Your holds stay in your browser.

When you put something on hold, HoldUp saves it in this browser's local storage, on this device only. There is no account, so there's nowhere else for it to go. A hold on your phone won't show up on your laptop.

The countdown, the hours-of-work line and the Skip or Buy decision are all worked out in your browser. Skipping adds the price to your not-spent total, which is also kept in this browser.

When you share a hold, the link holds four things: the item name, the price, your reason and when the cooldown ends. Your hourly pay and the shop link are left out.

Those four things sit in the part of the link after the #. Browsers keep that part to themselves and never send it to a server, so HoldUp's servers never receive it. The app you use to send the link, like Messages or WhatsApp, does carry the whole link, and anyone you forward it to can open it.

When your partner opens the link, the page reads the hold once, keeps it in memory, and clears it from the address bar before any analytics run. It shows the hold as plain text with a note that it was shared by someone using HoldUp and isn't verified.

Early access is free. If you sign up, your browser turns the email address you type into a one-way code and sends only that code, so each signup is counted once. The address itself never leaves your device and isn't stored, so at this stage HoldUp can't email you. Nothing is sold.

Signing up doesn't charge you and doesn't ask for a card. HoldUp will be $19/month per household after launch, and early access is limited to the first 100 households.

HoldUp uses PostHog to count what happens on the site, so we can tell whether it's worth building. Events go through HoldUp's own address to PostHog. These are the events HoldUp sends:

You opened the landing page

Which version of the page you saw.

You made a hold

The cooldown, the price as a number, and yes or no for whether you added hourly pay or a link. Not the values.

You chose Skip or Buy

Which one, the price as a number, and your not-spent total as a number.

The early-access offer came into view

The price it showed and the ad campaign you came from, if any.

You signed up for early access

Where on the site you signed up, the price shown, and a one-way code made from your email. Not your email address.

A partner opened a shared link

That it happened. Nothing about the hold.

You came back on a later day

How many days since your last visit.

Like most analytics, PostHog also receives the page address, your browser and device type, and an approximate location worked out from your IP address. If you arrived from an ad, it receives the ad's campaign tags too.

Here is everything the site keeps in your browser, and why.

Your current hold

Local storage, named holdup:hold. Kept until you start a new hold or clear site data.

Your not-spent total

Local storage, named holdup:not-spent. The total and how many holds you skipped.

Your last visit

Local storage, named last_visit_ts. Tells us whether you came back on a later day.

A random visitor ID

A PostHog cookie and local storage entry, so visits from one browser count once.

Ad click IDs

Only if you arrived from an ad link. Cookies starting with __attr_, kept for 90 days, plus campaign tags kept for this tab only.

HoldUp never asks for a bank login, card number or account details, and doesn't connect to any bank, card or budgeting service. The prices you see are the ones you typed in.

The site is served by Vercel. Like any web host, it keeps basic request logs, such as IP address and the page asked for. The part of a partner link after the # is never part of those requests.

After you decide Skip or Buy, “Put something else on hold” removes that hold. To remove everything, including your not-spent total and the visitor ID, clear this site's data in your browser settings. In a private window, all of it goes when you close the window.

Partner votes, reminders and shared history are being built for early access, and they may need an account. When anything here changes, we'll update this page and the date at the top.