Privacy Policy

Last updated October 13, 2026

Pulse is a nightlife app that shows live wait times and lets you share ephemeral moments from the venues you're at. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have. We've tried to keep it plain.

Information you give us

• Account: your email address (from email, Apple, or Google sign-in), a display name, and a unique @handle. Optionally, a profile photo and a US phone number.
• Phone number — optional. We don't ask for one when you sign up. You can add one in Edit profile, and it is only saved once you confirm it with a code we text you. It is never shown to other users. Friends can find you by your number only if you turn on "Find me by phone number" in Settings (it's off by default). You can remove your number at any time in Edit profile.
• Content you post: photos and captions you share at a venue, the comments you leave on posts, and the wait-time reports you submit. Posts are ephemeral — 24 hours after you post, a post leaves every feed, map count, and venue ranking. Two narrow exceptions keep a copy visible after that, and nothing else does; both are described under How long we keep things below.
• Your connections: the friend requests, friendships, and blocks you create, and the people and venues you choose to follow.

Information collected as you use Pulse

• Location — when you act, and (only if you opt in) around one venue. When you post, report a wait, start an "I'm in line" timer, or tap "Still in line", the app sends a single GPS reading to confirm you're actually at that venue. That check happens only while the app is open and only when you take one of those actions; apart from the opt-in below, nothing tracks you in the background. If you've allowed location, Explore and your feed also send it while you're using them, so venues sort by distance and nearby posts show up; that reading is used to answer the request and is not saved to your account.
• "Share when you leave" — optional, and off unless you turn it on. If you enable it, Pulse asks for background ("Always") location access and watches a single circle around the one venue you posted at, so your friends can see when you've headed out. It reports only that you left — never where you went. The watch ends when your post does, and you can turn it off at any time in Settings or by revoking the permission in iOS. Declining is a normal choice and the rest of Pulse works exactly the same. Pulse does not follow you between venues and does not build a history of where you go.
• "I'm in line" timers. When you tap "I'm in line" at a venue, Pulse starts a timer to measure the real wait. For each timer we store the venue, your account, the night, when you joined, when you last confirmed you were still in line, the wait Pulse was showing when you joined (so we can check our estimates), and when and how the timer ended: you tapped "I'm in" or "Left", you posted or reported a wait, you left the venue (only if you posted there with "Share when you leave" on), it timed out after 90 minutes, or you started a timer somewhere else. Other people see only counts on the venue's wait, such as "2 timed waits · 1 in line" — never who.
• A notification token, if you allow notifications. When you turn on push notifications, your device gives us a token we store so we can deliver them. It identifies the device, not you personally, and it stops being used the moment you turn notifications off in iOS or sign out.
• How the app gets used. We record the things you do that make the service work — posting, reporting a wait, marking yourself as going to a venue, and following a venue — and once a night we roll them into per-venue totals: how many posts, how many wait reports, how many people said they were going, how many different people were there, how many people started following the venue and how many follow it in all, and which hour was busiest. We use those totals to see which venues Pulse is actually working at and where to go next, and we share a venue's own totals with that venue — never another venue's, and never anything about an individual. We only show a total when at least five different people are behind it; below that we show nothing rather than a small number. The nightly rollup holds counts for a venue and a date; it is not a record of where any individual person went. We also keep simple nightly counts for each venue: how many times its card or map pin was shown, how many times its page was opened, and how many times its Reserve, Directions, menu/website and Share buttons were tapped, plus how many times a Pulse link to it was opened. Separately, we keep totals by campaign link (for example, our TikTok profile): how many times our web pages were visited and their App Store buttons tapped, and which campaign link brought the visit. These counts are sent without your account attached, are stored only as totals for a venue and a night, and never record who tapped what. We use them internally to understand how people find venues on Pulse.
• Diagnostics and performance: diagnostic and performance data (device model, OS version, error details, and how the app is behaving) is sent to our error-monitoring provider so we can find and fix crashes and slowdowns. It is not linked to your account.

How we use this

• To run the core features: show live wait times, deliver your posts to the right people, and power friends and discovery.
• To keep Pulse safe: enforce our Content Policy, review reports, and act on violations.
• To understand and improve the service, using the per-venue nightly totals described above — which neighbourhoods and venues Pulse works at, and where it is worth expanding.
• To show a venue how its own nights are going. A venue sees the totals for itself and no one else, and only where at least five different people are behind a number.
• To send you transactional email (verifying your address, resetting your password). We don't send marketing email.

What's visible to others

• Public posts are visible to people using Pulse. Friends-only posts are visible only to your accepted friends; their images are served through an access check and are never given a public link.
• A friend may see that you're "at" a venue tonight only if you've made a public post there and have the "show me in friends tonight" setting on. Presence checks for posting or reporting never reveal your location to anyone.
• If you mark yourself as going to a venue tonight, that shows to your accepted friends on that venue — it is how they see who is heading where. It is visible to friends only, never publicly, and it clears with the night.
• We do not sell your personal information.

Service providers

We use a small set of providers to run Pulse, each handling only what their function needs: Cloudflare (hosting, image storage), Neon (database), Resend (transactional email), Sentry (crash reporting), Apple and Google (sign-in), Expo (delivering push notifications to your device), Twilio (texting a confirmation code when you add a phone number), and Sightengine (automated image review) — every photo you post is sent to Sightengine to be checked against our Content Policy before it goes live. Sightengine processes the image to return a classification; it does not receive your name, handle, email, or location.

How long we keep things

• Posts: at 24 hours a post leaves every feed, map count, and venue ranking. After that it remains visible in only two places. You can see your own expired posts in the Archive tab on your You screen, and only you can: we keep them there until you delete them or your account. And if your account is on our public-creator roster, your public posts stay on your own profile for 7 days from posting — never your friends-only ones, and never back in a feed, a map count, or a venue ranking. When you delete a post, its database row and stored photo are deleted within a day; deleting your account deletes all of your posts.
• Account data: kept until you delete your account.
• Wait-time history: retained in aggregate to power the service; when you delete your account, your reports are disassociated from you (anonymized), not kept linked to your identity.
• Your most recent wait report: we keep the location, venue, and time of your latest wait report so we can check that reports are genuine. It is erased when you delete your account.
• "I'm in line" timers: each one is deleted 30 days after you joined the line. Deleting your account deletes all of yours; unlike wait reports, they are not kept in anonymized form.

Your choices

• Delete your account any time, from inside the app (Settings → Delete account). This removes your profile, posts, connections, and the media you've uploaded, and signs you out immediately.
• Control your default post audience, whether you appear in "friends tonight," and whether you're discoverable by handle or phone — all in Settings.
• Report or block other users at any time.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit. Access to friends-only media is checked on every request. We stamp the time of every wait report on our servers rather than trusting device clocks, so a stale time can't be presented as current.

Age

Pulse is intended for adults in nightlife settings and is not directed to children. You must meet the minimum age required in your location to use it.

Changes

We'll update this policy as Pulse evolves and revise the date above. Material changes will be surfaced in the app.