Privacy
CostCam has no accounts and no signup. This page says plainly what happens to your photo and what we keep.
What we store when you price an item
- The estimate itself: what the model thought the item was, its category, condition, the price range and its confidence.
- Your photo, for 90 days. A second photo, if you add one to refine an estimate, is kept the same way. See below.
- Your country and city, worked out from your network address so prices come back in your currency.
- Which page you arrived on, and the website that sent you, if any.
- A one-way hash that stands in for you. See below.
What happens to your photo
Your photo is sent to OpenAI to be identified and priced. We keep a copy for 90 days, then it is deleted automatically. If you add a second photo to refine an estimate, both photos are sent and both are kept for the same 90 days.
If you rate an estimate, we keep that photo for longer. Rated photos are how we measure whether CostCam is getting better or worse. Without them every change to the model is a guess.
Your photo is never published without your consent. When you rate an estimate there is an unticked box that asks whether we may feature the find anonymously. Leave it unticked and the photo is only ever used privately to check our accuracy.
We do not store your IP address
We take your network address and browser name, combine them with a secret key, and store the resulting scrambled string. It lets us see that fifty estimates came from one person without knowing who or where that person is. The original address is never written down.
If you write to us
The feedback form asks for your email so we can reply. We keep your message and your email address in the same database, and a copy is sent to our team chat on Slack. Ask us in the message to delete it afterwards and we will.
What we never do
- We never sell your photos or your data.
- We never ask for your name, email or address to price a photo.
- We never publish a photo, or anything that identifies a person or an address, without your consent.
When something breaks
If CostCam hits an error, we send an error report so we can see what broke. The report names the error, the page it happened on and which browser you used. Before it is sent we remove your network address, the headers that pass that address on, cookies, any header carrying a password or access token, and any email address. Your photo is not part of the report, and neither is the data the program was using to price it.
Who else sees this
- OpenAI receives your photo to produce the estimate. If you add a second photo, it receives that one too.
- DigitalOcean hosts the site, the database and the photos, in Germany.
- Slack receives a copy of anything you send through the feedback form, so we see it and reply.
- Fathom and Ahrefs count page views. Neither sets advertising cookies or tracks you across other websites.
- Google Ads loads a tag to measure ad conversions; the campaign and click-ID parameters your browser saw on its first visit are stored there and saved with your analysis.
- Sentry (Functional Software, Inc., in the United States) receives those error reports and keeps them for up to 90 days.
Your history on this device
The list of your past estimates lives in your own browser, not on our servers. Clearing your browser storage erases it, and we cannot see it.
Asking us to delete something
Use the feedback form. Tell us roughly when you took the photo and what the item was, and we will find it and delete it.
Last updated 19 October 2026.