Privacy Policy

Last Updated: April 23, 2026

1. Introduction

Welcome to BudgetPixel (“we,” “us,” or “our”). We are committed to protecting your personal information and your right to privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit our website at budgetpixel.com and use our AI-powered creative services (collectively, the “Service”).

BudgetPixel is operated from the United States. If you are accessing the Service from the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), or any other jurisdiction with data protection laws, please read this policy carefully as it describes your specific rights.

If you do not agree with the terms of this privacy policy, please do not access the site or use our services.

2. Data Controller

For the purposes of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and UK GDPR, the data controller is:

BudgetPixel
Email: support@budgetpixel.com

If you have questions about how your data is processed, you can reach our privacy team at the email address above.

3. Information We Collect

3.1 Information You Provide

When you register and use our Service, you provide us with:

  • Account information: Name, email address, and profile picture (provided by your OAuth provider such as Google or Discord)
  • Profile information: Bio, website URL, location, and social media links (optional, if you choose to add them)
  • Payment information: Processed by Stripe. We store your Stripe customer ID, card brand, last four digits, and expiry date. We do not store full card numbers.
  • User-generated content: Text prompts you submit, images/videos/audio generated through the Service, social posts, blog posts, and comments
  • Communications: Information you provide when contacting our support team

3.2 Information Collected Automatically

When you access the Service, we automatically collect:

  • IP address and geolocation: Your IP address is recorded at login. We use MaxMind GeoIP2 to derive your approximate country from your IP address for fraud prevention and compliance purposes.
  • Device identifier: A randomly generated device ID stored in your browser cookie (bp_device_id) for fraud detection and multi-account prevention.
  • Usage data: Pages visited, features used, generation history (model, parameters, timestamps), and credit consumption.
  • Referral data: UTM parameters, HTTP referrer, and landing page for understanding how users discover our Service.

3.3 Information from Third Parties

We receive limited information from your OAuth provider (Google or Discord) when you sign in: your name, email address, and profile picture.

4. Legal Bases for Processing (GDPR)

If you are in the EEA or UK, we process your personal data only when we have a valid legal basis. The bases we rely on are:

Processing ActivityLegal Basis
Account creation and service deliveryPerformance of contract (Art. 6(1)(b))
Payment processing via StripePerformance of contract (Art. 6(1)(b))
Storing and delivering generated contentPerformance of contract (Art. 6(1)(b))
Fraud detection (IP, device fingerprint)Legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f))
Content moderation and safetyLegitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f))
Analytics cookies (Google Analytics, Clarity)Consent (Art. 6(1)(a))
Marketing cookies (Meta Pixel, X Pixel, Google Ads)Consent (Art. 6(1)(a))
Email communications (welcome, billing, low credits)Performance of contract / Legitimate interest
Interest-based content recommendationsLegitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f))
Using prompts to improve AI service qualityLegitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f))
Compliance with legal obligationsLegal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c))

Where we rely on legitimate interest, we have conducted a balancing test to ensure our interests do not override your fundamental rights. You can request details of this assessment by contacting us.

5. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect for the following purposes:

  • Provide the Service: Create and manage your account, process your AI generation requests, store your generated content, and deliver features you use.
  • Process payments: Handle subscriptions, credit purchases, and billing through Stripe.
  • Prevent fraud and abuse: Detect multi-account abuse, enforce single-account policies, and protect the integrity of our Service using IP addresses, device identifiers, and usage patterns.
  • Moderate content: Classify generated content by safety level, enforce content policies, and maintain a safe community.
  • Personalize your experience: Recommend content based on your engagement patterns and interests.
  • Improve the Service: Analyze usage patterns, diagnose technical issues, and improve our AI models.
  • Communicate with you: Send transactional emails (welcome, billing, generation status) and respond to support requests.
  • Measure advertising effectiveness: With your consent, use analytics and advertising tools to understand how users discover our Service.

6. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

We use cookies and similar technologies on our Service. When you first visit, a cookie consent banner lets you choose which categories to allow.

Essential Cookies (Always Active)

Required for the site to function. These cannot be disabled.

  • Authentication cookies: Session tokens for keeping you logged in
  • Device ID (bp_device_id): Randomly generated identifier for fraud prevention
  • Cookie consent (bp_cookie_consent): Stores your cookie preferences
  • Google reCAPTCHA: Bot detection for security

Analytics Cookies (Requires Consent)

Help us understand how visitors interact with the site.

  • Google Tag Manager (GTM-TS9P847J): Tag management and event tracking
  • Microsoft Clarity: Session recordings and heatmaps to understand UI usage

Marketing Cookies (Requires Consent)

Allow advertising platforms to measure campaign performance and attribution.

  • Google Ads (AW-17087747603): Conversion tracking and remarketing
  • Meta Pixel (677098138297497): Conversion tracking for Facebook/Instagram ads
  • X (Twitter) Pixel: Conversion tracking for X ads
  • Attribution cookies (_fbc, _fbp, _gcl_aw, _rdt_cid, _twclid): Ad platform click identifiers

You can change your cookie preferences at any time by clearing your browser's local storage for budgetpixel.com, which will cause the consent banner to reappear on your next visit.

7. Sharing Your Information

We share your information with the following categories of recipients:

  • Service providers: Cloud hosting, storage, payment processing, email delivery, geolocation, and AI model providers that help us operate the Service and fulfill your generation requests.
  • Analytics and advertising partners: With your consent, we share data with analytics and advertising platforms to measure website usage and ad campaign performance.
  • Legal and safety: When required by law, subpoena, or government request, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of BudgetPixel, our users, or the public.
  • Business transfers: In connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

Data is only shared with analytics and advertising partners if you consent through our cookie preferences. Images you publish to the community gallery, social posts, and blog posts are publicly visible.

8. International Data Transfers

BudgetPixel is based in the United States. Your personal data is stored and processed in the United States (AWS US East 1 region). If you are located in the EEA, UK, or another jurisdiction outside the US, your data is transferred to the United States when you use our Service.

For transfers of personal data from the EEA/UK to the United States, we rely on:

  • Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs): We use EU-approved Standard Contractual Clauses with our sub-processors to ensure an adequate level of protection for your data.
  • Sub-processor safeguards: Our key service providers maintain their own data transfer mechanisms, including SCCs and, where applicable, certification under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

You can request a copy of the safeguards we use for international transfers by contacting us at support@budgetpixel.com.

9. Data Retention

We retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes described in this policy, unless a longer retention period is required by law. Specific retention periods:

  • Account data: Retained while your account is active. After account deletion, personal data is deleted within 30 days, except where retention is required for legal, tax, or fraud-prevention purposes.
  • Generated content (images, videos, audio): Retained while your account is active. Deleted upon account deletion or when you delete individual items.
  • Design agent assets: Session-scoped, automatically deleted after 60 days.
  • Payment records: Retained for 7 years as required for tax and financial compliance.
  • Login/security logs (IP, device ID): Retained for up to 12 months for fraud prevention.
  • Email logs: Retained for 6 months for delivery troubleshooting.
  • Analytics data: Governed by the retention policies of each analytics provider (typically 14-26 months).

10. Your Rights

Depending on your location, you may have certain rights regarding your personal data under applicable privacy laws (including the GDPR for EEA/UK residents and the CCPA for California residents):

  • Access and portability: You can request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
  • Correction: You can ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data, or update it yourself in your account settings.
  • Deletion: You can request that we delete your personal data. We will do so except where retention is required for legal compliance, fraud prevention, or other legitimate reasons.
  • Object to processing: You can object to processing based on our legitimate interests, including interest-based content recommendations and direct marketing.
  • Withdraw consent: Where we process data based on your consent (e.g., analytics and marketing cookies), you can withdraw consent at any time by clearing your cookie preferences.
  • Automated decisions: Our content moderation uses automated classification. If your content is flagged or your account is restricted, you can request human review by contacting us.
  • Lodge a complaint: If you are in the EEA or UK, you have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority.

How to Exercise Your Rights

To exercise any of the above rights, email us at support@budgetpixel.com with your request. We will verify your identity and respond within 30 days (or the timeframe required by applicable law). We will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.

California Residents (CCPA)

California residents have the right to know what personal information is collected, request deletion, and opt out of the sale of personal information. We do not sell your personal information. To exercise your CCPA rights, contact us at the email above.

11. Security

We use appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your personal data, including encryption in transit (TLS), access controls, and secure cloud infrastructure. However, no method of electronic transmission or storage is 100% secure. If you discover a security vulnerability, please report it to support@budgetpixel.com.

12. Children's Privacy

Our Service is not intended for children under 16 years of age (or under 13 in jurisdictions where COPPA applies). We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under these ages. If we learn that we have collected personal data from a child under the applicable age threshold, we will take steps to delete that information promptly. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, please contact us at support@budgetpixel.com.

13. AI Companion (Ava) Data

This section describes the data we collect and store specifically when you use the AI Companion (Ava) feature, and how it is retained and deleted. For general terms governing the Companion Service, see Section 18 of our Terms of Service.

13.1 Data We Collect for Companions

When you create and use an Ava companion, we collect and store:

  • Companion profile: The name, avatar, persona settings, and preferences you configure for each companion.
  • Chat history: The messages you and Ava exchange, including text, attached images or media, and references to generations produced during the conversation.
  • Long-term memory records: Compact summaries and atomic memory entries (facts, preferences, events, episodes, and companion-side records such as commitments and shared events) derived from your conversations so that Ava can remember you across sessions.
  • Semantic embeddings: Numerical vector representations of memory records, generated by a self-hosted text-embedding model, used solely to retrieve relevant memories during conversations. Embeddings are not sold, shared, or used for advertising.
  • Usage metadata: Per-companion timestamps (last-used, last-accessed, last-refreshed), memory access counts, and token-usage metrics used for service operation and cost monitoring.

13.2 How Companion Data Is Used

Companion data is used exclusively to: (a) operate the Companion Service for you (persona continuity, memory, media references); (b) enforce safety, content moderation, and abuse-prevention policies; (c) comply with applicable laws; and (d) monitor aggregate performance and cost of the underlying AI services. Companion chat content is not used to train third-party models. Companion chat content may be used in anonymized, aggregated form to improve our own service quality and safety systems.

13.3 Scope — Data Is Per-Companion and Per-User

Each companion's memory, chat history, and media are scoped to the specific (user, companion) pair. One companion does not share memory with another of your companions. No user can access, retrieve, or view the companion data of another user.

13.4 Sensitive Information

The Companion Service is a private conversational surface and users sometimes share sensitive topics. Our memory extractor assigns sensitivity tiers to memory records and applies stricter retrieval rules to memories flagged as sensitive. However, you should not share information you do not want stored — including medical history, mental-health crises, financial details, legal matters, or identifying information about third parties. The Companion Service is not a HIPAA-covered service, is not a licensed health-information service, and provides no professional confidentiality. If in doubt, do not share.

13.5 Retention

Companion chat history, memory records, and uploaded media are retained for as long as the companion exists on your account, except where removed earlier at your request or by our retention and decay processes. Low-salience or inactive memory records may be faded out or pruned by routine maintenance. When you delete a companion or reset its chat and memory, the corresponding chat history, memory records, semantic embeddings, and uploaded/generated media scoped to that companion are deleted from our primary data stores; residual backup copies are deleted on our standard backup-expiry schedule.

13.6 Your Controls

You have the following controls over companion data:

  • Reset chat & memory: From the companion chat screen, you can wipe all chat history, memory, and media for that companion while keeping the persona. This is effective immediately on the primary data stores.
  • Delete a companion: From the companions management page, you can delete a companion entirely, including persona, avatar, chat history, memory, and all related media.
  • Delete your account: Deleting your BudgetPixel account deletes all companions and their associated data, subject to the residual-backup schedule described above.
  • Data access and portability: To request an export of your companion data or to exercise any other data-subject rights described in Section 10, contact us at support@budgetpixel.com.

13.7 Age Restriction and Minor-Discovery Procedure

The Companion Service is restricted to users 18 years of age and older. We do not knowingly collect companion data from users under 18. If we learn or have reasonable grounds to believe that a companion account belongs to a user under 18, we will promptly (i) block that account's access to the Companion Service, (ii) delete the companion's chat history, memory records, semantic embeddings, and associated media from our primary data stores on an expedited basis, and (iii) where appropriate, refer the matter to account-level moderation. If you believe a user under 18 has accessed the Companion Service, please contact us at support@budgetpixel.com.

13.8 Third-Party AI Model Providers and Training Prohibition

To operate the Companion Service we send portions of your conversations to third-party AI model providers for response generation and, in limited cases, safety moderation. We require those providers by contract not to use your conversational data to train their own public-facing AI models, except to the extent strictly necessary for transient request processing or safety analysis at the time of the request. Providers process data only for the duration necessary to generate a response or complete a safety check, and are bound by confidentiality and data-protection obligations consistent with this Privacy Policy.

13.9 Retention Window After Deletion

When you reset a companion's chat and memory, or delete a companion or your account entirely, the affected chat history, memory records, semantic embeddings, and companion-scoped media are deleted from our primary data stores on an expedited basis. Residual copies in encrypted backups, disaster-recovery snapshots, and logs are purged on our standard backup-expiry schedule, which does not exceed sixty (60) days after the deletion event, except where longer retention is required by law (for example, to respond to a lawful legal hold or regulatory obligation).

14. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by posting the updated policy on this page and updating the “Last Updated” date. For significant changes that affect how we process your data, we will make reasonable efforts to notify you via email or a prominent notice on our Service. Your continued use of the Service after any changes constitutes your acceptance of the updated policy.

15. Contact Us

If you have any questions about this privacy policy, your personal data, or wish to exercise your rights, please contact us:

Email: support@budgetpixel.com

If you are in the EEA or UK and are not satisfied with our response, you have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority.