Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

CostiY is operated by CodeRynix Technologies, a sole proprietorship registered in Pakistan (“CostiY”, “we”, “us”). We decide how your personal information is used, and we are responsible for it.

This policy covers:

• the CostiY app, used by shoppers (“customers”) and by the shops that sell through CostiY (“stores”);
• the CostiY Rider app, used by the riders who deliver orders; and
• costiy.com.

2. What we collect

If you shop with CostiY

• Account details: your name, email address, phone number and password. Your password is stored only as a one-way hash, which cannot be turned back into the password.
• Your phone number: one Pakistani mobile number per account. The app asks for it after you sign in, and you can choose Later. You need one to order a delivery, so your rider can call you when they arrive. You can add or change it in Profile. We also keep a one-way hash (a fingerprint) of each number your account has held, to check invites; see How we use it.
• Confirming your number by text message: when CostiY asks you to confirm your number, Google’s Firebase Authentication texts a code to it. Google receives your number to send the code, and may check that the request comes from the real CostiY app. On some Android phones the code is filled in automatically from that one message; CostiY never reads your text messages. Once the code is right, we record that your number is confirmed, and when. If you confirm a number that another CostiY account had added but not confirmed, the number moves to your account.
• Google or Apple sign-in: if you continue with Google or Apple, they send us your name, your email address and an identifier for your account with them. We never see your Google or Apple password.
• Profile picture, if you add one.
• Delivery addresses: the label you give each one, the address, area, city, landmark, delivery instructions and its position on the map.
• Your location: when you tap “Use my current location”, your phone gives the app its precise position. We use it to show stores near you, to work out distances, delivery times and fees, and to name the area you are in. When you choose to share your location with your rider in the chat, the app takes one precise reading and sends it as a message. The app asks for your location only while you are using it, never in the background. If you would rather not share it, choose your area from the list instead.
• Orders: the store, the items, quantities and prices, delivery or collection, the delivery address and instructions, any delivery time slot you chose, any promo code, the payment method and any CostiY Wallet credit used, any note you add, and each step of the order’s progress.
• Your cart is kept on your phone until you place the order, and signing out empties it. If you leave something in it, the app may remind you once, about half an hour later. That reminder is set on your phone and sends nothing to CostiY. When you add a product to your cart, the app tells CostiY which product and store, and it is counted as described under “What the app shows you” below.
• Searches: the words you search for when you submit a search or pick a suggestion, with the area or position you searched from. The live results shown while you type are not saved as searches. If you are browsing without an account, the search is recorded without anything that identifies you.
• What the app shows you, counted without your name: when the app shows you a product or a store (in search results, a category, Top Deals, Nearby Stores, a price comparison or a sponsored place), and when you open a product or a store, tap a sponsored place or add something to your cart, CostiY adds one to that day’s total for that product or store. To count each shopper only once a day, our server turns your account, or, if you are not signed in, your IP address and the kind of app and phone you use, into a code that changes every day and cannot be turned back into you. That code is deleted after two days. Your account and your IP address are never stored with the totals, and the totals name products and stores, never shoppers.
• Saved products and stores.
• Reviews and feedback: your star rating, what you write, any photos you attach, and your thumbs up or down on the delivery.
• Messages with your rider: what you write, the photos you send, and your location when you choose to share it.
• Problems you report with an order: the kind of problem, which items and how many, what you write, and any photos. Some problems need a photo. Reporting a problem opens a conversation with CostiY support.
• Support requests: anything you send to CostiY support.
• Your CostiY Wallet: the credit CostiY gives you (refunds, wallet money returned when an order is cancelled, credit from our staff with the reason they gave, and invite rewards), what you spend it on, and when any of it expires.
• Invites: your invite code; the code you joined with, if any, and so who invited you; the friends who joined with your code; and whether each invite earned a reward, and if not, why not.
• Your notification choice: whether you want offers and promotions.

If you run a store on CostiY

• The account CostiY creates for you: your name, email address and phone number.
• Store details: the store’s name, address and position on the map, opening hours, contact details, category, logo and pictures, and any documents CostiY asks for to verify the business.
• Your catalogue and orders: products, prices and stock, and how you handle each order, such as when you confirm it, decline it or mark it ready. We use how orders are handled to calculate your store’s rating.
• Commission and settlement records, including charges for problems your store caused.
• Sponsored places you book: the product or store, the days, the daily charges taken from your earnings, and how many times shoppers saw and tapped it.

If you ride for CostiY

• The account CostiY creates for you: your name, phone number, email address if you give one, the city you ride in, and your vehicle type, description and registration plate.
• Your joining documents, if CostiY asks for them when you join: a photo of your face, both sides of your CNIC, your driving licence and your bike’s registration card, sent from the Rider app. CostiY keeps the pictures, not your CNIC number. Sending a new picture replaces the old one.
• Your location, while you are online and while you are on a delivery. While you are online and waiting for an order, the Rider app sends your position to CostiY about once a minute, and sooner when you have moved about 100 metres, so that CostiY can offer you orders from stores near you. CostiY keeps only the latest of these positions: each one replaces the last, and no trail of where you have been is kept. On your way to the store and on your way to the customer, the Rider app sends your position each time you move about 15 metres, and uses it to plan your route when you navigate. Sharing carries on while your screen is locked or the app is in the background: on Android a notification shows the whole time, and on an iPhone the blue location indicator shows. The app asks only for permission to use your location while you are using the app, never “Always”. When you go offline, sharing and the notification stop and CostiY does not receive your location; the map on your phone can still show you where you are. Your position when you mark an order delivered is kept with that delivery.
• Your shifts: when you go online and offline, and when the Rider app last checked in with CostiY while you were online.
• Deliveries: the orders you were offered, accepted, declined and delivered, your fares and earnings, and the feedback customers leave about deliveries.
• Calls to customers: each time you tap Call, a record of which delivery and when. The record never includes the customer’s number.
• Messages, including photos you send customers, and support requests.

From everyone who uses our apps

• Sign-in and security records: when you sign in, from which IP address, which app and the type of device, failed sign-in attempts, password reset requests, and a record of important actions on your account.
• A notification token: a code from Google’s Firebase Cloud Messaging (and, on an iPhone, Apple’s push notification service) that lets us send notifications to your phone.
• Server logs: our servers keep technical logs of the requests the apps make. They include your IP address and the address of each request, which can name the area you chose or are browsing in. Your precise position is removed before a request is logged: the logs record that a request carried a location, never where it was. Our hosting provider keeps these logs for a limited time.

On costiy.com

costiy.com uses no cookies, analytics or advertising trackers. Like any website, it is delivered by a hosting company (Vercel), which processes your IP address to send you the pages.

What we do not collect

• Card details. Orders are paid in cash and with CostiY Wallet credit today. When card or mobile wallet payments arrive, card details will go straight to the payment provider, and CostiY will never see or store a full card number.
• Your contacts, text messages, microphone or call history.
• A shopper’s location in the background.
• A rider’s location while they are offline.

