Privacy policy

Who we are

APEX SCALE LTD, trading as ProductConsult.
Registered in England and Wales, company number 17077877.
Email: hello@productconsult.com

For the purposes of UK data protection law, APEX SCALE LTD is the data controller for personal data described in this policy, except where stated otherwise below.

Analytics and session recording

This site uses Microsoft Clarity on every page. Clarity records how visitors interact with the site — pages viewed, clicks, scrolling, mouse movement and, where enabled, session replays and heatmaps — so we can see which parts of the site are useful and which are not.

Clarity is provided by Microsoft, which processes the data on its own infrastructure, including in the United States, under its own terms. It assigns a pseudonymous identifier to your browser rather than identifying you by name.

Clarity sets the following cookies, per Microsoft’s published list:

• _clck — first-party. Persists the Clarity user ID for this site.
• _clsk — first-party. Joins several page views into a single session recording.
• CLID — third-party. Identifies the first time Clarity saw this browser on any site using Clarity.
• MUID, SM, MR, ANONCHK — third-party Microsoft cookies that identify and synchronise a browser across Microsoft domains. Microsoft states that MUID is used for advertising as well as analytics.

If your browser blocks cookies, Clarity does not set them. You can clear or block these cookies in your browser at any time, and doing so affects nothing else on this site.

What this site still does not do

The rest remains true, and is worth stating because it removes most of what a privacy policy usually covers:

• No Google Analytics, no advertising pixels, no remarketing tags, no social media trackers
• No account, no login, no newsletter sign-up, and no email wall on any resource
• Your personal data is never sold, rented or shared for anyone else’s marketing
• There are no forms on this site, so nothing you type into one is stored by us

The one piece of browser storage we set ourselves is a sessionStorage entry named pcc-seen, recorded when the assistant’s prompt has been shown once so it is not repeated. It contains the value 1, holds no personal data, is never sent to a server, and is discarded when you close the tab.

Hosting and server logs

The site is hosted on Vercel. Like effectively all web hosting, Vercel's infrastructure processes technical request data such as your IP address, the page requested, the time, and your browser's user-agent string. This is used to serve the site and to protect it from abuse.

We do not use those logs to build a profile of you and do not combine them with anything else.

The site assistant

The chat assistant in the corner of the page sends what you type to a function on our own server, which adds a fixed knowledge base about the company and forwards the combined text to Groq, an AI inference provider, to generate a reply. Groq processes the request on servers in the United States.

Your messages are not stored by us. The function holds them only for the seconds it takes to produce a reply, records no transcript, and writes no message content to any log. Your IP address is held briefly in memory purely to rate-limit abuse, and is not written to a database.

Groq's own handling of the data it receives is governed by its policies as an independent processor. Because it is an automated system that can be wrong, and because we cannot control what a third party does with what it is sent, please do not type confidential information, personal data about other people, or anything sensitive into the assistant. Use email or a call for that.

Booking a call

The booking page embeds a scheduler provided by Calendly. If you book, the name, email address, timezone and any answers you give are collected by Calendly and passed to us so we can hold the meeting.

Calendly acts as an independent controller for the data you enter into its own interface, under its own privacy policy, and it may set cookies within that embedded frame. Nothing you type into the Calendly frame passes through this website.

Email and enquiries

If you email us, we hold your message and contact details for as long as needed to deal with the enquiry and to keep a record of what was agreed. Business correspondence is normally retained for six years, in line with the usual limitation period, then deleted.

Contacting businesses we think we can help

We keep a list of businesses whose published information suggests we could reduce a cost for them, together with the people at those businesses whose role means the decision would be theirs. If you have been contacted by us and want to know how we got your details, this section is the answer.

Where it comes from. All of it is either a public register or published by the company itself:

• Companies House — the statutory register of companies and their directors
• The company’s own website
• Job advertisements the company has published
• Professional networking profiles, obtained through a third-party data provider, which also verifies whether a work email address is deliverable

What we hold. Name, employer, job title, work email address, and a link to the public professional profile. Nothing about your personal life, and no data from any private source.

Why we may do this. Legitimate interests: contacting a named decision-maker at a business about a service directly relevant to their role. We weigh that against your interests, which is why the list is deliberately small, targeted by role rather than scraped in bulk, and why we contact people at their work address about their work.

You will be told at first contact. Where personal data is not obtained from the person it concerns, UK GDPR requires us to say so. Our first email to you will identify us, state where your details came from, link to this policy, and give you a one-click way to opt out.

Opting out. Reply to any message, or email hello@productconsult.com, and we will delete your details and add you to a suppression list so you are not contacted again if your company reappears in a later search. You can also ask for a copy of what we hold, or have it corrected. There is no need to give a reason.

How long we keep it. Prospect records are reviewed at least annually and deleted where there has been no engagement. Suppression entries are kept indefinitely, because their whole purpose is to stop you being contacted again.

Client engagements

Where we are engaged to build a system, we may process personal data held in a client's own systems in order to do that work. In that arrangement the client is the controller and we act as processor on their documented instructions, under a written agreement that sets out the scope, security measures and retention.

Nothing on this website forms part of that agreement.

Legal bases

• Legitimate interests — responding to enquiries, operating and securing the site, preventing abuse of the assistant
• Performance of a contract — arranging and delivering work you have asked us to do
• Legal obligation — keeping records we are required to keep
• Consent — analytics cookies are not strictly necessary, so consent is the basis relied on where it is required, and it can be withdrawn at any time by blocking or clearing the cookies described above

Transfers outside the UK

Microsoft, Groq and Vercel all process data in the United States. Those transfers rely on the safeguards in UK data protection law, including the UK International Data Transfer Addendum or an approved adequacy route, as applicable to each provider.

Your rights

Under UK GDPR you have the right to ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive it in a portable format. To exercise any of these, email hello@productconsult.com.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or by calling 0303 123 1113. We would appreciate the chance to put it right first.

Changes

Any change to this policy will be published on this page with a new date at the top. The version you agreed to is the one published when you used the site.