Six decisions we made. Why we made them. What they mean for you.
Building this app meant making choices at every step — what to store, what to delete, what to ship and what to leave out. Every one of those calls came down to the same question: what do our customers actually deserve?
Almost everything in RentalGuards — your scan history, ledgers, property records — lives on your device. Not on our servers. Not in the cloud. On your phone.
Your records belong with you. We built RentalGuards local-first — the architecture puts your data on your device, where you control it. Your records aren't on our servers, aren't in our backups, aren't sitting in our cloud. They're on your phone, where they should be.
Your scan history, ledgers, property records, and tenants' documents stay on your phone — nobody at RentalGuards can see any of that. A breach of our servers can't expose them; they were never there. What we do hold on our end is account credentials, credit balance, and minimal scan log entries — timestamp, document type, whether the scan passed or flagged, credits deducted. Never the document. Never the results.
Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, driver's license numbers, phone numbers, dates of birth, and any face on a photo ID — these get identified and blacked out on your phone before any document is uploaded. Not on our server. On your device, before it goes anywhere.
Most services receive the full document and promise not to look at the sensitive fields. You shouldn't have to take that promise. The sensitive parts of your tenants' documents are blacked out on your phone before any document uploads — there's nothing for us to promise because there's nothing for us to see.
You also get a downloadable record per scan showing exactly which fields were redacted — the type, the count, and a masked preview. Your own proof, in your hands, if you ever need it.
You can upload a tenant's pay stub, ID, or employment letter knowing the most sensitive parts never left your device. Not a promise — a technical fact.
Every document you upload for a scan is deleted from our server the moment your results come back. No retention. No archive. No "we keep it to improve the product."
You don't have to trust us to be careful with your tenants' documents. There's nothing for us to be careful with. The moment your scan finishes, the document is deleted from our server.
Our fraud detection stays sharp a different way — we built our own test datasets from the ground up, researching how fraud actually gets committed and what the latest document fraud trends look like. No customer data needed.
The moment you see your results, the document is gone. There's nothing left to breach, subpoena, or misuse.
When you upload a tenant's document, the security around it is designed and documented to SOC 2 standards — the same framework large enterprise software is held to. Tenants' documents deserve that level of protection. We're a small beta product, but the controls are there now — not after the next round of customers, not after an investor asks.
The security isn't theoretical. It's been built to a documented standard and verified end-to-end, including the actual document uploads. When formal certification becomes relevant, the controls are already there.
If you use a screen reader, the app announces itself properly. If your hands aren't always steady, touch targets are sized for real use. If you're running a scan at 11 PM after a long day with the lights dim, the layout is built to be readable then too.
Five rounds of accessibility audits. Real device testing — TalkBack on Android hardware, VoiceOver on iOS. WCAG 2.1 AA confirmed throughout. The credentials matter — the test that matters more is whether the app works for the actual person in front of it.
The app works with assistive technology. Touch targets are large enough to use comfortably. Whether you use accessibility features or not, the app was built with care for the full range of people who'll actually use it.
Credits never expire. No subscription. No automatic charges. Pack sizes that map to real scan counts. And if you buy more than you need, we'll refund the unused ones — anytime, right up until state unclaimed property laws make us hand them over to the state (years out for most people, and even then you can recover it from the state directly). We cover all transaction fees. You get back exactly what you paid.
Your credits are yours until you use them. You shouldn't have to remember to spend something you already paid for.
You pay for what you use. Buy when it makes sense, use when you need to. If life changes and you don't need the credits anymore, ask for them back.
"I'm proud of every one of these decisions because they were right for our customers."