Privacy Policy

Market Scout is a small tool built by one person, not a company with a legal or data team. This page explains, plainly, what happens to the location and field of study you type into the form, which outside services see it, and what is never stored. If any of this changes, this page will change with it.

When you run an analysis, the form sends three things: the location you typed, the field of study you picked or wrote in, and, if you chose “improve my existing business,” the type of business you run. That is the full list. There is no account system, so we never ask for your name, email, or a password.

Your browser also sends an IP address with every request, the same way it does to any website you visit. How that is used is covered below, under Rate limiting.

Your location is turned into map coordinates by Nominatim, a free OpenStreetMap geocoding service. Those coordinates are used to pull nearby businesses from the Overpass API (also OpenStreetMap) and public review text from Mangrove Reviews. If the person running this app has configured Reddit API access, public posts about the area are pulled in too. Each of these calls happens live, while your request is being handled, and nothing from them is saved afterward.

If an AI provider is configured, either Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, or a self-hosted proxy called FreeLLMAPI, your location, field of study, and business type are sent to that provider so it can write your recommendations in plain language instead of a fixed template. If no provider is configured, none of this leaves the app: a built-in template writes the report from the same data instead.

Depending on how the app is configured, your submitted location and field of study may be sent to one or more of these services, each of which has its own privacy policy that governs what happens on their end:

• Nominatim / OpenStreetMap Foundation (location lookup)
• Overpass API / OpenStreetMap Foundation (nearby businesses)
• Mangrove Reviews (public review text)
• Reddit, only if the operator has configured API keys (local discussion)
• Google Gemini, Anthropic, or FreeLLMAPI, whichever one is configured, if any (report writing)

No service here receives more than it needs to answer the one question it is asked. Nominatim, for instance, only ever sees the location text, never your field of study or business type.

There are no ad trackers, analytics scripts, or third-party tracking pixels on this site. There is no database behind Market Scout, so no permanent record of your searches exists on our servers to begin with. We do not sell data, because there is no stored data to sell.

Market Scout does not set cookies. The only thing your browser keeps is a small flag in local storage, confirming you have seen the notice on the homepage about how your input is used. That flag stays on your device and is never sent to our servers.

To keep the free services this app relies on from being overwhelmed by automated traffic, each request is checked against a short-term limit tied to your IP address. That check lives in the server’s memory only, resets every minute, and is cleared whenever the server restarts. It is never written to disk, logged alongside your search, or kept beyond that window.

We don’t keep your submissions at all. Once your report is built and sent back to your browser, the server has nothing left describing what you asked. If a request fails, the error log records what kind of failure it was, not the location or field of study you entered.

Because nothing about your request is stored after it is answered, there is generally nothing on our end to request a copy of, correct, or ask to be deleted. If you are in the EU, UK, California, or anywhere else with its own privacy law and still have questions about how this applies to you, use the contact below.

Market Scout is not directed at children and is not built to collect information from them. If you believe a child has submitted information through this tool, contact us below. As explained above, requests are not retained after they are answered, so there is typically nothing left to remove.

If what this tool collects or sends changes, this page will be updated to match, and the date at the top will reflect the last change.

Questions about this policy or how Market Scout handles your input can go to the project’s GitHub issues.