Privacy Policy

Last updated November 13, 2026

This policy explains what personal information Epiforge collects, why, who receives it, and how long we keep it. It covers our website, Epiforge accounts, payments, our earlier products’ subscriptions, downloads, support, and what Grindstone 5 sends us.

In short

  • Your Grindstone workspaces stay on your computer. Nothing in them comes to Epiforge.
  • We don’t show ads, don’t use analytics or tracking cookies, and don’t sell or rent personal information.
  • Card numbers go from your browser straight to our card processor; we never receive them.
  • Grindstone 5 sends a small daily count of which versions are in use, which you can turn off, and sends a report or a message only when you choose to.

Who we are

Epiforge Software, LLC, 760 Old Roswell Road, Roswell, GA 30076, United States (“Epiforge,” “we,” “us”).

This policy doesn’t cover sites and services run by others that we link to or embed, such as YouTube, our card processor’s own sites, or the discussion forum at discuss.epiforge.com, which is a separate service with its own privacy policy.

Your Epiforge account

  • Your details. When you sign up, we collect your name, your email address, your company if you give it, and whether you want announcement emails (off unless you choose them). You can later add an accounting email address, which gets copies of billing emails, and an invoice mailing address. We use these to run your account, sign you in and send you the emails described below. We keep them as long as your account exists.
  • Your password. We store it only as a salted, slow hash, never as you typed it. When you choose a new password, we check it against Have I Been Pwned’s list of passwords exposed in breaches; we send them only the first 5 characters of a hash of it, never the password or anything else about you.
  • Signing in. When you sign in, your browser keeps a cookie holding a random code. We store only a hash of that code, with when the session started, when it was last used and when it expires. A session ends after an hour without use (a week if you chose to stay signed in), and after 24 hours at most (30 days if you chose to stay signed in). We delete ended sessions daily.
  • Email links. Links we email to confirm your address, reset your password or change your email address hold a code we store only as a hash. They expire after 7 days, 1 hour and 24 hours respectively, and we delete them daily once expired. While an email change is pending, we keep the new address with its link.
  • Protecting sign-in. To stop password guessing and abuse of our email forms, we count attempts against a hashed form of the email address and of the network address they come from. We delete these counts 30 days after the last attempt.

Cards and payments

  • Adding a card. The card number, expiration date, security code, name and ZIP code you enter go from your browser straight to Elavon, our card processor. Elavon gives us a token that stands for the card, and tells us its brand, a masked form of its number (most digits hidden), its expiration date and the name on it. That’s what we keep.
  • Charges and payments. We keep a record of every charge and payment on your account: amounts, dates, what they were for, the card used, whether a payment succeeded and, if it was declined, the kind of decline. We also keep a record of each exchange with Elavon, with our credentials and card details removed. When you pay a balance yourself, we send Elavon your network address so its fraud checks see you rather than our servers; we don’t keep it.
  • Removing a card. We delete it at Elavon, so it can’t be charged again. We keep the masked card record because your billing history refers to it.
  • How long. We keep billing records for as long as we may need them for tax and accounting, and currently don’t delete them on a schedule.

Earlier products’ subscriptions and licenses

If you have a Task Force or Grindstone Sync Cloud subscription, or Grindstone Sync Server or Grindstone 4 Pro licenses, your account holds what you see in Account: subscription names and administrator logins, the names and logins of Sync Cloud administrators, license codes, the hardware signatures your Grindstone 4 Pro licenses are tied to, and your Sync Server’s device signature, network address and port. To bill usage, we count the active users of each subscription for each billing period. We keep these as long as your account exists.

The time-tracking data your team keeps in Task Force or Grindstone Sync Cloud (people, tasks or work items, time entries, notes, custom fields and, in Task Force, rates and invoices) is stored on our servers to provide that service, under that service’s terms. We don’t use it for anything else. We’ll tell subscribers what happens to it before each service ends.

Email we send

We send confirmations, password resets, security notices, receipts, charge notices and failed-payment notices through Microsoft’s Azure Communication Services, with open and click tracking turned off. You can turn off receipts and charge notices in Account; security notices and failed-payment notices always go. Copies of billing emails go to Epiforge’s own accounting mailbox, and to your accounting email address if you gave one. We send announcement emails only if you opted in, and you can opt out in Account at any time.

Support requests

When you send us a message from Support, or a report or message from Grindstone, it holds what you wrote and the details you chose to include: your name and email address if you gave them, the product, and, from Grindstone, the technical details described below. We store it only until it reaches our support desk, usually within a minute, and then delete its content, keeping only when it arrived, what kind of request it was and which case it became, for 30 days. If it can’t be delivered within 14 days, we keep it for 30 days from when it arrived so we can find out why, then delete it.

