Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 13, 2026

What Settle is

Settle helps you find a neighborhood to live in. You tell us a few things about what you're looking for — where you need to commute, what matters to you, your budget — and we rank neighborhoods using live public data. This policy explains what happens to your information along the way.

What we don't collect

Settle doesn't have user accounts, and we don't ask you to sign up. Anything you save while using the app — favorites, notes, answers to our questions — stays in your browser or on your device. It's never sent to our servers.

What's processed transiently

To rank neighborhoods for you, we turn a work or home address (and, if you allow it, your device's location) into map coordinates and use those coordinates to run your search. This happens in the moment — we don't store your address or coordinates on our servers. Our servers do keep standard, short-lived request logs (the kind any web server keeps for security and troubleshooting), which are automatically cleared on a rolling basis.

Third-party services

To answer your questions, Settle sends the minimum information needed — usually just coordinates or a search query — to a handful of outside services:

• Google Maps Platform, for commute times, geocoding, and places
• NYC Open Data, Dallas Open Data, Los Angeles Open Data, Chicago Data Portal, Seattle Open Data, and San Francisco Open Data (Socrata)
• OpenDataPhilly (Carto)
• City of Houston GIS and Open Data DC (ArcGIS)
• Analyze Boston (CKAN)
• OSRM, for routing
• Photon / OpenStreetMap, for address search

Each of these receives only the coordinates or queries needed to answer your specific request — nothing more.

Analytics

To understand which features get used and how visitors find Settle, we use privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics (Umami) that we host on our own server. It counts page views and a few anonymous events (like “started the finder”) — no cookies, no personal data, and nothing collected, sold, or shared with anyone.

No sale of personal data

We don't sell your personal data. We don't have any to sell — see above.

Looking ahead

Our mobile apps may in the future show advertising or affiliate links to help keep Settle free. If that happens, it will always be clearly disclosed, and this policy will be updated first.

Children

Settle is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect information from them.

Changes & contact

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, we'll update the effective date above. Questions? Reach us at support@settle.place.