Privacy

Last updated October 7, 2026

GovInbox is operated by Artifex Innovations LLC (Washington, USA). In this page, "GovInbox", "we" and "us" mean Artifex Innovations LLC, the operator of getgovinbox.com.

GovInbox is a subscription that watches public federal contract notices and answers when you, or an AI assistant acting for you, ask which ones match your filters. It collects as little about you as it can while still doing that job. This page says exactly what that is.

What is collected

• Billing details, collected and stored by Stripe when you subscribe: your name, email address and payment method. GovInbox receives your email address and a Stripe customer reference. It does not see or store card numbers.
• Your email address, when you sign up for an account or contact support.
• Account records: your subscription status, plan, and the Stripe customer reference tied to your access token.
• Watchlist filters: the set-aside programs, NAICS codes, keywords and states you ask it to watch, and the names you give your watchlists.
• Bookmarks: the individual notices you pin, and any names or notes you attach to them.
• Search inputs you or your assistant send (keywords, NAICS codes, company names, UEI or CAGE codes, and optional revenue or headcount figures used for size-standard checks). These are processed to answer the request and are not stored in your account.
• Usage records: for each request made with your access token, the token's identifier, the endpoint path called, and the time. Query strings are not written to these logs. These exist to enforce the daily request limit and to spot abuse.
• Support correspondence: emails you send to support.

Your access token itself is stored only as a one-way hash. It is shown to you once, cannot be recovered by anyone, and is replaced rather than retrieved if lost.

What is not collected

• No SAM.gov credentials. The service uses its own.
• No tracking cookies, advertising identifiers or cross-site tracking on this site. Cloudflare Web Analytics counts page visits in aggregate; Cloudflare states it uses no cookies, no local storage and no visitor fingerprinting for analytics. Since nothing is stored on your device, we show no consent banner for it.
• No proposal or bid uploads. GovInbox does not ask for them.

How it is used

To run the service, bill the subscription, enforce request limits and prevent abuse. Your information is not sold, rented or shared for marketing. It is shared only with the providers needed to operate:

• Stripe, for billing.
• Oracle Cloud, which hosts the GovInbox API.
• Cloudflare, which serves this website.
• The AI-assistant provider you choose. When you use GovInbox through Meta Muse, Meta Platforms, Inc. processes your requests and the results returned to Muse under its own terms and privacy policy. See "Using GovInbox through an AI assistant" below.

Using GovInbox through an AI assistant

You can use GovInbox from an AI assistant such as Meta Muse, Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor by giving that assistant your access token. When you do, the assistant's provider stores your token, sends your questions to GovInbox from its own systems, receives the results, and handles both under its own privacy policy, not ours.

We receive from the assistant only what it sends: your token, the request parameters, and the requesting system's network address. We do not send anything to the assistant's provider on our own. Anything a connected assistant does with your token counts as done by you, including creating or deleting watchlists and bookmarks.

Using GovInbox through ChatGPT (plugin)

The GovInbox ChatGPT plugin gives your AI assistant a research toolset for federal contract records: open notices and opportunities, grants, agency feeds, award history, subawards, notice checklists, notice record briefs with version compare, protest-risk checks, recompete tracking, teaming-partner research, FAR clause lookup, and a watchlist with deadline reminders. It is not affiliated with the U.S. government, GSA, or SAM.gov. It does not ask for your SAM.gov credentials and does not write proposals.

Anonymous use. You can use the plugin without signing in, up to 3 uses per UTC day and 10 per UTC calendar month, with both limits applying. To enforce that limit, ChatGPT sends an anonymized user identifier with each request. We store only a salted one-way hash (SHA-256) of that identifier plus the daily and monthly counters, and use it only to enforce the quota. The salt is rotated monthly. Day counters are kept 7 days, month counters 40 days, then deleted. We do not see your ChatGPT account identity. We do not call this "anonymous" in our systems; it is a pseudonymous hash.

No identifier provided. If ChatGPT does not send an identifier, we process the requesting IP address to enforce a stricter shared quota. The IP address is hashed with the same salted SHA-256 and is not stored in raw form. It is used only for quota enforcement.

Signed-in use. A free GovInbox sign-in raises the limit to 20 uses per UTC calendar month, with no separate daily limit. The same account records described above apply; plugin usage counters are kept on your account.

