Privacy Policy

Fabrication AI is operated by Aaron Kettl ("we," "us" or "our"), at 11320 Alhambra Dr, Austin, TX 78759. Contact us about privacy at privacy@fabrication.ai.

This policy describes how we handle information through fabrication.ai, our manufacturer and supplier directory, enabled account and workspace features, the Fabrication AI connection in ChatGPT, and the industry research and reports we prepare from published company information. It also covers support and other communications with us. The information involved depends on the features you use.

This policy does not govern OpenAI, manufacturers, suppliers or other services you visit through our links. Those services handle information under their own policies. If you use Fabrication AI for an organization, its workspace owners control membership and the information they choose to share. A separate agreement with that organization may also govern our handling of its information.

We receive information in the following ways:

• From you: contact details, support messages, feedback and, if you create an account, your name, email address, sign-in information, profile preferences and organization or workspace membership.
• Through enabled features: questions, conversations, attachments, project documents, saved selections, supplier listing information, quote requests and messages you choose to submit. These can contain personal or business information. The service also records relevant activity, permissions, revisions and AI usage, including the model used, usage counts and cost information.
• From your browser and connection: IP address, request time, requested address, browser or device information, sign-in and guest identifiers, errors and security events. This includes the approximate country and, for some countries, the region that our hosting provider derives from your IP address, and technical signals from your browser that our bot-protection service evaluates to distinguish a person from an automated program. Hosting and security services process this information to deliver requests and protect the service, as described in How we protect the directory and the companies in it.
• From public and contributed sources: manufacturer and supplier names, business descriptions, business contact information, locations, capabilities, photographs and source references, and company facts such as ownership, company size, founding year, industries served, certifications and U.S. small business statuses. Information may come from company websites, public government and certification records (such as SAM.gov and certification bodies' registries), published articles and announcements about a company, company representatives and authorized contributors.
• From service providers: sign-in results, email delivery or suppression reports, and website traffic and performance measurements, as described below.

We use information to provide the features you request; maintain accounts, conversations and workspaces; search and display supplier information; prepare research and industry reports about manufacturers and suppliers, as described below; respond to support and privacy requests; send account and service messages; administer communication preferences; understand use of public pages; diagnose errors; determine where the public service is available; detect and block automated, bulk or excessive collection of directory information; prevent abuse; maintain security and records of service activity; and meet applicable legal obligations, including U.S. sanctions and export control laws.

Where enabled, we send tips and product news using the email preference associated with your account. You can turn these messages off in your profile settings or through an unsubscribe link in the message. This does not stop account, security or other service messages needed for an action you take.

Fabrication AI is built for the U.S. manufacturing community. The companies in our directory, many of them small U.S. manufacturers, trust us to present their capabilities to the engineers and businesses that buy from them, and not to become a convenient source for copying the U.S. industrial base in bulk. The safeguards below are designed to keep the directory useful to the people it serves and to make bulk harvesting of company information harder. Each one relies on limited technical information, and we do not use them to build a profile of what you browse. Measurement of visits to public pages is separate and is described in Cookies and website measurement.

• Regional availability. When a visitor who is not signed in requests a page, our hosting provider derives an approximate country and, for some countries, a region from the request's IP address. If that location is in a country or region where we do not offer the public service, including those subject to comprehensive U.S. sanctions, the service is designed to show the visitor a notice that the service is unavailable instead of the page requested. We use this location only to answer that request. Our application does not save it to our database or associate it with an account. Location derived from an IP address is approximate and can be wrong; if you believe you were shown the notice in error, contact hello@fabrication.ai.
• Signed-in access. A person signed in to a Fabrication AI account keeps access when traveling or working outside the United States, subject to our Terms of Service and applicable law. We recognize a signed-in browser by its existing sign-in cookie; the regional check does not request or record additional information to do so.
• Bot protection. We use Vercel BotID, which is designed to check requests for directory data, and steps that send email or use AI on a visitor's behalf, without asking you to solve a puzzle. Its check runs invisibly in your browser and evaluates technical signals from the browser and device to determine whether a request comes from a person or an automated program. Vercel processes these signals as our service provider, and our application receives only the result of the check.
• Rate limits. Our hosting provider's firewall counts requests from each IP address to directory data and to the Fabrication AI connection in ChatGPT over short periods, and is designed to pause an address that sends more than a person reading the directory would. These counters are kept by the hosting provider for the short periods they measure; we do not associate them with an account.
• Sign-in for full lists. A visitor who is not signed in can browse the first results of each directory, parts and guides list, and can read every public company profile, part and guide. Viewing a complete list requires a free account. The limit is applied from the position in the list that a request asks for; it does not require us to keep a history of the pages you viewed. Company profiles remain public and available to search engines so that U.S. manufacturers can be found.

We prepare research and industry reports about manufacturing markets, such as which companies offer a capability, where they operate, the industries they serve and how a market changes over time. We may share, license or sell these reports to investors, analysts and other businesses.

Reports are built only from published company information: the researched company profiles in our directory, the listings companies publish on Fabrication AI, our catalogue of manufacturing services, and public sources we cite, such as government and certification records and published articles. They are not built from your account details, email address or sign-in information, your questions or conversations with our AI features, attachments, project documents, saved selections, unpublished listing drafts, quote requests, messages or files, workspace content, or website analytics. We do not sell account, conversation, project, quote or workspace information.

Reports describe companies, not the people who use our service. A report can name a company and repeat information it has published, such as its capabilities, cities, certifications, ownership, size and founding year. It does not include the names, email addresses or account details of people who use Fabrication AI. A person's name can appear only where a company published it about itself, such as a founder named in its own company description.

Small business statuses, such as woman-owned or veteran-owned, describe a business as the company states them on its listing or as a public government record shows them. We do not ask individuals for their personal characteristics, and we do not guess a status from a name, a photograph or other information.

Reports are drafted with help from an AI model through Vercel AI Gateway, currently a Google model, and a web search service reached through the gateway that finds published industry sources. The model receives the published company information described above and the sources the search returns. It does not receive account or workspace information. A person on our team reviews each report before it is published.

Reports do not use activity on our service, such as searches or quote requests. If we later decide to report on that activity, we will update this policy first, and we will use it only in aggregated, de-identified form that combines enough activity that it cannot reasonably be linked to a person, a workspace or a particular company.

A company can ask us to correct or remove its information by emailing privacy@fabrication.ai. A correction applies to our directory and to later reports. It does not change a report already delivered to its recipient.

The public ChatGPT connection searches published manufacturer and supplier listings and reads public profiles. It receives the tool inputs ChatGPT sends, such as a company or service query, capability or company-type filters, a U.S. state, a result limit, a pagination reference or a public supplier reference. It returns published listing information, locations, source links and details that remain unknown. Your query can contain personal information if you put it there.

The connection does not require a Fabrication AI account or receive your Fabrication AI sign-in credentials. It cannot access private workspaces, drawings, account records or quote requests, contact suppliers, or change records. It does not create a Fabrication AI conversation history or call an AI model to answer the tool request. Our hosting and security services still process request information and network-address counters to provide the connection and enforce usage limits.

OpenAI controls the ChatGPT conversation, which tool inputs it sends and how it handles the returned information under its own terms, settings and privacy policy. A request to Fabrication AI does not delete your ChatGPT conversation; use OpenAI's controls for that information.

Website AI features are separate from the public ChatGPT connection. When you use an enabled AI feature, we send the information needed for that request, which can include your question, relevant conversation context, the page you are asking about, retrieved records and files you attach, through Vercel AI Gateway to the model provider used for the feature. Providers can include Google, OpenAI and Anthropic, depending on the feature and available model. Usage attribution can include an account or workspace reference.

The website can save your question, answer, source references and related tool activity so you can return to a conversation. For chat attachments, the conversation record keeps the file name and type rather than a reusable copy of the attachment's contents. Files saved through project or quote features have separate storage and sharing, described below.

Guest chat uses a browser cookie and a stored token hash to let you return to the conversation and apply usage limits. If you sign up or sign in from that browser, the guest conversation can move into your account. Clearing the cookie removes that browser's means of returning to the guest conversation; it does not immediately erase server or provider records.

The model provider also processes the request under the terms and retention settings applicable to that service, which can differ between providers and features. Contact privacy@fabrication.ai with questions about a particular feature before submitting information that requires special handling.

Information is disclosed in the following circumstances:

• To provide the service: Vercel provides hosting, security (including its firewall, rate limiting and BotID bot protection), file storage and AI request routing; Neon provides database and sign-in services; Resend delivers application email; Google Workspace handles our correspondence; and Google Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights measure eligible public pages. Model providers receive the information needed for enabled AI requests. The information a provider receives depends on the service it supplies.
• At your direction: workspace content is available to people with the relevant access. Publishing a company listing makes its published information public. Sending a quote request shares the selected request, messages and files with the receiving company and authorized participants. The ChatGPT connection itself cannot take those sharing actions.
• In industry reports: we may share, license or sell reports to investors, analysts and other businesses. Reports contain published company information, as described in Industry research and reports, and not account, conversation, project, quote or workspace information.
• For legal and security purposes: when necessary to comply with applicable law or a valid legal process, address fraud or security threats, enforce applicable agreements, or protect rights and safety.
• For a business transaction: if the service or its assets are involved in a merger, financing, acquisition or transfer, information may be disclosed as part of that process, subject to applicable confidentiality and legal requirements.

We use cookies or browser storage for sign-in, guest chat, appearance preferences, saved browser selections, chat-panel preferences and your analytics choice. The sign-in cookie also tells our regional availability check that a browser is signed in. Our bot-protection service runs a script in the browser and may use browser storage to complete its check; it is a security function, not analytics, so the analytics controls below do not turn it off. These functions are distinct from optional website measurement. Clearing browser storage can sign you out or remove preferences and information saved only in that browser.

Google Analytics measures visits and interactions on selected public pages, including browsing, searches, scrolling and outbound links. Our integration removes the site's search text and project reference parameters from the page addresses it supplies and removes URL fragments. It disables Google signals and advertising personalization. Account pages, private workspaces and the internal operating system are outside the public analytics page list.

Google Analytics stays off until you choose Allow when your connection is reported as being in the European Union, the rest of the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland or another supported consent region, or when we cannot determine the region. On other eligible public pages it can run unless you turn it off. We use the hosting provider's approximate country information to decide whether to ask, and to apply the regional availability described in How we protect the directory and the companies in it; neither feature saves that country in our application database.

Vercel Speed Insights measures the loading and responsiveness of eligible public pages without setting cookies. Its reports omit URL query strings and fragments. It can run without the Google Analytics consent question, but turning analytics off or sending Global Privacy Control stops both integrations in that browser.

You can change your choice through Privacy choices in the site navigation or the controls below. Turning analytics off stops these measurement integrations and clears this site's Google Analytics cookies. Where consent is requested, an Allow choice is requested again after 180 days. A choice to turn analytics off remains until changed; if browser storage is unavailable, it lasts only for the current page. These controls do not prevent the processing of requests needed to serve and secure the website.

Retention depends on the record and why it is needed. Account and workspace records support continuing service, collaboration and activity history. Supplier records remain useful while the listing is maintained. A report is kept as it was written, so that it can be checked later; corrections apply to later reports. Support messages support the request and its follow-up. Security, delivery and usage records support troubleshooting, abuse prevention and recordkeeping; rate-limit counters last only for the short period they measure. Legal obligations, unresolved disputes, shared workspace records and backup recovery can require information to remain after you stop using a feature.

The guest-chat cookie lasts seven days after the last question. When it starts a new guest chat, the application removes guest-chat records that have been inactive for more than seven days. Cookie expiration is not a guarantee that every server record or backup is erased at exactly seven days. A guest conversation moved into an account becomes part of that account's conversation history.

You can delete your own saved conversations using the available account controls. Account deletion ends memberships and removes or replaces identifying profile fields, but it does not automatically erase shared workspace content, historical activity, delivery records, separate file copies or provider backups. If you are the last owner of an active workspace, transfer ownership or delete the workspace before deleting your account. For a request that the controls do not address, email privacy@fabrication.ai.

Our service and provider records do not all have one retention period. Deletion of an active record does not necessarily remove backup copies immediately or remove information a recipient has already received. We assess requests in light of the record's purpose, applicable law and any continuing need to retain it.

The service uses access checks, workspace permissions and other technical controls to limit who can read or change records. Uploaded quote files use private storage and time-limited access links. Public listings and their source links are intended to be visible publicly, and the regional availability, bot protection, rate limits and sign-in for full lists described above are designed to limit how readily they can be collected in bulk. These measures reduce risk but cannot prevent every determined attempt to circumvent them, and no system or transmission method is completely secure.

Our providers may process information in countries other than the country where you live, and applicable protections can differ. Processing is not represented as restricted to a single country. Where applicable law requires safeguards for an international transfer, the transfer must comply with those requirements.

You can update available profile and email preferences, use the conversation and account deletion controls, change your analytics choice and stop submitting information. For access, correction, deletion, a copy of your personal information, an objection or another privacy request, email privacy@fabrication.ai or write to Aaron Kettl at 11320 Alhambra Dr, Austin, TX 78759.

Depending on where you live and the law that applies, you may have rights to access, correct, delete or obtain personal information; restrict or object to processing; withdraw consent; or opt out of certain sales, sharing, targeted advertising or profiling. These rights are subject to applicable conditions and exceptions. We may need to verify your identity and authority, including an authorized agent's authority, before responding. We respond within the time required by applicable law and do not unlawfully discriminate for exercising a privacy right.

If we decline a request, you can ask for a review by replying to the response or emailing privacy@fabrication.ai with the subject Privacy appeal. Explain the decision you want reviewed. Where applicable, you can also complain to your privacy regulator, including the Texas Attorney General for a matter within its authority.

If information belongs to an organization's workspace, we may need to refer the request to that organization or coordinate with it. A correction or removal from our directory does not remove information from the original company website, a third-party service, a report already delivered or copies already received by others.

Fabrication AI is intended for adults using manufacturing and business services. It is not directed to children under 18. If you believe a child has provided personal information through the service, contact privacy@fabrication.ai so we can assess the information and take the steps required by applicable law.

We may update this policy as the service or our practices change. The date above identifies the latest version. Where applicable law requires additional notice or consent for a change, we provide that notice or obtain that consent.

For privacy requests or questions about this policy, email privacy@fabrication.ai. For general support, email hello@fabrication.ai. You can also write to Aaron Kettl, Fabrication AI, 11320 Alhambra Dr, Austin, TX 78759.