Privacy policy

Verteks Konsalting (Vertex Consulting), a company in Strumica, North Macedonia, is responsible for your data on Hustle. Hustle is its project.

For anything about your data, write to us at kontakt@hustle.mk.

When you sign up, we store:

• your email address
• your password, though we never see it: our sign-in provider, Supabase, keeps it, and only in hashed form
• your name
• your account type: business or freelancer
• your date of birth
• your language
• which version of these documents you accepted, and when
• whether you are on the Hustle team, and at which level

If you sign up with Google, Google gives us your name and email address.

When you fill in your profile, we also store:

• for students: your photo (if you add one), categories and skills, bio, city, school or university (if you give it), availability, past projects with their images and links, and certificates with their files
• for businesses: the business name, the logo (if you add one), the category, the description, the city, the website and the social media profiles
• the services students offer: the title, category, description, what they need from the business, the price, the delivery time, the rounds of revisions and the images
• the needs businesses post: the title, category, description, budget, deadline and attachments (the images and PDF files are public, on the need’s page)
• the applications students send to needs: the message, the price, the delivery time and the chosen projects or services; only the person who sent it, the business that posted the need and the Hustle team see an application
• the business’s decisions on applications
• what the keyword filter found and what the team decided: approved, or sent back with a note
• which email notifications you want
• who saved the profile last: you, or an admin helping you

When you use messages, we also store:

• conversations: who talks with whom, whether a message request was accepted or declined, and when each person last read the messages
• messages, with the photos, PDF files and voice messages in them, and what a message is about (a service, a need or an application) if it was written from there
• whom you have blocked
• the reports you send to the team, with a copy of the reported message
• when we sent you an email about unread messages

When you work through an order, we also store:

• the order: its number, title, price, delivery time and rounds of revisions, which need, offer or service it came from, and for a service, what the student asks for and the business’s answer
• each step: accepting, declining, delivering, asking for revisions, approving or canceling, who did it and when, with the note and the reason
• the files in the brief, the deliveries and the revision requests; only the two sides and the Hustle team see them
• reviews: the rating and the text, who wrote it, about whom and for which order; reviews are public on the profile
• the notifications on the site, and when we emailed you about a step of an order

Our hosting and database providers also keep technical data: IP addresses and logs of requests to the site.

Before the beta, the site had a waitlist. Its entries are kept with Resend, as contacts. People on the waitlist get emails about Hustle and can ask us to remove them.

We use your data to:

• run your account
• show your profile and your listings
• pass your application to the business that posted the need, and its decision back to you
• deliver your messages to the other person, and tell you about unread ones
• run an order between you and the other side, tell you about each of its steps and show the reviews
• check that you are at least 14, and whether your listings need a moderator’s review first
• translate your texts into the other language
• moderate content and keep users safe, with warnings and suspensions when needed
• send you emails about your account
• answer you when you ask for support

We do not sell your data and do not use it for advertising.

A profile goes public once it is complete. For a student, that means a name, at least one category, a bio of at least 80 characters and a city. For a business: a business name, a category, a description of at least 80 characters and a city. Until then, only you and the Hustle team can see it.

A student’s public profile shows their full name. A business profile shows the business name, not yours. Your date of birth, email address and settings are never shown.

Photos, project images and certificate files are public: anyone who opens the profile can see them. Public profiles can also appear in search engines such as Google.

We shrink photos and images in your browser before they are uploaded. This removes everything stored in the file, such as the location (GPS) and the phone model. Certificate files are uploaded as they are.

The Hustle team can read conversations between users and moderate them. A keyword filter checks every listing, profile text and chat message. If it finds something, such as a phone number or an offensive word, the text stays hidden until the Hustle team reviews it. The team can approve it or send it back to you with a note.

A message the filter holds doesn’t reach the other person until the team approves it. The team can hide a message: both people then see only that it was hidden. Only the team sees the messages in the “Hustle team” conversation, so the filter holds nothing there.

Photos, PDF files and voice messages in conversations are not public. Only the two people in the conversation and the Hustle team see them, through links that last a short time. We shrink photos in your browser before they are uploaded, which removes the data stored in the file, such as the location (GPS).

If someone writes to you and the message stays unread for 30 minutes, we send you an email that says who wrote, without the message itself. At most one a day. You can turn these emails off in your account settings.

