Privacy Policy

1.Information we collect

We group what we hold into four buckets: what you type in, what the marketplace generates as you use it, what your browser tells our servers, and what our payment records require. Nothing falls outside those four.

1.1 Information you give us

Account details

Email address, display name, and a password we immediately convert to a bcrypt hash (cost factor 12). Your plaintext password exists only in memory for the milliseconds it takes to hash or verify it.

Seller profile

If you become a seller: headline, bio, country, and the languages you work in. Optional and public — write it as if strangers will read it, because they will.

Gig listings

Titles, descriptions, category, package tiers, prices and delivery times. Public by design.

Order requirements

The brief you attach when you place an order. Visible to you, to the seller, and to a moderator if the order goes to dispute.

Messages

The body text of messages you send in a thread, plus timestamps and which thread they belong to.

Reviews

Your star rating and review text. Published under your display name and country, permanently attached to the gig.

Support contact

Anything you write to support or in a Trust & Safety report, including the order or profile you are reporting.

1.2 Information the marketplace generates

• Orders. Which gig, which package tier, the price in cents, the state the order is in (placed, in progress, delivered, completed, cancelled) and the timestamp of every state change.
• The escrow ledger. One immutable row per money movement — hold, release, refund, payout — with the amount in integer cents, the account it belongs to and when it was written. See section 6.
• Favourites. The gigs you have saved. Private to you.
• Derived reputation. Your average rating, review count, completed-order count and average response time, recomputed from the underlying records rather than stored as an editable field.

1.3 Information your browser sends

Every HTTP request carries an IP address and a user-agent string. We keep them in server access logs for 14 days for security and abuse investigation — specifically to enforce the rate limit on /api/auth/signup and /api/auth/login (20 attempts per 15 minutes per IP), which is what stops someone credential-stuffing your account. After 14 days the log files are deleted outright; we do not keep an anonymised copy.

1.4 What we deliberately do not collect

• No advertising or analytics cookies, no Meta Pixel, no Google Analytics, no session-replay recorder watching your mouse.
• No card numbers. Our payment processor takes those on its own hosted fields and hands us a token. See section 6.
• No contact-list, calendar or device-storage access. The site is a website; it does not ask for those permissions.
• No precise location. We store the country you type into your profile, and nothing finer than that.

2.How we use your information

Each use below maps to something you can actually see happening on the site. If a use is not on this list, we are not doing it.

• To run your account. Sign you in, keep you signed in for 30 days, show you your dashboard, and let you sign out of a session.
• To run orders. Move an order through its states, show the buyer and seller the same status, and put the right amount into and out of escrow at the right moment.
• To deliver messages. Route what you write to the other party in the thread, and show them your country, member-since date and average response time so they know who they are hiring.
• To publish reviews. Attach your review to the gig and recompute that gig's rating. Only a buyer with a completed order can review it, and only once.
• To make search useful. Rank and filter gigs by category, price, delivery time and rating. Search terms hit our own database; they are not sent anywhere else.
• To send operational email. Order placed, delivery received, dispute opened, password changed, payout sent. These are not marketing and you cannot unsubscribe from them while you have an active account, because they are how the service tells you your money moved.
• To send optional marketing. Product news and seller tips, only if you opt in. One click in the footer of any such email turns it off permanently.
• To keep the marketplace safe. Detect fraud, spam and prohibited services; investigate reports; enforce the prohibited services and conduct rules.
• To meet legal obligations. Keep the financial records that tax and anti-money-laundering law require, and respond to lawful requests from authorities.

We do not use your data to train machine-learning models that generate content, and we do not sell it to anyone who does. Gigs in the AI Services category are sellers using their own tools — that has nothing to do with our access to your data.

3.Our legal bases for processing

If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, the GDPR requires us to name a lawful basis for each purpose. Here they are, mapped one to one.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have carried out a balancing assessment and concluded that the processing is what a reasonable user of a marketplace would expect. You can object to it — see section 9 — and we will stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your objection.

4.Cookies and sessions

Gigxie sets exactly one cookie. The table below is the complete list.

4.1 What the flags mean for you

• HttpOnly means JavaScript cannot read the cookie, so a cross-site scripting bug cannot walk off with your session.
• SameSite=Lax means another website cannot cause your browser to send the cookie on a form post, which is what blocks cross-site request forgery.
• Secure means the cookie is only ever transmitted over HTTPS in production.

4.2 No consent banner, and why

The ePrivacy Directive requires consent for cookies that are not strictly necessary to deliver a service you asked for. A cookie that keeps you signed in is strictly necessary. Since we set no others, there is nothing to ask you to consent to. If we ever add an analytics or advertising cookie, you will get a real banner with a real "reject all" button that works, and this section will change before it happens.

4.3 Local storage

We use your browser's localStorage for two conveniences: your saved-gig list before you sign in, and whether you dismissed the seller onboarding tip. Both stay on your device, are never transmitted to us, and are cleared when you clear site data.

