Privacy policy

We collect information you provide directly to us, such as when you create an account, request a quote, or contact us for support.

Personal information:

• Name, email address, and phone number
• Home address and property details
• Energy usage information and utility bills
• Payment and billing information

Automatically collected information:

• Device information and IP address
• Usage data and website interactions
• Cookies and similar tracking technologies

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide and improve our services
• Connect you with qualified solar installers
• Generate accurate solar quotes and proposals
• Process payments and manage your account
• Send you important updates and communications
• Analyse usage patterns to enhance user experience
• Comply with legal obligations

We may share your information in the following circumstances:

With solar installers:

We share relevant information with installers in our network to provide you with accurate quotes and services. This includes contact information, property details, and energy requirements.

Sharing across our related services:

WattMate, BillWise (billwise.com.au), and Solar Battery Perth (solarbatteryperth.com.au) are all operated by the same company, WattMate Pty Ltd. If a lead you submitted on BillWise or Solar Battery Perth is passed to WattMate for installer matching, we process it here as part of the same organisation, not as a disclosure to an unrelated third party.

Service providers:

We work with third-party service providers who assist us in operating our platform, processing payments, and providing customer support.

Legal requirements:

We may disclose information when required by law or to protect our rights, property, or safety.

Some of our tools ask you to upload images or files. Depending on which tool you use, that can include:

• Electricity or gas bills, as a PDF or a photo
• Site photos taken at your property — your switchboard, meter, roof, and where an inverter or battery could go
• Equipment-placement photos, where you position a battery or inverter in a photo of your home
• Solar quotes you have received from other companies, uploaded for review
• Photos of appliances, used to read the nameplate and estimate running costs

These files are held in private storage. They are never published, never given a public link, and are not indexed by search engines. Our staff and, where your enquiry has been matched to them, the installer quoting your job can view them through short-lived links that expire. Photos you attach to an enquiry are deleted when your account is deleted, and are also subject to the retention periods below.

Four features send an image you upload to an external AI service to read what is in it. These are the only places today where an uploaded image leaves our systems for automated processing:

• The appliance scanner, to read an appliance nameplate
• The home assessment tool, to assess your home's envelope from a photo
• The bill reader, when you upload a bill as a photo rather than a PDF
• The guided energy assessment, to flag possible obstacles in the site photos you take there — for example a gas meter near a wall — so your installer knows to look

The service used is Claude, provided by Anthropic, which processes the image on servers in the United States. This is a cross-border disclosure under Australian Privacy Principle 8. Anthropic does not keep the image; it is read and discarded on their side, under our agreement with them.

You can turn the fourth one off. In the guided energy assessment, automatic reading of your site photos is on by default and there is a toggle beside the photo step to switch it off. With it off, your photos are never sent to the AI service and the short checklist under each photo is the only thing your report uses. Turning it off stops new reads; anything already noted stays on your assessment. The first three tools have no toggle — reading the image is the whole feature.

We keep our own copy of the site photos you attach to the guided assessment or to an enquiry, under the retention periods below. For the first three tools we keep no copy at all — the image is read from the upload and discarded. Documents you attach to an enquiry, and equipment-placement photos taken with an installer, are not sent to any AI service. Bills uploaded as a PDF are read on our own servers without AI.

