recipient, a longer retention period) we will say so on the site rather than only editing the text.
Write to us at the address in Who we are.