No accounts, no server-side user data

ToolScanner has no sign-up, login, or user accounts. There is no backend database of visitors — nothing you do on this site is tied to an identity stored on our servers.

What's stored in your browser

Local storage (never sent to our servers, readable only by your own browser):

• Your selected UI language (English / 한국어 / 日本語 / हिन्दी)
• A cached daily USD/KRW/JPY exchange rate snapshot, refreshed at most once a day
• Your saved My AI Stack list — which tools you've added and the prices you entered for them

One first-party cookie, toolscanner_lang: stores the same language choice above so pages render in your language immediately, instead of flashing in English first. It holds only a language code (e.g. ko) — no identifier, no tracking value — expires after a year, and is sent only to ToolScanner's own server, never to a third party.

You can clear any of this anytime via your browser's site settings. The tools you're currently comparing (the Compare page selection) aren't saved at all — that resets on page refresh. Search queries aren't stored or transmitted anywhere.

Tool preview images and operational data

To keep tool preview screenshots and a few operational counters (like daily capture limits) working reliably, ToolScanner's server stores this data in Upstash Redis, a managed database service.

This data is about tools, not about visitors: cached homepage screenshots of listed AI tools, when they were last captured, and internal counters used to stay within external screenshot providers' usage limits. It is not used to identify or track individual visitors.

Analytics and advertising — today vs. planned

Today: no analytics SDK (no Google Analytics, no session recording, no event tracking of any kind) and no ad network is installed or active. Nothing about your visit is measured beyond what any web server inherently sees per request (see "Server logs" below).

Planned: ToolScanner intends to add Google AdSense for advertising. Once that's actually live (it is not yet), it will set its own cookies and may use them to personalize ads based on your visit here and elsewhere, under Google's advertising policies. This page will be updated, and a consent mechanism added where required, before — not after — any ad network goes live.

Cookie consent

Because no advertising or analytics cookie is active today, there is currently nothing to obtain consent for beyond the strictly necessary language cookie above (which, under most cookie-law frameworks, doesn't require a consent banner since it's purely functional). A consent banner will be added before the planned ad network above goes live, for any visitor where that's legally required.

Requests our server makes on your behalf

A few features work by having our server fetch public information about a tool, not about you:

• Daily exchange rates from a public FX rate API (Frankfurter), used to show approximate KRW pricing
• Each tool's official favicon, via Google's and DuckDuckGo's public favicon services
• Each tool's homepage screenshot, via a rotating set of screenshot APIs

These requests are keyed by a tool's public website domain, not by anything about you as a visitor, and results are cached and reused rather than requested fresh on every visit.

Server logs

Standard hosting/CDN request logs (IP address, user agent, requested path) may be retained by whichever hosting provider serves this site, under that provider's own policy. This is outside what this codebase controls, and the operator will confirm the specifics once hosting is finalized.