3. How we use it

• To run CostiY: showing stores, prices and delivery estimates near you; placing, preparing, delivering and tracking orders; offering each delivery to online riders near the store; letting your rider reach you; collecting payment; and paying stores and riders.
• To keep CostiY fair: calculating store ratings from how orders are handled, showing a saving only when a store’s “was” price is above what it charges, publishing reviews, and looking at the pictures people upload. Profile pictures, review photos and store pictures appear as soon as they are uploaded, and CostiY staff look at them afterwards.
• To suggest searches: the words shoppers searched for most over the last seven days are shown to other shoppers as trending searches, if they match a product or a store on CostiY. They are shown as words only, never with who searched for them.
• To sort out problems: looking into a problem you report, and refunding you as CostiY Wallet credit or a voucher only you can use. If the store was at fault, the amount comes out of its next payment.
• To answer you quickly: when you write to CostiY support in the app, CostiY Assistant, an AI, answers first. To do so it uses what you write, your first name and the details of your orders — the shop, the items, their status and whether a problem can still be reported. It can pass a problem to our team to decide on a refund, but it never refunds, cancels or changes anything itself. A person from CostiY’s team takes over whenever you ask, and whenever the assistant cannot help.
• To run invites: checking whether an invite earns a reward, and paying it. To stop one person rewarding themselves through two accounts, we check whether the two accounts have ever held the same phone number, by comparing the fingerprints of their numbers.
• To tell stores how they are doing: a store’s Insights and its sponsored-place reports are built from anonymous totals. What a store can see is set out in Who can see it.
• To show sponsored places: stores can pay to have a product or the store shown first in search results, categories or Nearby Stores, always labelled “Sponsored”. Which sponsored place you see depends on what you searched for or are browsing and where you are, the same as the rest of the list. A store chooses what to promote and on which days, never who sees it.
• To keep accounts and the service secure: preventing fraud, abuse and unauthorised access, limiting repeated sign-in attempts, recording each time a rider asks for a customer’s number, and investigating problems.
• To keep you informed: notifications about your orders, deliveries, wallet, invites and account, and replies to your support requests. These cannot be switched off in the app, because they are how we tell you where your order is.
• To tell you about offers: CostiY sends offers and promotions as notifications in the app and on your phone, to all shoppers or to those whose saved address is in a particular city or area. You get at most a few a day. They are pushed to your phone only between 9 am and 9 pm Pakistan time: one sent at night waits in the app until the morning, and one more than a day old is never pushed. Switch them off in Profile → Notifications. We do not send marketing by email or text message.
• To meet legal obligations: keeping order and financial records, and responding to lawful requests.

We do not build a profile of you for advertising, we do not let stores or anyone else choose who sees their sponsored places, and we do not sell your information.

4. Who can see it

Each person involved in an order sees only what they need for their part of it.

Service providers

These companies process information for us, only to provide their service to CostiY:

• Railway hosts our servers and database.
• Cloudflare stores photos: public ones, such as product pictures, and, in separate private storage, rider documents and the photos sent with a reported problem or in a delivery chat.
• Vercel hosts costiy.com and our staff panel.
• Google provides Google sign-in, the maps in our apps, Firebase Cloud Messaging, which delivers notifications, and Firebase Authentication, which texts the code when you confirm your phone number. Google’s Geocoding and Routes services receive locations from our servers, to name the area a shopper is in, to draw the road from the store to your door on the tracking map, and to plan a rider’s route.
• Apple provides Sign in with Apple and delivers notifications to iPhones.
• Resend sends email for us. Today that is a store owner’s sign-in details, and notices to our own support team about a support request.
• Anthropic provides Claude, the AI behind CostiY Assistant. It receives what you write in a support chat in the app, your first name and the details of the orders it looks at, to write the answer, and it reads photographs of shop shelves and price lists that CostiY’s own staff take in shops. Under Anthropic’s commercial terms, what we send is not used to train its models.
• ImprovMX receives email sent to costiy.com addresses, such as support@costiy.com, and forwards it to our mailbox, which Google (Gmail) hosts.

When you use Google or Apple sign-in, the maps in our apps, or confirm your phone number, Google and Apple also handle information under their own privacy policies.

When the law requires it

We share information when the law, a court order or a lawful request from a Pakistani authority requires it, or when it is needed to protect the safety of customers, riders, store staff or the public, or to investigate fraud.

If the business changes hands

If CostiY is sold or merged into another business, your information would pass to the new owner, who would have to keep using it as this policy describes.

5. Where it is stored

Our servers, and those of our service providers, may be located outside Pakistan. Wherever your information is stored, we protect it as this policy describes.

6. How long we keep it

We keep your account information for as long as your account is open, and other information for as long as we need it for the purposes in this policy.