Our support desk service receives your name, email address, message, the product, and from Grindstone the technical details, version and platform. We keep support conversations there for as long as they may help us support you.

While a message from the website is on its way, your browser keeps a copy in its session storage, so it can be resent without being duplicated; it’s cleared once we’ve answered.

What Grindstone 5 sends

Privacy in Grindstone’s documentation describes exactly what Grindstone sends and never sends. In summary:

  • Usage counts. At most once a day, and once more when it’s updated, Grindstone sends a random number it made for the installation (not made from your computer, your name, your account or your workspaces), whether it’s the beta, its version, the operating system and its version, whether the app and the system are x64 or Arm64, and the language your computer is set to show apps in. It’s on from the start; the first time Grindstone shows Your Workspaces, it shows the switch, and nothing is sent until you’ve left that screen. Turning it off in Settings stops it completely and deletes the random number.
  • We keep each installation’s latest details until 400 days after we last heard from it, and its daily activity and version changes for about 400 days. Daily totals, which are only counts, we keep indefinitely.
  • Reports and messages go only when you choose to send them, after you’ve seen and can change everything in them. See Support requests.
  • Updates. On Windows, Windows’ App Installer checks downloads.epiforge.com for updates. On a Mac, Grindstone checks it itself, once a day and whenever you ask it to.

Grindstone 4

Grindstone 4 checks Epiforge for updates every few hours, sending its version, a hardware signature identifying the computer, its operating system, its .NET runtime and its language. Until Grindstone 5 launches, our older servers answer these checks and record those details as sent. From Grindstone 5’s launch, our current servers answer them and keep only a keyed hash of the hardware signature, never the signature itself, with the same retention as Grindstone 5’s usage counts. We’ll delete the older servers’ records when we retire them, after Grindstone 5’s launch, and stop recording these checks when Grindstone Sync Cloud ends.

Downloads

downloads.epiforge.com serves our installers and updates. We don’t keep logs of individual downloads. Error records from the download server, kept 30 days, can include the network address of the request that caused them.

Our website and servers

  • The website is hosted by Microsoft, which handles each request to deliver the page. We add no analytics, advertising or tracking.
  • Our servers keep operational records for 30 days to keep them running and fix problems: which address on our servers was requested, with values in it removed, the response, how long it took, errors, and our own identifiers for accounts, payments and requests. They don’t record your IP address.
  • Rate limits. To stop abuse, our services count requests against a keyed hash of the network address they come from, and delete the counts after 48 hours.

Cookies and browser storage

  • One cookie, set only when you sign in, to keep you signed in. It can’t be read by our pages’ scripts or by other sites.
  • Session storage, cleared when you close the tab: a payment you’ve started, so it isn’t made twice if you retry, and a support message on its way.
  • Local storage: a single setting the site uses to reload itself after it’s been updated.
  • Videos on our pages load from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced service only when you click play. From then on, YouTube’s privacy policy applies.

We don’t use advertising or analytics cookies, so there’s nothing to opt out of.

Who we share it with

We share personal information only with the service providers who help us run Epiforge, only for that purpose:

  • Microsoft, which hosts our website, servers, database, storage and email delivery, in the United States;
  • Elavon, our card processor;
  • our support desk service, which holds support conversations;
  • our email provider, which delivers mail sent to our addresses;
  • Have I Been Pwned, which receives only the first characters of a hash of a new password.

We disclose information when the law requires it. If Epiforge’s business is sold or reorganized, the information may pass to the new owner, still under this policy. We don’t sell or rent personal information, or share it for advertising.

Where it’s kept

Epiforge and its service providers store and process personal information in the United States.

How we protect it

All connections to our services are encrypted. Passwords, sign-in codes and email-link codes are stored only as hashes. Our database is reachable only from our own servers’ private network. Card details never reach our servers. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to keep yours safe.

Your choices

  • Change your details and email preferences, and remove cards, in Account.
  • Turn off Grindstone’s usage counts in its Settings.
  • Send a support request without your name or email address, except a question, which needs an address to reply to.
  • To close your account, contact us. We’ll delete your saved cards at Elavon, stop all email to you, and remove the details we don’t need to keep for billing records.

Children

Our services aren’t directed to children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, contact us and we’ll delete it.

Changes to this policy

We’ll post any change here and update the date at the top. If a change matters to people with an Epiforge account, we’ll also email account holders before it takes effect.

Contact

Epiforge Software, LLC, 760 Old Roswell Road, Roswell, GA 30076, United States. To reach us, use Speak with a specialist.