Privacy Policy

TipTheMaid is a New Zealand-operated service. We provide a platform that lets guests of holiday homes thank, rate and optionally tip the cleaner who prepared their stay.

Privacy questions and requests go to the TipTheMaid Privacy Officer through our Contact & Support page. Please choose the “Privacy request” topic so it reaches the right place.

• Visitors to our website
• Guests who leave a rating, comment or tip
• Hosts and property managers
• Cleaners
• Anyone who contacts us through the Contact page or asks about a starter pack

We collect only what the service actually needs. Depending on how you use TipTheMaid, that can include:

• Account and authentication information - your email address and the authentication records held by our authentication provider. We do not store your password in readable form. Password authentication and credential storage are handled by our authentication provider.
• Profile and role information - your name and whether you are a host or a cleaner.
• Cleaner information - display name, optional short bio, and whether you are currently accepting tips.
• Host and property information - property name, suburb or town, property status, and any property images a host uploads or links.
• Cleaner assignments and invitations - which cleaners are assigned to which properties, and invitation records including the invited email address.
• Ratings and comments - the star rating and any optional thank-you note a guest submits, and which property and cleaner it relates to. Guests are not asked to create an account or provide their name.
• Tip session and payment status information - the tip amount selected, currency, the status of the tip, and the time it was created or confirmed.
• Saved tips - if you are signed in, a private record connecting your account to a tip, plus the time it was made. If you are signed in when you start a paid tip, that record is created at that point, before the payment is confirmed, so the tip can appear in your history automatically once it goes through. Only confirmed tips are shown as saved history: a payment that failed or was abandoned, and a rating or note sent without a tip, do not appear. Hosts and cleaners cannot read this record. See section 8.
• Stripe Checkout identifiers and transaction metadata - reference identifiers returned by Stripe so we can match a payment to a tip.
• Stripe Connect onboarding and payout status (for cleaners) - the connected account identifier and status flags such as whether charges and payouts are enabled and whether Stripe still needs more information.
• Contact messages - your name, email address, the role you tell us you have, the topic, subject and the message you send us.
• Technical, security and diagnostic information - limited information used to keep the service running securely, such as session cookies and server error diagnostics.

We do not receive or store full card numbers or bank account details. We receive limited payment and connected-account information needed to operate the service, such as reference identifiers, amounts, currency, payment status and payout-capability status. Stripe handles full card and bank-account details on its hosted systems.

We do not currently store starter-pack enquiries submitted from the homepage - that form is not yet connected. If you want a starter pack today, please use the Contact & Support page.

• Directly from you, when you create an account, add a property, leave a rating or tip, or contact us.
• From hosts or cleaners, when they create a property, assign a cleaner, or send an invitation that names you.
• From Stripe and our authentication and hosting providers, when they confirm a payment, a payout status or a sign-in.
• Automatically, through the security and diagnostic systems needed to operate the site.

• To operate accounts, properties and cleaner assignments.
• To display and deliver ratings and comments according to the product settings that apply.
• To process tips and the associated fees.
• To set up and administer cleaner payouts.
• To prevent fraud and abuse and to keep the service secure.
• To provide customer support and respond to your messages.
• To meet legal, accounting, tax and dispute-resolution requirements.
• To improve the service, using aggregated or de-identified information wherever we reasonably can.

We do not sell personal information. We share it only with the service providers we need to run TipTheMaid, and with others where the law requires it:

• Stripe - payment processing and cleaner payouts.
• Supabase - our database, authentication and file storage provider.
• Vercel - website and application hosting.
• Resend - the provider we use to deliver support email. When we reply to a contact message, the reply content, the subject line and your email address are processed by Resend so the email can be delivered.
• Professional advisers, insurers or authorities - where we are legally required to disclose information, or where it is reasonably necessary to establish or defend a legal claim.

Some of these providers store or process information outside New Zealand. Where that happens, we take reasonable steps to use established providers that offer comparable safeguards to those required under New Zealand law.

We keep our own record of the support replies we send, including the subject, the message text, the address it went to and whether our email provider accepted it. If you reply to one of our support emails, your reply goes to a monitored support mailbox rather than being imported automatically into TipTheMaid.