• Enquiry photos and documents, where the enquiry does not proceed: deleted 90 days after you upload them, along with the stored files
• Enquiry photos and documents, where the enquiry does proceed: kept with the job record while we and your installer need them for the work
• Part-finished uploads never attached to an enquiry: deleted after 72 hours
• Your saved assessment: everything behind a guided assessment — your postcode, household size, usage and bill figures, whether you have a battery, pool or EV, and what you tell us about the property itself (roof type and orientation, shading, storeys, switchboard age, meter type, any system or battery size you are considering, and any notes you write), together with any site photos you attach and what we read from them — is kept for up to 90 days after your last visit, so you can pick the assessment up again. Coming back resets that 90 days
• A saved assessment that becomes an enquiry: it stops expiring. The answers stay with the enquiry record rather than being deleted on the 90-day clock above, because they are the basis of what we passed to your installer. Attached photos still follow the enquiry-photo entries above. If you want the answers removed, ask us and we will delete them
• What your own browser keeps: so you can resume on the same device, an assessment in progress is stored in your browser and stops being restored after 7 days. A short profile — your postcode, household size, usage and bill figures, the battery, pool and EV answers, any system size you have modelled and the tariff rates you have entered — is also stored there so our calculators do not keep asking; that one has no expiry and stays until you clear your browsing data. Neither is a copy we can see or reach
• Your account: if you ask us to delete it, we schedule the deletion 30 days ahead so you can change your mind, then permanently remove your account, your uploaded photos and documents, and the files behind them
• Financial and compliance records: kept for as long as the law requires — 7 years for tax records, and 5 years for renewable-energy certificate evidence. We cannot delete these on request, so we replace your name, email, phone and address with placeholders instead and keep only the amounts and dates

We use the following service providers to run WattMate. Each processes data on our behalf, only for the purpose described, under a data processing agreement:

• Supabase: Hosts our database and handles account authentication. Sees the data you submit to WattMate (account details, quotes, job and billing records)
• Vercel: Hosts the WattMate website and provides Vercel Analytics, a cookieless, anonymized usage-statistics tool
• Resend: Delivers our transactional emails (quotes, invoices, notifications). Sees your email address and the content of emails sent to you
• Stripe: Processes payments, including WattCoin credit purchases, installer subscription billing, and installer payouts via Stripe Connect. Sees payment and billing details
• Twilio: Delivers SMS and WhatsApp messages, including phone number verification codes and job notifications. Sees your phone number and message content
• Sentry: Error-monitoring tool that helps us diagnose technical faults. It captures error and diagnostic data, which can include the contents of an error message. We mask identifiers in our own logging, but we do not warrant that no personal information ever reaches Sentry in an error report
• Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI: Power AI features such as installer quote review, quote-checker document analysis, and product datasheet parsing. These providers process the document or quote text you or your installer submit for the specific feature you use. Anthropic also reads uploaded images for the four tools listed under the heading on automated reading of uploaded images above
• Upstash (Redis): Provides short-lived, per-IP request counters used to prevent abuse of our forms and APIs. No personal data is stored here beyond a temporary count

Several of these providers store or process data on servers located outside Australia. Where that happens, we take reasonable steps consistent with Australian Privacy Principle 8 (cross-border disclosure) so your information continues to be handled in a way consistent with this policy.

We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your personal information against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction.

• SSL encryption for data transmission
• Secure data storage with access controls
• Regular security audits and updates
• Employee training on data protection

You have the following rights regarding your personal information:

• Access: Request a copy of your personal data
• Correction: Update or correct inaccurate information
• Deletion: Request deletion of your personal data
• Portability: Receive your data in a portable format
• Opt-out: Unsubscribe from marketing communications

To exercise these rights, please contact us at admin@wattmate.com.au.

We keep the cookie list short. WattMate only sets cookies needed to keep you signed in, keep forms secure, and carry your in-progress calculator or quote details between pages. Those cookies are controlled through your browser's own cookie settings.

Your analytics choice is separate, because it is not stored in a cookie: the accept-or-decline answer you give on our cookie banner is remembered in this site's local storage in your browser. To change it, use the banner, or clear this site's stored site data in your browser's site settings. Clearing cookies alone does not reset it.

Types of cookies we use:

• Essential: Required for login, security, and core site functionality
• Functional: Remember information you've already given us (postcode, calculator inputs) so you don't have to re-enter it between pages

We run no advertising pixels and no marketing cookies on WattMate, and we do not track you across other sites. Our default traffic measurement is cookieless and sets no persistent identifier on your device. Google Analytics is built into the site but loads only if you accept analytics cookies in the banner — decline, and it never runs. See our cookie policy for the full list.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us: