Our data retention and privacy policy
Your surveys, forms and the answers people give you are yours. This page explains how we protect them, who can see them, and how long we keep them if you stop paying.
Your data belongs to you
- We never sell your data, and we never use it for advertising.
- We never share your data with other organizations or other Pulseform customers.
- Each organization's data is stored in its own separate database, apart from every other account.
- Inside your account, only the users you add can see your data, and only what their permissions allow.
Who can see what
| Who | What they can see |
|---|---|
| Users on your account | What their role allows |
| People answering your surveys or forms | Only the questions they are asked, never other people's answers |
| Field collectors | Only the one survey or form their code opens |
| Other Pulseform customers | Nothing |
Services that help run Pulseform
A few trusted services help run parts of the platform. Each one gets only what it needs for its job:
- Payments are handled by a secure payment provider. Your card details go straight to them. Pulseform never sees or stores your card number.
- The AI assistant (when you use AI credit) sends your question and the matching help text to an AI provider. Survey answers are never sent. On the free assistant, nothing you type leaves our servers.
- Automatic translation sends text to a translation service so it can be shown in the other language: a survey's question wording, and text written in monitoring records (such as activity descriptions or complaint messages) when you view them in a different language. Survey answers are never sent.
Tip Don't paste respondents' comments into the assistant. It's designed to answer questions about the platform, not to read your data.
How long we keep your data
While you're subscribed, your data is kept for as long as you use Pulseform.
When your services stop, the account becomes read-only for 60 days. The same 60 days apply to every account, whether it ever paid or not:
| What happened | The 60 days start |
|---|---|
| The trial of your last service ended | The day that trial ended |
| A paid service ended without renewal | The day the paid period ended |
| You closed your account yourself | Immediately |
| Nobody signed in and no responses arrived for 24 months | The day it was closed for inactivity. Signing in reopens it |
- During these days you can open and export everything, but nothing new is collected.
- Subscribing to any service during this time stops the countdown, and you pick up exactly where you left off.
- We remind your account administrators 14, 7 and 1 days before the end, by email and in the app.
- On the last day the account is suspended, and its data, uploaded files and any remaining AI credit are permanently deleted, automatically.
Warning Deleted data can't be recovered, not even by our support team. If you might need it, export it before the date in the email.
If you sign in again later, you can reactivate the same account. It starts empty and without a new free trial.
Taking your data with you
You can export your data at any time while your account is open, including during the 60 read-only days:
- Survey responses as a spreadsheet, or ready for SPSS.
- Form records as a spreadsheet.
- Analysis and charts as PDF.
Summary
- Your data is yours, stored separately, and never sold or shared.
- Not paying doesn't delete anything straight away.
- Every account gets 60 read-only days to come back or to export, then it is suspended and deleted.
- We warn you 14, 7 and 1 days before anything is deleted.