Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

License Bids Inc. ("License Bids," "we," "us," or "our") operates the LicenseBids platform at licensebids.com, a business-to-business marketplace where organizations request competitive bids on cloud software licensing and certified cloud partners respond. This Privacy Policy describes what personal information we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the rights and choices available to you.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Information You Provide

• Account data — When you create an account, we collect your name, email address, and (optionally) phone number. We require a corporate email address; free email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail are not accepted for account registration.
• Company data — Customers provide company name, size, industry, and region. Cloud partners provide more detailed organization profiles including legal company name, DBA name, website, year founded, employee count, description, billing contact name and email, billing mailing address, tax identification number (EIN), and cloud platform partner IDs (Microsoft Partner Network ID, Google Partner ID, AWS Partner ID), certifications, competencies, specializations, and service capabilities.
• RFQ and bid content — Customers submit Requests for Quotation containing cloud licensing requirements (product names, license types, quantities, current spend, agreement types, renewal timelines, and platform-specific details for Microsoft 365, Azure, AWS, Google Workspace, and Google Cloud). Partners submit bids containing pricing, discount percentages, support tiers, value-added services, and transition plans.
• Payment details — When you pay a membership fee, your payment card information is collected and processed directly by Stripe. We never see or store your full card number. We retain only Stripe transaction identifiers (customer ID, payment intent ID) to maintain billing records.
• Communications — If you submit a licensing guidance request, we collect your name, email, company, geographic region, estimated seat count, current buying program, and any notes you provide. If you submit a partner inquiry, we collect your name, email, phone number, and company name. If you email us, we retain the correspondence.

2.2 Information Collected Automatically

When you visit our site, we automatically collect:

• IP address
• Browser type and version, operating system, and device type
• Pages you view, links you click, and how you navigate the site
• Referring website or search terms that brought you to our site
• Date and time of each visit
• Interactions with our advertisements and phone links (see Section 4)

This data is collected through Google Analytics, Google Ads conversion tags, server logs, and cookies as described in Section 4.

2.3 Information from Third Parties

• Clerk (authentication) — When you sign in, Clerk provides us with your user identifier, email address, and name to create or update your account.
• Stripe (payments) — When you complete a payment, Stripe sends us a confirmation with your Stripe customer ID, payment intent ID, and payment status. We do not receive your full card number from Stripe.
• QuickBooks Online (partner accounting) — For partners whose marketplace fee invoices are managed through our accounting system, we send billing contact names, email addresses, mailing addresses, and invoice line items to Intuit QuickBooks Online for invoice generation and delivery.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect for the following purposes:

• Providing the service — Creating and managing your account, displaying the marketplace, and matching customers with cloud partners through our anonymous bidding process.
• Processing payments and memberships — Collecting membership fees via Stripe and maintaining records of payment status.
• Facilitating RFQ and bid matching — Sharing your licensing requirements with partners (anonymously) so they can submit competitive bids, and revealing identities to both parties only after a bid is awarded.
• Communicating with you — Sending transactional emails about your account activity, including RFQ confirmations, bid notifications, partner introductions, payment reminders, invoice notices, certification reminders, team invitations, and account status updates.
• Invoicing and tax compliance — Generating invoices for marketplace fees, synchronizing billing records with QuickBooks Online, and retaining financial records as required by tax law.
• Improving the service — Analyzing aggregated, anonymized usage data to understand how the platform is used and where we can improve.
• Marketing and advertising measurement — Using Google Analytics to understand site traffic and Google Ads conversion tracking to measure the effectiveness of our advertising campaigns, including phone call conversions.
• Security and fraud prevention — Monitoring for suspicious activity, enforcing rate limits, and validating corporate email domains.
• Legal compliance — Responding to legal obligations, enforcing our terms of service, and protecting our rights.

4. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

4.1 Strictly Necessary Cookies

Our authentication provider, Clerk, sets session cookies to keep you logged in as you navigate the site. These cookies are essential for the platform to function and cannot be disabled while using the platform.

