Draft — last updated 6 October 2026
Privacy
Plot studio is a free tool for drawing a garden plan over an aerial photo. This page says, in plain words, what it keeps about you, why, who else ever sees it, and how to have it deleted.
Plot studio is operated by Mark Stenquist. Contact: mark@visualboston.com
The short version
- We keep your email address so you can sign in, and the gardens you draw so you can come back to them.
- We do not sell your information. We do not show ads and there are no advertising trackers. We count page visits with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and does not identify you.
- Your plan and contact details go to a landscape company only if you ask for quotes and tick the box agreeing to it, for that garden.
- Write to us and we will delete your account and gardens.
What we keep
- Your email address
- Signing in works by emailing you a one-time link, so your address is your account. We keep it, the time it was confirmed, your sign-in sessions (they last up to 30 days) and the one-time sign-in tokens (they expire after 24 hours). We do not ask for a name or a password.
- Your gardens
- For each garden: its name, the address you typed when you made it, the point on the map it is centred on, its size, and everything you draw. Each time you publish, a full copy is saved as a revision along with the email address of whoever published it. For gardens made in the app we keep the newest 100 revisions and the last one of each day before those.
- Who can see or edit each garden
- The email addresses invited to edit or to view a garden, who invited them and when. Each garden is either listed on the home page, open to anyone with its link, or private to the people on its list; you choose.
- Images
- When you make a garden we fetch a public-domain aerial photo of the spot from the US Geological Survey and store a copy. Images you upload into the studio are stored too. Both are kept in Vercel Blob storage at web addresses that are long and hard to guess, but anyone who has one of those addresses can open the image, even if the garden itself is private.
- Quote requests
- If you ask for quotes: what you want done, your budget range and timing, your phone number if you give it, your notes, the exact wording you agreed to and when, the request's status, and which companies it was shared with.
- Feedback
- Notes you send with “Send feedback”, the page you sent them from, and your email address if you were signed in.
- Abuse limits
- To stop the sign-in form and garden creation being abused, we briefly record attempts against your email address or your network's IP address. These entries are kept for about a day.
- In your own browser
- Unpublished drafts, your light or dark theme and how the studio panels were left are saved in your browser's local storage, on your device only. Clearing your browser's site data removes them.
Cookies
Cookies are used only to keep you signed in: a session cookie, and the short-lived cookies the sign-in process needs to protect the form and send you back to the right page. A map opened with a map password (an older way in) sets one cookie for that map. Nothing else sets cookies, and none are used for advertising or tracking across sites.
Bot checks
On a few forms — signing in, making a garden, sending feedback and asking for quotes — Vercel BotID runs an invisible check in your browser to tell people from automated scripts. It looks at signals from the browser, not at what you type.
When your plan is shared with landscape companies
Only if you ask for quotes for a garden and tick the box agreeing to it. We then share that garden's plan, the general area of its address, and your contact details (email, and phone if given) with up to 3 vetted local landscape companies. Each gets view-only access to the published plan of that one garden — they cannot change it or see your other gardens — and may contact you by email or phone about the project.
You can withdraw at any time by writing to mark@visualboston.com. We then remove the companies' access to the plan and ask them not to contact you. What a company already wrote down before you withdrew is held by them under their own privacy practices.
We never sell your information. We will not pass it to anyone else for their own use without your explicit consent for that garden.
Services that handle data for us
- Vercel hosts the app, stores images (Vercel Blob), runs the bot check (BotID) and counts page visits (Web Analytics: the page, the referring site, the country and the kind of device, with no cookies and nothing that identifies you).
- Neon hosts the database that holds accounts, gardens, revisions, quote requests and feedback.
- Resend delivers the sign-in emails, so it sees your email address.
- The US Census Bureau geocoder turns the address you type into a point on the map, the US Geological Survey supplies aerial photos for that area, MassGIS (the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) supplies the assessor lot line, building outlines and ground contours for Massachusetts addresses, and Open-Meteo supplies the weather for a garden's location. These requests come from our server, not your browser, and carry the address or location only.
How long we keep it, and deleting it
Your account, gardens, quote requests and feedback are kept until you ask us to delete them, or until we close the service. Write to mark@visualboston.com from the address you sign in with and we will delete your account, your gardens with their revisions and images, and your quote requests, and tell you when it is done. You can also ask for a copy of what we hold about you, or for something to be corrected.
Children
Plot studio is not meant for children under 13, and we do not knowingly keep information about them.
Changes
If what we keep or share changes, this page changes first, with a new date at the top. A change that would share your information in a new way will ask for your consent before it applies to you.