When you close a shopper’s account

• Your name, email address, phone number and password are removed from the account.
• Your saved addresses, saved products and stores, and search history are deleted.
• The fingerprints of the phone numbers your account has held are deleted.
• Your Google or Apple sign-in is unlinked.
• You are signed out on every device, and notifications stop.
• Your profile picture is deleted.
• The photos you sent your rider are deleted, and the locations you shared are removed from those messages. The messages themselves stay, as words such as “Photo removed” or “Shared their location”.

What we keep after that

• Your orders, including the delivery address used, but without your name, email address or phone number. An order is also a store’s sale and a rider’s earnings, and we need it for accounting, tax and resolving disputes.
• Your reviews, with any photos, which stay published without your name.
• Messages and support requests you sent.
• Problems you reported, with their photos, and any refunds.
• Your CostiY Wallet and invite records, because they record money CostiY gave and spent. Credit left in your wallet cannot be used once your account is closed.
• Security records, including a record that the account was closed and when.

Searches and counts

• Searches, with the account and the position they came from, are deleted after 35 days. After that we keep only daily totals of how often each word was searched in an area of about one kilometre, with no account attached, for up to 800 days. Words that fewer than three different signed-in shoppers searched for in 30 days, and anything that looks like a phone number, email address or web address, are not kept in those totals: they are counted as “not listed”.
• The codes used to count each shopper once a day are deleted after two days. The daily totals of what was shown, opened and added to carts name no shopper.

Other records

• Counts of failed sign-in attempts are deleted after a day.
• A photo uploaded for the chat but never sent is deleted after an hour.
• A rider’s location during a delivery is kept with that delivery’s record.
• While a rider is online and waiting for an order, CostiY keeps only their latest position, which the next one replaces, and no trail of where they went while waiting.
• Store and rider accounts are closed by CostiY on request. Their order, delivery, earnings and settlement records are kept for accounting.

7. Your choices

• Location: turn it off for CostiY in your phone’s settings at any time, and choose your area from the list instead. Your location goes to your rider only when you tap to share it in the chat.
• If you ride for CostiY: go offline in the Rider app when you are not working. While you are offline, it shares no location with CostiY. You cannot go offline while one of your deliveries is in progress.
• Offers: switch offers and promotions off in Profile → Notifications, and back on at any time. Order updates cannot be switched off there, because they are how we tell you where your order is.
• Notifications: turn all of them off, including the cart reminder, in your phone’s settings.
• Phone number: add or change it in Profile. You need one only to order a delivery.
• Camera and photos: the app asks for access only when you add a picture, and works without it.
• Profile picture: change or remove it in Profile. A picture you remove or replace is deleted.
• A copy of your information, or a correction: email support@costiy.com from the email address on your account. We reply within 30 days.
• Deleting your account: see the next section.

8. Deleting your account

In the CostiY app

Open Profile → Close my account and confirm. Your account is closed straight away. If an order is still on its way, you can close your account once it has arrived or been cancelled.

Without the app

Email support@costiy.com from the email address on your account, with the subject “Delete my account”. We may ask you to confirm that the account is yours, and we close it within 30 days.

Store and rider accounts

These are managed by CostiY. Ask CostiY support to close one, in the app or at support@costiy.com.

What is deleted, and what is kept afterwards, is set out in How long we keep it.

9. How we protect it

• Everything sent between our apps and our servers is encrypted.
• Passwords are stored as one-way hashes, and the apps keep your sign-in in your phone’s secure storage.
• Every photo uploaded to CostiY is re-created before it is stored, which removes hidden details such as where it was taken and what camera took it.
• Rider documents, the photos sent with a reported problem and the photos sent in a delivery chat are kept in private storage. They are handed out only to the people allowed to see them, through links that stop working after a few minutes.
• A rider gets your phone number only by tapping Call while carrying your order, and every tap is recorded.
• CostiY staff reach your information only through a staff panel with its own sign-in, and changes made there are recorded.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information, we will tell you.

10. Children

CostiY is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will close it.

11. Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we update the date at the top. If a change significantly affects how we use your information, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

12. Contact us

For any question about this policy or your information: