The short version: no cookies, no analytics scripts, no email capture, and no account needed. What you type stays in your browser unless you send it yourself; the AI checks process your upload once and discard it, the optional last step of the journey shares an anonymous cost figure if you press the button, and the optional account holds your login, your credit and whatever you chose to save with a save button. The complete picture, including the few things we do count.
The tools remember your work in your own browser storage, so a reload does not throw it away. Nothing in this list is sent anywhere by itself. There are two exceptions, both voluntary and both described below: at the end of the renovation journey you can pass on what your project cost, and if you are signed in you can save an estimate or an impression to your own account. Each of them happens only when you press the button yourself.
renovationstart:calculator: your last calculator choices (project, size, finish, region).verbouwstart:ruimteplanner: your room planner layouts and unit preferences (the name comes from the shared planner code with our Dutch sister site).verbouwstart:droomhuis:v1: your house design from Design your own house (floor plan, storeys, roof, garden, objects and your own parts), so a reload does not throw it away; "Start over" on the drawing board clears it. The name comes from the shared code with our Dutch sister site.verbouwstart:droomhuis:overdracht (session only): a hand-over slot the drawing board uses to pass a design between its own pages; emptied as soon as it is read.verbouwstart:tekentafel:instellingen and verbouwstart:tekentafel:versies: how you set the drawing board up (what drawing snaps to, whether it aligns and how close, which panels are open, and how often it takes a snapshot), plus those snapshots themselves. Each snapshot is a copy of your design at that moment, at most as many as you set, so you can go back to how it looked half an hour ago; one you pin stays until you remove it. Nothing here goes to a server. The settings screen shows how much room it takes and clears it with "Clear versions" and "Back to defaults".verbouwstart:wereldbol:plek: the place you last chose on the globe (city, country and, in the Netherlands, the municipality), so your next visit opens there. It is a convenience, not a fact about you; before your first choice the globe simply opens in the country of the language you are reading.verbouwstart-bouwjouwhuis-bestanden holds the STL, OBJ or glTF files you load as your own parts, and verbouwstart-productfotos holds a photo you attach to an object or the photo of your existing house (key eigenhuis:foto). Both stay in your browser; the photo of your house is sent once for a description when you press the button, and not kept.renovationstart:gebruik_… (session only): remembers that an anonymous counter already fired this session, so nothing is counted twice.verbouwstart:impressie:v1: your latest AI impression (your photo, the result and the last steps), kept for up to seven days so a reload does not throw away your work; the "Clear and start over" button under the impression removes it. The photo itself is still never stored on a server, whether or not you save the result to your account.renovationstart:extras:v1: your extras log (descriptions, amounts, agreed-in-writing ticks and your contract sum).renovationstart:budget-tracker:v1: your spending tracker (budget and payment lines).renovationstart:first-fix:v1: which first-fix checks you ticked.renovationstart:snagging-checklist: which snagging checks you ticked.renovationstart:koper-scan:v1: your house-viewing comparison (the labels you typed for each house, the jobs you ticked for it and any asking price you added), kept for up to ninety days; removing a house or clearing the comparison deletes it.renovationstart:renovation-record: your renovation record (property address, who did each job, which documents you hold, your notes).renovationstart:journey:v1: your renovation journey (chosen project, budget, region, which steps you completed and what you filled in along the way).renovationstart:journey:corrupt-backup: a safety copy the journey keeps if its own data ever turns out unreadable, so nothing is silently lost.renovationstart:intro-seen: remembers that the opening animation has played, so it only plays once.verbouwstart:eigen-bezoek: a flag the maker uses to exclude his own visits from the counters.To know whether the tools are used at all, we record events like "the calculator showed a result for a loft conversion today" or "the planning check ended on orange today": the tool, a project type or outcome colour, and the day. Never an amount, never a postcode, never anything you typed, no cookie and no identifier. If you tap the optional thumbs up or down under an AI impression, I count that the same way: the verdict, the style, the room and the day, nothing else. The embeddable widget counts the same way, plus the partner name and the website it is embedded on; nothing about the visitor.
A feature that does send something: your room photo goes to the image model over an encrypted connection, is processed in memory and is not stored by us. A moderation step rejects photos with people. Daily limits protect the free service; they work with a salted, truncated hash of your IP address that changes every day and cannot be reversed.
On the buying-a-house page you can type a postcode and house number to fetch the construction age band and floor area from the official EPC register. That input identifies a building, not a person; it passes through our server to the register for that one lookup, is not logged and is not stored. The result stays on your screen, and is only kept if you save the house to your comparison yourself, on your own device.
The second one is the last step of the renovation journey, and it only happens if you press the share button there. It sends the project type, the region you picked, the final figure you type in and the date, plus, if you gave them, our estimate for the same project, the type of house and the score out of five for how the project went. It does not send your postcode, your name, your address, your email or the name of whoever did the work; I do not ask who did the work. The entry carries no account, no cookie and no identifier, so it cannot be traced back to you. Your browser may write one entry and may never read the collection back; the entries are ours to read, and none of them point to a person. Skipping the step changes nothing else about the journey, and the step itself lists what travels before you press anything.
Signing in is optional and changes nothing about how the tools work. It adds one thing: a save button under a calculator result and under a finished AI impression. Press it and that single item goes to your own account, and only then.
The site is served by Google Firebase Hosting. Like any host, the infrastructure keeps short-lived technical logs (such as IP addresses) to run and secure the service; I do not use them to identify visitors.
Questions? Email info@verbouwstart.nl (English is fine). This page describes the site as it works today, last updated 14 August 2026; if the way something works changes, this page changes with it. How the cost figures are built is a separate honest story: how we price.
No. The site sets no cookies at all, which is also why there is no cookie banner. Everything the tools remember lives in your own browser storage, listed on this page, and clearing your browser data removes it completely. If you sign in to the optional account, Firebase keeps your session in browser storage too, not in a cookie.
No. The calculator, quote check, planning check, budget planner and room planners run entirely in your browser. Amounts, postcodes, layouts and answers are never sent to a server on their own. Two things are voluntary exceptions, and both need a button press from you. The last step of the renovation journey lets you pass on what your project actually cost; it goes without your postcode, your name and your email. And if you are signed in, the save button under a calculator result or an AI impression keeps that one item in your own account. The sections on this page say exactly what each of them contains.
It travels encrypted, is read once by the AI model to produce your report, and is discarded. It is not stored, not linked to you and never used for training. To give one free check per month fairly, I keep a salted monthly hash of your IP address with a counter; it cannot be traced back to you and resets every month.
Your email address and password (the password encrypted by Firebase Authentication), your Renovation Pack credit (a counter plus the payment session ids that booked it) and anything you saved yourself with a save button: the estimates and the impressions listed on your account page. Payment itself runs through Stripe; we never see your card details. The email address is used for signing in and password recovery, nothing else. You can delete each saved item, and the account itself, on the account page; that removes it permanently.
Your photo travels over an encrypted connection to the image model, is processed in memory and is not stored by me. The result comes back to your browser. If you are signed in and press save under the result, that result image is stored in your own account until you delete it; your original photo is never stored, saved or not. To enforce a fair daily limit I keep a salted, truncated hash of your IP address that changes every day; it cannot be traced back to you and is meaningless the next day.