4.2 Analytics Cookies

We use Google Analytics 4 (measurement ID: G-PDXSNPR8YZ) to understand how visitors use our site. Google Analytics places cookies (such as _ga and _ga_*) on your device to collect information about your browsing behavior, including pages visited, time spent, and how you arrived at our site. This data is transmitted to and processed by Google.

4.3 Advertising and Conversion Tracking Cookies

We use Google Ads conversion tracking (ID: AW-1014652636) to measure the effectiveness of our advertising campaigns. This includes:

• Conversion tracking — When you arrive at our site from a Google ad, a cookie (such as _gcl_aw) is placed on your device to track whether you complete actions like signing up or submitting an RFQ.
• Phone call conversion tracking — We use Google's call conversion feature, which dynamically replaces the phone number displayed on our website with a Google forwarding number. This allows us to measure phone calls generated by our advertising. The forwarding number routes to our business line at (877) 824-3746. Google may record the caller's area code, call duration, and whether the call was answered.

4.4 Session Storage

We use your browser's session storage (not cookies) to temporarily save bid draft data while you are completing a bid form. This data is automatically cleared when you close your browser tab and is never sent to third parties.

4.5 How to Control Cookies

We are implementing a cookie consent banner that will allow you to accept or decline non-essential cookies (analytics and advertising) when you first visit the site. Once available, your preference will be saved and honored on subsequent visits. In the meantime, you can control cookies through the following methods:

• Browser settings — Most browsers allow you to block or delete cookies through their settings. Blocking all cookies may prevent you from logging in.
• Google Analytics opt-out — Install the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.
• Google ad preferences — Manage your ad personalization settings at Google My Ad Center.

We do not currently respond to "Do Not Track" browser signals, as there is no industry-standard way to honor them consistently.

5. How We Share Information

We share your information in the following circumstances:

5.1 Anonymous RFQ Sharing

Your licensing requirements are shared with cloud partners on the marketplace so they can submit competitive bids. Your identity and company name remain hidden throughout the bidding process.

5.2 Partner Introductions

When you award a bid, we share your contact details with the selected partner (and the partner's details with you) to facilitate the engagement. This is the only time identities are revealed.

5.3 Third-Party Service Providers

We use the following services to operate our platform. Each processes data on our behalf under contractual obligations:

• Clerk — Authentication, user management, and session handling. Clerk Privacy Policy
• Stripe — Payment processing and membership billing. Stripe Privacy Policy
• Resend — Transactional email delivery. Resend receives recipient email addresses, names, and email content. Resend Privacy Policy
• Neon, operated by Databricks, Inc. — PostgreSQL database hosting. All platform data is stored in Neon's infrastructure. Databricks Privacy Notice
• Cloudflare R2 — Document and file storage for uploaded files and partner logos. Cloudflare Privacy Policy
• Intuit QuickBooks Online — Accounting and invoicing for partner marketplace fees. QuickBooks receives partner company names, billing addresses, and invoice amounts. This integration is used only for partners with active fee obligations. Intuit Privacy Policy
• Google Analytics and Google Ads — Website analytics and advertising conversion measurement, as described in Section 4. Google Privacy Policy
• Vercel — Application hosting and deployment. Vercel Privacy Policy
• Pushover — Internal administrator push notifications only. No end-user personal data is sent to Pushover. Pushover Privacy Policy

5.4 Legal and Business Reasons

We may disclose your information if required by law, subpoena, court order, or governmental authority. We may also share information in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or a portion of our assets, in which case you would be notified via email or a prominent notice on our site.

5.5 With Your Consent

We may share your information for purposes not described in this policy if we have your explicit consent.

We do not sell your personal information to third parties.

6. Data Retention

We retain your data only as long as needed for the purposes described in this policy, or as required by law. Specific retention periods are:

• Active user accounts — Retained while your account is active.
• Inactive user accounts — If you have not logged in for 3 years, we will delete your account and associated data, subject to legal retention obligations below.
• Financial records — Stripe transactions, membership records, invoices, and QuickBooks data are retained for 7 years from the transaction date, as required for tax and accounting compliance.
• Lead and contact submissions — Guidance requests, partner inquiries, and fee waiver requests that did not result in an active account are retained for 2 years, then deleted.
• IP addresses — IP addresses recorded in our click-tracking logs are retained for 90 days, then deleted.
• Activity logs — Platform activity logs (such as account actions and bid events) are retained for 2 years.
• Partner invitations — Invitation records are deleted 30 days after the invitation expires.
• Backups — Database backups are retained for a limited period in line with our backup schedule. Backups may contain data past the retention dates listed above but are not used for active processing.