Search filters. When you open a notice record brief, you may supply search filters. These are processed to answer the request. We store only a SHA-256 hash of the canonical filters inside the answer receipt. We do not store raw filter values beyond the request.

Receipts. Every notice brief returns a receipt (a random identifier, the inputs hash, the methodology version, and the time). Signed-in receipts live on your account. Anonymous receipts are opaque, expire at the time shown in expires_at, and are bound to the anonymized identifier so one person's receipt cannot be replayed by another.

What counts as a use. One accepted search counts as one use, regardless of how many records are returned. Follow-up calls (opening records, comparing versions, listing awards or subawards) within 30 minutes after a search do not count extra, up to 30 follow-ups per search. Empty results consume the search. A lookup for a record that does not exist is not charged. Invalid tool arguments and execution errors never count. Each retry of a search counts as a new search, as does each call for another page of search results. Chat messages, server initialization, and tool discovery do not count. Requests rejected for invalid authentication or an exhausted quota, and requests that never reach the server, do not count. Daily limits reset at 00:00 UTC each day; monthly limits reset at 00:00 UTC on the first day of each month. Unused searches do not carry over. Without a connected account, a hashed subject identifier or shared IP bucket enforces the limits, so callers in the same bucket may share the allowance.

Logs. Security logs record the requesting system's network address and timestamps for abuse prevention. Query contents are not written to logs.

Retention (plugin). Daily counters are deleted within 7 days of the day they count; monthly counters within 40 days of the month they count. Anonymous receipts are deleted within 7 days after expiry. Signed-in receipts are deleted when you delete them, or after 12 months of account inactivity. Backups are overwritten within 30 days.

Your controls. Signed-in users can view and delete their receipts and counters by emailing [email protected]. Anonymous receipts expire on their own; because we hold only a hash of the anonymized identifier, an anonymous deletion request must include the receipt identifier. Deletion requests are completed within 30 days.

Subprocessors for the plugin. Oracle Cloud (hosting) and Cloudflare (this website). OpenAI processes your plugin requests under its own terms and privacy policy when you use GovInbox through ChatGPT.

Where the opportunity data comes from

Opportunity notices come from the public SAM.gov Contract Opportunities API published by the U.S. General Services Administration, refreshed every 4 hours. GovInbox also reads other public U.S. government data: the SAM.gov exclusions list, federal protest status (whether the notice you're chasing is frozen by a protest), USASpending award records, Simpler.Grants.gov grant postings, and DOGE-reported terminated contracts and cancelled grants. All of it is public government information; none of it contains information about you unless you appear in it as a public record.

People named in notices

Federal notices published by GSA include the name, government email address and phone number of the contracting officer or point of contact, and the SAM.gov exclusions list names individuals as well as companies. GovInbox passes those details through as published, does not add to them, does not use them for marketing, and does not share them beyond returning them to you or your AI assistant. If you are a government employee and want your contact details suppressed in our copy, email us and we will remove them from our output; the source record at SAM.gov is controlled by GSA.

Retention and deletion

Deletion removes your records from our live systems within 30 days. Backups are not live systems: encrypted backup copies may persist until those backups age out, and we access them only to recover the service.

• Watchlists, bookmarks and their names: deleted 30 days after your subscription ends or 30 days after your last activity on the free tier.
• Usage records: deleted on a rolling 90-day basis.
• Your email address and Stripe customer reference: deleted from GovInbox 30 days after your subscription ends. Stripe keeps its own billing records for as long as tax law requires.
• Token hashes: deleted when the token is revoked.
• Backups: overwritten within 30 days.
• Stripe subscription-event records (created, renewed, cancelled): kept 12 months to resolve billing disputes. They contain your Stripe customer reference and subscription status, not card details.
• Support messages: kept 12 months after the issue is resolved.

Two things survive deletion: (a) billing records we are legally required to keep, and (b) de-identified aggregate statistics already created from usage data, including aggregates already shared with research partners. We strip direct identifiers before creating aggregates, require our partners by contract not to attempt re-identification, and cannot practicably retract aggregates once shared.

Revoking a token stops access immediately; it is not the same as deleting your data, which follows the timelines above. Deletion requests are completed within 30 days and confirmed by email. If your account is suspended or under investigation for a suspected violation of these Terms, we may delay deletion until the matter is resolved and retain the records relevant to it.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes with it, and subscribers are told by email before the change takes effect.

Contact

Questions or deletion requests: [email protected]. Company contact: [email protected].