4.4 Signing out everywhere

Signing out deletes the server-side session row, not just the cookie — so the identifier is dead even if someone copied it. Suspending an account cuts all of its live sessions immediately.

5.Sharing and service providers

5.1 Other users see what the marketplace needs them to see

Your display name, country, member-since date, seller level, average response time, gigs, ratings and reviews are public. Your email address is not shown to buyers or sellers at any point, including inside a thread — messages route through Gigxie precisely so neither side has to hand over an address to work together.

5.2 Processors we use

These are the only third parties that touch your data. Each is bound by a data processing agreement, may only act on our documented instructions, and may not use your data for their own purposes.

5.3 Legal and corporate disclosure

• Lawful requests. We disclose data when a valid court order, warrant or equivalent legal process compels it. We check that requests are lawful and proportionate, we narrow overbroad ones, and we notify you unless we are legally forbidden from doing so.
• Protecting people. We may disclose data where we believe in good faith that it is necessary to prevent imminent physical harm, fraud or a serious crime.
• Business transfer. If Gigxie is acquired or merged, your data may transfer to the acquirer, who is bound by this policy until it gives you notice and a genuine opportunity to delete your account first.

What we never do: sell, rent, licence or trade your personal data; share it with advertising networks or data brokers; or hand your email address to a seller so they can market to you off-platform.

6.Payments and escrow data

Money is the part of a marketplace people most want to be able to audit, so this section is unusually specific about what we hold.

6.1 We never see your card

Card numbers, expiry dates and security codes are entered into fields hosted and served by our payment processor, and are transmitted directly to it. They never reach a Gigxie server, are never written to our database, and are never present in our logs. We receive a token, the last four digits, the card brand and the authorisation result — enough to show you "Visa •••• 4242" on a receipt and nothing more.

6.2 The escrow ledger

Every movement of money writes exactly one immutable row containing the type of movement, the account, the amount in integer cents and a timestamp. There are six types and no others:

escrow_hold

Written when an order is placed. The buyer's funds leave their available balance and sit in escrow.

service_fee

Written against the buyer at placement, for the fee charged on top of the order price, and written again in the opposite direction when a refund returns it. This fee is Gigxie's revenue, and it sits outside escrow.

escrow_release

Written when the buyer accepts delivery. The full order price moves to the seller — our code asserts that the released amount equals the held amount, which is how the 0% commission promise is enforced by the code itself.

processing_fee

Written against the seller at settlement, for the card processor's charge on the payment. It leaves the system entirely; Gigxie keeps none of it and our revenue reporting cannot count it. It is a separate row rather than a smaller release, so it can never hide inside the escrow check above.

refund

Written when an order is cancelled or a dispute resolves in the buyer's favour. Funds return to the buyer.

payout

Written when a seller withdraws their balance to a bank account, PayPal or Wise.

Ledger rows are append-only. Nothing in the product — including our internal admin console — can edit or delete one; a correction is a new compensating row, so the history stays honest. Your balance is simply the sum of your rows.

6.3 Payout details and identity checks

To pay you, our processor needs your name, country and bank or PayPal details. Those live with the processor. If your payouts pass €2,000 in a calendar month, EU anti-money-laundering rules require an identity check: you upload a government ID to the processor's verification flow, the processor tells us pass or fail, and we store only that pass-or-fail result and its date. The document itself never touches our systems.

6.4 Fee data we hold on an order

There is no commission field to hold, because there is no commission. Our earnings endpoint returns commission_paid_cents: 0 for every seller, and our admin API rejects any attempt to set a commission rate with an error — 0% is built into the system rather than exposed as a setting an operator could quietly change.

What we do store on each order is its fee breakdown, calculated once when the order is placed and never recalculated afterwards: the price, the buyer service fee, the payment processing fee, the buyer's total, the seller's payout and the exact rates in force at that moment. We keep it so that a receipt can be reproduced from the record rather than recomputed from today's rates. See Terms, section 6 for what each fee is, or the seller page for what it means to your take-home.

7.International transfers

Gigxie is an Irish company, our primary database is in Germany, and our sellers work in 94 countries. Data crosses borders; here is how it is protected when it does.

• Primary storage stays in the EEA. Accounts, orders, messages, reviews and the ledger live in Falkenstein, Germany, with encrypted backups in Helsinki, Finland.
• Transfers to the United States — to our email and payment processors — rely on the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (2021/914) plus a transfer impact assessment, and, where the recipient is certified, the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.
• Transfers to the United Kingdom rely on the UK adequacy decision of 28 June 2021.
• Publicly visible profile data is, by its nature, visible worldwide. Your seller bio is readable from any country with an internet connection; that is the point of a global marketplace, and no transfer mechanism changes it.

You can request a copy of the Standard Contractual Clauses we rely on by writing to privacy@gigxie.com. We will send them with commercial terms redacted.

8.How long we keep data

We set a retention period per data type rather than applying one blanket period to everything. "Until deletion" below means until you delete your account or ask us to.

When you delete your account, reviews you wrote stay published but are relabelled to a generic "Former Gigxie member" with the country retained and every link to your identity severed. Ledger rows are retained for the statutory seven years in a restricted-access archive that is used for accounting and legal response only.