Some information is intended to be seen by others. Ratings, comments, cleaner names and property information may be visible to the relevant host, cleaner or guest depending on the product settings that apply at the time.

• Hosts and cleaners should not submit information about other people that they are not entitled to provide.
• Please do not include sensitive personal details about yourself or anyone else in a rating or thank-you note.
• Operational or private information will not intentionally be made public unless the product clearly tells you that it will be.

You do not need an account to tip. Scanning a QR code, leaving a rating, writing a thank-you note and paying a tip all work without signing in. This feature does not require you to sign in before tipping, and everything in this section is optional.

If you are signed in, you can keep a record of a tip in two ways:

• If you were already signed in when you tipped, we privately note that the tip attempt was yours, so the tip appears in your history automatically once we have confirmed the payment.
• If you tipped anonymously, the payment confirmation page offers to save the tip. Saving it links that tip to the account you are signed in to.

Either way, only a confirmed tip appears in your history. A payment that is still pending, one that failed, and a rating or thank-you note sent without any tip are never shown as saved.

Saving a tip works from the payment confirmation page, using the Stripe Checkout reference that page already carries together with the account you are signed in to. Only a tip we have confirmed as paid can be saved, only one account can hold it, and the option stops working 30 days after the payment.

Your saved tip history shows the property name and suburb or town, the amount, the currency, the date and a short reference. It does not show card details, Stripe identifiers or anything about the cleaner beyond the property they cleaned.

The connection between you and a tip is kept private. We hold it in a separate, restricted record rather than alongside the tip itself. Hosts and cleaners cannot read it, and neither can other account holders or anyone who is not signed in. A host or cleaner sees the tip, the rating and the note, exactly as they did before this feature existed — they are not told whether a tipper had an account, and they cannot tell that the same person tipped twice.

We do not connect an anonymous tip to an account because the email addresses match. Matching an email address is not proof that the same person tipped. A tip is only ever linked to an account by the two routes described above, and we do not go back through old tips looking for accounts to attach them to.

There is no public list, ranking or leaderboard of people who tip. Your tip history is visible to you when you are signed in, and to us when we need it to run the service or answer a support request. If we ever build something that shows tippers publicly, it will be opt-in, it will never show your email address, and we will update this policy before it goes live.

Deleting your account deletes the saved-tip link between you and the tips you saved. The tip itself stays in our records, because it is the cleaner's income and part of our accounting: the payment record, the rating and the note remain. Other records described elsewhere in this policy — including payment information held by Stripe and any support conversation you have had with us — are kept as set out in those sections and in section 9.

We keep personal information only as long as we reasonably need it to run the service, meet our legal obligations, resolve disputes, protect the security of the platform and keep accurate accounting records.

Payment, payout and audit records generally need to be kept longer than other information. We have not set fixed deletion periods for every category, and we would rather say so honestly than promise timeframes we do not yet apply.

We use reasonable technical and organisational safeguards to protect personal information, including access controls on our database, server-side authorisation checks, and delegating card and bank details to Stripe rather than handling them ourselves.

No method of transmitting information over the internet is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a privacy breach that is likely to cause serious harm, we will act in line with our obligations under the Privacy Act 2020.

You have the right to ask for access to the personal information we hold about you, and to ask us to correct it if it is wrong.

Send your request through the Contact & Support page using the “Privacy request” topic. We may need to verify your identity before we release personal information, so we may ask you a follow-up question - but please never send identity documents, passwords or card details through the contact form.

If you have a privacy concern, please raise it with the TipTheMaid Privacy Officer first through the Contact & Support page. We will take it seriously and try to put things right.

You may also complain to the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner at privacy.org.nz.

We use cookies and similar browser storage only for things the service needs to work:

• Keeping you signed in and refreshing your session securely.
• Protecting accounts and preventing misuse.
• Remembering essential preferences needed to operate the site.

We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not sell or share browsing information with advertising networks.

TipTheMaid is not directed to children. Accounts, payments and payout features must only be used by people who are legally able to enter into the relevant agreements and to make or receive payments.

We may update this policy as the service develops. When we do, we will post the updated version on this page and revise the “Last updated” date at the top. If a change is significant, we will try to tell affected users through the service.