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What is shared and what never leaves

What a connected app or API key can read, what it can never read, and how reads are recorded.

Everything below is the same for an AI tool, an app and an API key, through the MCP server and the public API alike.

What a connection can read

  • Your jobs and their status
  • Your clients' names, job addresses, phone numbers and email addresses
  • The current version of each scope and estimate, including drafts, each labelled with its status. Earlier versions that were replaced are never shared, and Blueprint estimates are not included.
  • Your costs and your customer prices
  • Job photos, as a resized copy, without the location saved with them
  • The transcripts and audio and video recordings of your job walks and daily sweeps, which hold the words of everyone recorded
  • 3D room models when your company captures them

An owner or admin may separately allow an app to create jobs and their clients, edit job details, link external job IDs, decide and sync daily sweep segments, merge duplicate jobs, record estimate outcomes, record the prices sent to clients and what work actually cost, and propose rate changes for an owner or admin to approve. These edits are recorded. Connected apps cannot change money, permissions or ownership, or delete records. API keys remain read only.

What never leaves

  • Receipt photos
  • The exact location saved with a photo

Photos leave only as a resized copy, never the original file. Walk transcripts and recordings are read only by asking for them on their own: they are never repeated inside a job, a scope or an estimate. See walks and transcripts.

The whole company, or nothing

A connection reads everything above for one company. You cannot choose a set of jobs: consent is all or nothing for each company. To stop a tool reading a company, end the connection.

Costs and prices

Cost and price are your company's own data, and a connection reads both.

  • A number labelled as a customer price is always your marked-up price.
  • If your company's markup is 0%, customer prices are not shared until an owner or admin sets a markup. Costs still are.
  • When your tool reads an estimate or a scope, it gets the homeowner view unless it asks for the full view: no costs, no markup and no internal notes. The full view is one request away.
  • Numbers written into notes, allowances and assumptions travel as written. The price rules above cover fields labelled as a price, not numbers inside sentences.

Text is read as written

Your AI tool reads what Forge returns word for word. That includes job names, notes, scopes, estimate notes and assumptions, and walk transcripts, and so it includes what your team, your subcontractors and your clients wrote or said.

Text like that can carry instructions meant for the AI tool, planted by anyone who can put words into those places. Forge cannot detect or remove them. Forge tells your tool that everything it returns is data, not instructions, but a tool may still act on what it reads, and most AI tools have other connections that can send email, change files or do other things.

So connect only tools you trust, and keep an eye on what they do with their other connections.

Records of what was read

Forge records every read a connection makes, and every request it refuses, and keeps those records for 13 months.

  • A photo read is recorded when the photo is read.
  • Audio and video are different. Forge gives out a link to a recording that works for 15 minutes, so it records when it gave out the link, not when or whether the recording was played.

Each connection and key in Settings shows when it was last used. To find out what a connection or key read, email team@forge.equipment.

Emails about connections

When data access is turned on or off, and when a connection is made or ended, Forge emails the company owner and the person who made the change. Anyone with no email address gets a push notification and a notice in Forge's Settings instead.

Each of them can turn off their own copy of these emails in Settings, except the email that tells the owner data access was turned on. Turning it off is per person: it covers you in every company you belong to, and it does not turn it off for anyone else.

After a tool has read your data

  • The tool's own terms and privacy policy apply to what it receives.
  • Forge cannot make it delete what it read, and cannot promise it will not use your data to train AI models. Check the tool's terms before you connect it.
  • Deleting something in Forge does not delete a copy a tool already has.