During the beta the team helps users set up their profiles in person. That is why team members can edit any profile.

The Hustle team has three levels: moderator, admin and owner. All of them see the content of accounts, including what is not public yet. Admins and owners also see your email address, your age in years (not your date of birth), when the account was made and when you last signed in. When moderators search for an account, they see only the name, the account type and whether the profile is complete.

Moderators open conversations from a report or from a message the filter held; admins and owners can also open them from a user’s page. Every time a team member opens a conversation they are not part of, we record who, when, which conversation and from where before the messages show. Conversations with “Hustle team” are the team’s own, and reading them is not recorded.

Warnings arrive as a message from “Hustle team” in your “Hustle team” conversation. If the team warns you or suspends your account, we keep the reason, the note, who on the team did it and when.

We record every action the team takes: changes of level, warnings, suspensions and their lifting, orders the team canceled, messages and reviews hidden or shown again, decisions on held content, profiles the team saved, changes to the site’s settings and every reading of a conversation. Each record says who, when, what and with which note. The team cannot change or delete these records, and only owners can see them.

Hustle is for people aged 14 and older. Sign-up asks for your date of birth. If someone is younger than 14, we do not sign them up and we store nothing they entered.

From 14, no parental consent is needed to sign up: under the Law on Personal Data Protection, 14 is the age of digital consent.

A moderator from the Hustle team reviews services and listings from users under 18 before they are published. A profile photo is optional for everyone, minors included.

If you are under 18, the school or university you enter is not shown publicly. Only you and the Hustle team see it; it appears on your profile when you turn 18.

Our database is in Ireland, in the EU. These companies process data for us:

• Supabase: database, accounts and files, in Ireland, EU.
• Vercel: hosting. The server code runs in Dublin, Ireland, and pages are delivered through Vercel’s worldwide network.
• Resend: sends Hustle’s emails, from its EU region in Ireland.
• Google: if you sign in with Google, Google gives us your name and email address.
• Anthropic, a US company: translates your texts with AI and answers in the site’s assistant, “Ask”.
• Cloudflare: DNS for our domain, and forwarding of mail sent to kontakt@hustle.mk. That mail arrives in the team’s Gmail (Google) inbox.

What you type into the “Ask” assistant is sent to Anthropic to get an answer. Hustle stores none of it. Anthropic may process text outside the EU.

When you save text in your profile (the bio, skills, city, availability note, projects or business description), in a service (the title, the description and what you need from the business), in a need (the title and the description), in an application (the message) or in a review, it is sent to Anthropic to be translated into the other language. We keep both the original and the translation. Names, the school and certificates are not sent. Messages in conversations, and the briefs and notes in orders, are not translated and are not sent to Anthropic.

We only use the cookies needed to keep you signed in. When you sign up with Google, we also use one short-lived cookie that remembers the first step of sign-up while you sign in.

We have no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies.

We keep your data while your account exists. When the account is deleted, we delete its data too.

Public pictures (photos, logos, project and service images) can stay in browser and network caches for up to an hour after they are deleted.

Your messages and the files in them are deleted with your account. The other person keeps the conversation with their own messages and sees that the account was deleted. A report to the team keeps its copy of the reported message after that, so the team can still review it.

Orders stay with the other side, without your files, marked as from a deleted account; an order that isn’t finished is canceled. The reviews you wrote and the reviews about you are deleted with the account.

We keep the records of the team’s actions, including readings of conversations, warnings and suspensions, so the team can check what happened.

Our hosting and database providers keep IP addresses and request logs for a limited time, under their own rules.

Under the Law on Personal Data Protection, you can ask us to:

• show you the data we keep about you
• correct it
• delete it
• restrict how we use it
• give you a copy of it, so you can take it elsewhere

You can also object to how we use it. Where we use data on the basis of your consent, you can withdraw that consent.

Send your requests to kontakt@hustle.mk. You can also delete your account yourself, in your profile’s settings. Deleting is immediate and complete: we delete the account, the profile, the projects, the certificates and every uploaded file.

If you think we are not handling your data properly, you can complain to the Agency for Personal Data Protection (azlp.mk).

We may change this policy. Before an important change takes effect, we will tell you by email or on the site. The version and date are at the top of this page.

For questions and requests about your data, write to us at kontakt@hustle.mk.