9.Your rights and how to use them

If you are in the EEA, UK or Switzerland these are GDPR rights. If you are in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia or another US state with a privacy statute, we extend the same rights to you rather than running two standards.

1. Access. Ask what we hold about you and get a copy. Most of it is already visible in your dashboard.
2. Export (portability). Settings → Privacy → Export my data produces a JSON archive of your profile, gigs, orders, messages, reviews, favourites and ledger rows. It is generated on demand and usually emailed within a few minutes.
3. Rectification. Fix anything wrong. Profile fields are editable directly; write to us for anything that is not.
4. Erasure. Settings → Privacy → Delete my account, or email us. We confirm within 72 hours and complete within 30 days, minus the statutory records described in section 8.
5. Restriction. Ask us to freeze processing while a dispute about accuracy or legitimate interests is resolved.
6. Objection. Object to any processing based on legitimate interests, including all profiling. Marketing objections are actioned immediately and unconditionally.
7. Withdraw consent. Where we rely on consent, withdraw it at any time. That does not undo processing already carried out lawfully.
8. No sale, no targeted advertising, no discrimination. We do not sell personal data or use it for cross-context behavioural advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of — and we will never degrade your service for exercising a right.
9. Human review. No decision that legally or significantly affects you — suspension, dispute outcome, payout hold — is made by an automated system alone. Automated checks can flag an account, but a named member of staff makes the call, and you can appeal to a second reviewer.

Email privacy@gigxie.com from your account address. We answer within 30 days and will tell you if a complex request needs up to 60. We do not charge for requests unless they are manifestly repetitive, and we will say so before doing any work.

You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. Ours is the Irish Data Protection Commission (21 Fitzwilliam Square South, Dublin 2, D02 RD28). You may also complain to the authority where you live. We would rather you gave us a chance to fix it first, though you are under no obligation to.

10.Children

Gigxie is for people aged 18 or over. Freelance work involves binding contracts and receiving payment, which minors cannot enter into in most of the countries we operate in. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18 and we do not offer a teen or supervised account.

If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we suspend it, stop processing beyond what is needed to close it out, refund any orders still in escrow to the buyers, and delete the account's data within 30 days. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us at privacy@gigxie.com and we will act the same day.

Some jurisdictions set a higher age for contracting. Where local law requires you to be older than 18 to enter a binding agreement, that higher age applies to you.

11.How we secure your data

No one can honestly promise perfect security. What we can do is list the specific measures in place, so you can judge them.

• Passwords. bcrypt at cost factor 12, unique salt per user. We check new passwords against a list of known-breached credentials and refuse the ones that appear in it.
• Sessions. Cryptographically random identifiers, httpOnly and SameSite=Lax, server-side revocation, and a hard 30-day expiry that is not silently extended forever.
• Transport. TLS 1.3 everywhere, HSTS with preload, and no plaintext HTTP endpoint to downgrade to.
• At rest. Full-disk encryption on database volumes; encrypted, access-controlled backups with a tested restore procedure exercised quarterly.
• Rate limiting. Authentication endpoints are capped at 20 requests per 15 minutes per IP; administrative mutations at 100 per 15 minutes.
• Least privilege. Access to production data is limited to the engineers and Trust & Safety staff whose role requires it, gated behind hardware security keys, and logged.
• An audited admin console. Every administrative change writes an immutable audit row recording who did it, what changed, and the before and after values. Administrators cannot read or set passwords, cannot change the commission rate, and cannot refund an order whose escrow has already been released — that would mint money that does not exist.
• Input handling. Parameterised SQL throughout, output escaping on every piece of user-generated content, and a content security policy on all pages.
• Testing. An end-to-end test suite that fails the build if a code change skims any amount off an escrow release, plus an annual third-party penetration test.

11.1 If something goes wrong

If a breach is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we notify the Irish Data Protection Commission within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, and we notify affected users directly and without undue delay where the risk is high. Our notice will say what happened, what data was involved, what we have already done and what you should do yourself.

11.2 Reporting a vulnerability

Email security@gigxie.com. We acknowledge within one business day, we do not pursue legal action against good-faith researchers who follow our disclosure policy, and we credit reporters who want to be credited.

12.Changes to this policy, and how to reach us

12.1 How we change it

When we make a material change — a new category of data, a new purpose, a new processor, a shorter retention period in our favour — we email every account holder at least 30 days before it takes effect and show a notice on the site. Non-material changes (clarified wording, a fixed typo, a processor's new legal name) update the date at the top of this page and nothing else.

Every version stays available. Write to us for a dated copy of any earlier version, or the redline between two of them.

Version 3.1 — 12 June 2026

Added the escrow ledger table breakdown, the 14-day access-log retention, and the human-review right in section 9.

Version 3.0 — 4 February 2026

Rewrote the whole policy in plain language and added the short version box.

Version 2.4 — 19 September 2025

Named Wise as an optional payout processor.

12.2 Contact