Privacy & Disclaimers

Last updated October 7, 2026

What this site is

The Almanac organizes public data about U.S. states, cities, and ZIP codes — population, workforce, housing, and housing-program access — refreshed automatically from government sources, alongside hand-researched material that carries its research date. Through its connector, your AI assistant can also research a property or a market for you and save that research to your account. It is a reference, not advice.

What we collect

• Your account. Signing in uses our authentication provider (Clerk), which holds your email address and sign-in details.
• Connector requests. When your AI assistant uses the Almanac, we record which account called which tool about which place, and when. We use these records to run the service, understand usage, and improve coverage.
• What your assistant saves for you. Your research dossier and your research files (described below) are stored because your assistant saves them to your account at your request.
• Property addresses you research. To identify a property, our server sends its address to the U.S. Census Bureau's geocoder, and the point it returns to FEMA's flood map service to screen the flood zone. Those are federal services with their own privacy policies. The public address preview on our website does the same lookups; we keep the result for a day so repeat lookups don't call those services again, and we don't tie it to you.
• Release emails. If you follow a place, we store your email address and the places you follow, only to send those places' release emails. Nothing is sent until you confirm. Unsubscribing, one click in any email, deletes your address.

We don't see your conversations or prompts, or anything your assistant reads on other sites. We see only the requests it makes to the Almanac and what it asks us to save. We don't run advertising, sell personal information, or use third-party tracking.

What we store, and for how long

• Your account: until you ask us to delete it.
• Usage records: account, tool, place, and day for each connector request, kept until your account is deleted. A nightly backup of these records, including account email addresses, is kept in our private code repository on GitHub.
• Your research dossier: the private notes and projects your assistant saves. The last 50 versions of each project are kept, and you can download any of them from the Connect page. Kept until you delete it or ask us to.
• Research files: for each property or market you research, the findings your assistant saves (each with its source and date), the checklist of what was and wasn't checked, the finished documents (the last 40 versions), and the earlier wording of any finding that was corrected or withdrawn. Private to your account. You can delete a file at any time from its page; deletion is permanent, and our logs keep only the file's id and the date it was deleted.

Who can see it

Your dossier and research files are visible to you, through your account and the AI assistants you connect. We don't read them. Access to our storage is limited to the people who run the Almanac, and is used only to keep backups, to fix a problem you ask us about, or when the law requires it. We disclose their contents only with your consent or in response to valid legal process.

The website can present a research file back to you as an Edition (cards, a PDF or a deck), visible only to you. If you create a share link, anyone with that link can see a fixed copy of that Edition, without signing in; mortgage, lien and loan details are left off it. You can stop sharing at any time, and the link stops working. Shared links are kept out of search engines.

Service providers

Netlify (hosting and storage), Clerk (sign-in), GitHub (our code, and the nightly usage backup), Resend (sending release emails, once they start), and, when payments launch, Stripe (billing; card details go to Stripe, never to us). They process data on our behalf. We don't share personal information with anyone else.

Deleting your data

You can delete research files yourself, at any time, from each file's page. To delete your account and everything stored under it (your dossier, your research files, and your usage records), or to ask what we hold about you, email brooks@strangeorbit.ai.

Do Not Track

We don't track you across other sites, so a browser's Do Not Track signal doesn't change anything here.

Changes to this page

When this page changes, the date at the top changes. Before a material change takes effect, we email account holders.

Data disclaimer

Every value on this site identifies its source and vintage. Four kinds of information appear here, with different confidence:

• Federal data (Census Bureau, BLS, BEA, HUD, and peers) is republished as-is from the source, with its vintage. It is as current — and as revised — as the agency's own release.
• Hand-researched material (such as program access) carries the date it was researched and may have changed since. Verify with the administering agency before relying on it.
• Computed estimates (such as supportable rent ranges and missing-unit estimates) are methodology-bound outputs of the inputs listed with them. They are screening tools, not appraisals, and carry the uncertainty of their inputs — small places especially.
• Research files are written by your AI assistant from public sources. The Almanac checks their structure, labels and sources; it does not verify the facts.

Missing data is shown as missing, with the reason — never silently as zero.

Not advice

Nothing here is investment, legal, tax, lending, or engineering advice, or an opinion of value for any property. A research file is public-record research, not a title search, survey, flood determination, appraisal, or zoning opinion. Development decisions should rest on professional diligence — this site exists to make that diligence faster, not to replace it. We provide the data "as is," without warranty, and are not liable for decisions made from it. Our Terms of Service have the details.

Access

Connecting by signing in (OAuth) grants your AI assistant access to the Almanac under your account; you can revoke it at any time from the assistant's connector settings. Personal access links are equivalent to a password: don't share or publish yours, and if one leaks we can revoke and reissue it in minutes. Usage is recorded under your account either way.

Attribution

This product uses data from the U.S. Census Bureau (ACS, PEP, LEHD/LODES, CBP, Building Permits Survey, QWI, and the Census Geocoder), the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. It is not endorsed or certified by any of those agencies; calculations and any errors introduced in processing are our own.

Questions

Email brooks@strangeorbit.ai for product, privacy, or security concerns. Security reports get a reply within two business days.