Privacy-first freelance software

What privacy-first freelance software actually means

When you pick the software you run your freelance business in, you are also deciding what gets watched — yours and your clients'. Many web tools rely on third-party trackers, advertising pixels, and cross-site cookies that follow people from page to page and site to site. That is so normal it usually goes unquestioned.

We took the other path on purpose. Drift Catch measures aggregate usage with our own first-party analytics, built and operated by us — no third-party analytics provider is involved. The rest of this page explains, in plain terms, what that actually means and what we never collect. For the authoritative, full detail, our Privacy Policy is the source of truth.

What cookieless, first-party analytics actually means

"First-party" means the measurement is done by us, on our own service, not handed off to an outside analytics company. "Cookieless" means it sets no cookie and stores no persistent identifier in your browser. Here is how we count visits without identifying you, exactly as our Privacy Policy describes:

• To count a visit, our server computes a one-way hash of your IP address, your browser's user-agent string, and our domain, using a secret key.
• That key is rotated and destroyed daily. Because each day's key is gone, the hash cannot be reversed to identify you, and it cannot be correlated from one day to the next.
• Your raw IP address is read only momentarily, in memory, to compute that hash. It is never written to any database, log, or backup.
• The short-lived signals used to avoid double-counting are deleted at our next daily rollup, and in all cases within 48 hours. What remains is aggregate, hash-free counts.

That is the whole mechanism. There is no third-party analytics provider in the path, and there is no persistent visitor profile being built.

No cookie banner — because we do not need one

You have clicked through enough cookie banners to know the drill. We do not have one. Because we do not set any non-essential cookie and do not deploy any tracker that requires consent under the major cookie-consent regimes, no cookie or storage consent banner is required for the Service as currently configured.

The only client-side storage we use is strictly necessary to run the app: a first-party cookie to keep you signed in, and short-lived browser storage for small UI preferences. No tracking cookies, no advertising cookies, no cross-site identifiers, no third-party analytics cookies, and no fingerprinting.

If that ever changes — if we were to add a non-essential cookie, tracker, advertising pixel, or comparable third-party script — we would update our Privacy Policy and present an appropriate consent interface before that script loads. That commitment is written into the Policy itself.

What we never collect

The shortest way to describe our posture is by what is absent:

• No third-party analytics provider.
• No tracking or advertising cookies, and no cross-site identifiers.
• No persistent visitor id stored in your browser.
• No raw IP address stored in any database, log, or backup.
• No fingerprinting.

We also do not sell, rent, or share your personal information with other third parties. The services we do rely on to operate — such as our payment processor — are named, with their roles, in our Privacy Policy, and they have their own privacy policies governing the data they handle.

For the authoritative, full detail — every sub-processor, every retention window, and your rights: read our Privacy Policy

Why this matters when you send a client a portal link

Privacy is not only about your own data. When you send a client a link to a Drift Catch portal — to review a proposal, sign off on a deliverable, or pay an invoice — they are visiting a page too.

Because we run no third-party trackers and no advertising pixels, a client opening your portal link is not quietly handed someone else's tracking scripts on your behalf. The clean, no-banner experience your client sees is part of the work landing professionally. You chose the tool; your client should not pay for that choice in trackers.

That is the practical version of "privacy-first freelance software": fewer things watching, on both sides of the work.