Effective October 3, 2026
Who we are
The Foundry Firm prepares research and development tax credit studies. When this policy says "we" or "us," it means The Foundry Firm. You can reach us at inquiries@thefoundryfirm.com.
What you give us
We collect what you type into our forms and what you send us directly.
- Affiliate signup. Your name, email, and phone number, plus your firm or company, city, and state if you add them to your portal profile.
- Referrals. When an affiliate refers a business to us, they give us the company's name, a contact's name and title, the contact's email or phone, the industry, and any notes. If you were referred, this is how we first learned of you.
- Payout paperwork. Affiliates who reach a payout set up a payout account with Stripe, our payment processor. Stripe collects the legal name, address, taxpayer identification number, and bank details on its own pages and holds them; we keep only a Stripe account id and whether the account is ready. Affiliates who completed a Form W-9 inside the portal before September 2026 have that form kept in our private document store.
- Engagement documents. Clients under an engagement upload records through a private link we send them. These are the documents a study is built from.
- Newsletter. If you sign up for new guides, your email address, the page you signed up on, and when you confirmed. We email you only after you click the confirm link, and every email has an unsubscribe link.
- Webinar signup. Your name, company, email, and mobile number, plus the link you came from. We pass your name and email to Zoom so it can send your join link and reminders, and we use your mobile number for one reminder text before the session.
- Messages. Anything you send us by email or through the portal.
What we collect on our own
When you visit the site or the portal, our systems record the address your device connects from, the type of browser and device you use, the pages you view, and identifiers from cookies and similar storage, described below.
How we use it
- To open and run your affiliate account, review your signup, process referrals, and pay what you have earned.
- To prepare, deliver, and if needed defend a client's study.
- To measure whether our advertising works, so we know which pages bring in partners.
- To see where the site is hard to use, so we can fix it.
- To answer you when you write to us.
- To meet our obligations under tax law and other law that applies to us.
Automated review
We use an automated model for two narrow jobs. It checks new affiliate signups for signs that the entry is not a real person, and it sorts documents a client uploads against the checklist for their study. A person makes every decision about an account, a referral, or an engagement. The model never sees a taxpayer identification number.
Who we share it with
We do not sell personal information. We share it with companies that do work for us, and only what they need for that work.
- Amazon Web Services hosts the site and the portal, stores what you give us, runs sign-in for the portal, and sends our email.
- Stripe handles affiliate payouts. When you set up payouts, you give your bank details to Stripe directly under Stripe's own privacy policy.
- Meta receives advertising measurement data, described in the next section.
- Google provides our business email.
- Zoom runs our webinars. When you sign up for one, Zoom receives your name and email to send your join link and reminders, under Zoom's own privacy statement.
- Microsoft runs Microsoft Clarity, which records how visitors use the site: where they click, how far they scroll, and which pages they view. It hides anything you type into a form. Microsoft handles this data under its own privacy statement.
We will also share information when the law requires it, when a court or agency orders it, or when it is needed to protect our rights or someone's safety. If the firm is ever sold or merged, what we hold would go with it, under this policy.
Advertising measurement and your choices
We run ads on Meta's platforms, and we want to know whether they bring in real partners. To measure that, the site uses the Meta Pixel, which sets cookies in your browser and reports the pages you view. When you create an affiliate account, we also send Meta a record of that event from our server, along with your email address and phone number in hashed form, your device's connection address, and your browser type. Meta uses this to match the signup to an ad you may have seen. We never send Meta the details of a business an affiliate refers to us.
Under some state laws this counts as sharing personal information for targeted advertising. You can opt out at any time by writing to inquiries@thefoundryfirm.com, and we will stop sending your information to Meta. You can also limit how Meta uses information about you through the ad settings in your Meta account, and you can block the pixel's cookies in your browser.
Cookies and similar storage
- Meta Pixel cookies (named
_fbpand_fbc) identify your browser to Meta for the measurement described above. They last up to three months. - Microsoft Clarity cookies (named
_clckand_clsk) tie the pages of one visit together for the site analytics described above._clcklasts up to a year,_clskone day. - Portal sign-in. The portal keeps your sign-in session in your browser's storage so you stay signed in. It clears when you sign out.
- Form and page state. The site keeps small markers in your browser so a form does not report the same action twice within a visit.
You can clear or block all of these in your browser's settings. The portal needs its sign-in storage to work; everything else is optional.
How long we keep it
We keep affiliate account information for as long as the account is open, and for a reasonable period afterward in case a payout or a question is still outstanding. Payout paperwork is kept for the period tax law requires. Client engagement records are part of a tax filing and are kept for as long as that filing can be examined. Advertising measurement data is kept by Meta under its own retention rules; we keep only the event identifiers needed to avoid double counting.
How we protect it
Everything moves over encrypted connections and is stored on systems where access is limited to the people who need it. Taxpayer identification numbers are held by Stripe, or inside a W-9 signed before September 2026 in a private store, and never appear in our working records or logs. No system is perfect, and we cannot promise that a breach will never happen. If one does and it affects you, we will tell you.
Your rights
You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or opt out of the advertising sharing above. Write to inquiries@thefoundryfirm.com from the address on your account and we will act within thirty days. We may keep what tax law requires us to keep. We will never treat you differently for exercising these rights.
If you live in California or another state with its own privacy law, those laws may give you additional rights, and the same address is how to use them.
Children
Our site and our services are for businesses and the professionals who work with them. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under eighteen.
Changes
When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change affects how we use information you have already given us, we will tell you before it takes effect.
Contact
The Foundry Firm
inquiries@thefoundryfirm.com