Anonymized, aggregated data that cannot identify you may be retained indefinitely for platform analytics.

7. Your Rights and Choices

7.1 Rights Available to All Users

Regardless of where you are located, you may:

• Access your data — Request a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct your data — Request that we fix inaccurate information.
• Delete your data — Request that we delete your account and associated data.
• Export your data — Request a copy of your data in a structured, portable format (CSV or JSON).
• Opt out of advertising cookies — Use the methods described in Section 4.5 to decline analytics and advertising cookies. Once our cookie consent banner is available, you will also be able to manage your preferences directly on the site.

7.2 How to Exercise Your Rights

To make a privacy request, email us at privacy@licensebids.com with a description of what you're requesting. We will respond within 30 to 45 days. We may need to verify your identity before processing your request, typically by confirming you can access the email address on your account.

7.3 Exceptions

We may retain certain data even after a deletion request if required by law. In particular, financial records (invoices, payment transactions, tax-related data) must be retained for 7 years under U.S. tax regulations. We will let you know in our response if any of your data falls under a legal retention requirement.

7.4 California Residents

If you are a California resident, you have additional rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA):

• Right to know — You may request the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected, the sources, the business purposes, and who we have shared it with.
• Right to delete — You may request deletion of your personal information, subject to legal retention exceptions.
• Right to correct — You may request correction of inaccurate personal information.
• Right to opt out of sharing — Our use of Google Analytics and Google Ads may constitute "sharing" of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising under the CCPA. You may opt out by declining advertising cookies through the methods in Section 4.5, or by emailing us at privacy@licensebids.com.
• Right to limit use of sensitive personal information — We collect certain information that may be considered sensitive under the CCPA, such as account login credentials (managed by Clerk) and tax identification numbers (for partners). This information is used only for the business purposes described in this policy.

To exercise your California privacy rights, email privacy@licensebids.com.

7.5 Canadian Residents

If you are a Canadian resident, you have rights under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), including the right to access and correct your personal information. If you are a resident of Quebec, you have additional rights under Quebec's Act Respecting the Protection of Personal Information in the Private Sector (Law 25), including the right to data portability and the right to withdraw consent for data collection and processing, subject to legal and contractual restrictions.

To exercise your Canadian privacy rights, email privacy@licensebids.com.

7.6 Non-Discrimination

We will not deny you service, charge you different prices, or provide a different quality of service because you exercised any of your privacy rights.

8. Security

We use industry-standard measures to protect your information, including:

• Encryption in transit using HTTPS/TLS for all connections between your browser and our servers
• Encryption at rest for our database (provided by Neon)
• Password hashing and session management handled by Clerk, including support for multi-factor authentication
• Access controls that limit data access to authorized personnel
• Rate limiting on forms and API endpoints to prevent abuse
• Webhook signature verification for payment and accounting integrations

No system is 100% secure. While we take reasonable precautions, we cannot guarantee absolute security. If you believe your account has been compromised, please contact us immediately at privacy@licensebids.com.

9. Children's Privacy

LicenseBids is a business-to-business platform. Our services are not directed to children under the age of 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under 13, we will delete it promptly. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us at privacy@licensebids.com.

10. International Users

Our service is intended for users in the United States and Canada. If you access our service from outside these countries, your data will be transferred to and processed in the United States. We do not specifically target users in the European Union or United Kingdom, and our service is not designed for compliance with EU/UK data protection laws.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will revise the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. If we make material changes, we will notify registered users by email at least 30 days before the changes take effect. Your continued use of the platform after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

12. Contact Us

For privacy questions, data access requests, or to exercise any of the rights described in this policy:

License Bids Inc.
2628 E. Newberry Blvd
Milwaukee, WI 53211
Email: privacy@licensebids.com
Phone: (877) 824-3746