Effective August 13, 2026. PaycheckBase is operated by an individual. Privacy questions can be sent to contact@paycheckbase.com.
Calculator inputs
Calculator inputs are processed in your browser. The site is a static export with no page-level server, so the arithmetic behind every estimate runs on your own device. PaycheckBase does not ask for your name, Social Security number, employer, bank information, tax documents, email address, or account credentials, and it collects no payment details of any kind.
Shareable URLs
Scenario values are written into the page URL so you can bookmark or share an estimate. Depending on the tool, these include your salary or hourly rate, hours and weeks, bonus amount, side-hustle revenue and expenses, retirement-contribution amounts, number of dependents, filing status, pay frequency, work state and locality, and the states and localities being compared. Some pages also carry a salary figure in the address itself, such as /salary/85000-after-tax-in-california/.
These values stay in your browser’s address bar and history. They are not transmitted to us by the act of appearing there, but anyone you send the link to — and anyone who can see your screen or browser history — can read them. Do not add sensitive information to a URL.
Cookies and browser storage
PaycheckBase sets no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. It does use the following, and nothing else:
- Privacy choices — your analytics and advertising selections, and the date you made them, are kept in your browser’s local storage so the choice persists between visits.
- Saved plan — if you use the AI advisor and it suggests a sequence of calculators to work through, the scenario behind that sequence (salary, contribution amount, dependents, filing status, pay frequency, and state) is kept in your browser’s session storage so the sequence survives navigation between pages. It is cleared when you close the tab and is never uploaded.
- AI session cookie — a request to an AI feature sets a first-party
pb_advisor_sessioncookie containing a random identifier. It expires after 24 hours, is marked HTTP-only, and exists only so repeat requests can be rate-limited without relying on your network address. It is not used for analytics, advertising, or profiling. - Analytics session — if analytics is enabled and you have allowed it, a random session identifier is kept in session storage for the duration of the tab.
Analytics, advertising, affiliates, and payments
Analytics, advertising, affiliate placements, and payments are disabled in the default build. PaycheckBase does not load an optional provider merely because a placeholder or integration boundary exists. Before any of these is enabled, this notice must first identify the provider, purpose, data categories, retention, and available controls.
The AI explanations
The optional AI features explain the figures already shown on the page. They are the only part of the site that can send anything derived from your inputs off your device, so this section states exactly what is sent.
What is sent, and what is not
Using an AI feature sends your figures to PaycheckBase’s own server so it can prepare the request. Your exact figures are never written to logs, and they are not retained after the request is answered, except as part of the cache key described under Retention.
The AI provider does not receive your exact salary. Our server first rounds the figures into coarse bands — salary to the nearest $5,000, and tax and contribution amounts to the nearest $1,000 — and only the rounded band is sent onward, along with your state, filing status, and, where relevant, the scenario type and comparison state. What the provider receives is something like “$100,000, single filer, California”. Because the rounding goes to the nearest band rather than downward, a figure that is already a round multiple passes through unchanged. That rounding is also what lets one answer be reused for many readers.
Preset explanations — the suggested questions offered above the box — send no text you wrote. They send a fixed identifier for the question, plus your figures, which our server rounds into the band above before contacting the provider.
The free-form question box is the one exception. If you type a question and submit it, that text is sent to the AI provider so it can be answered. It is limited to 200 characters. If you never use the box, no text you wrote ever leaves your browser.
Provider
When enabled, requests go to the configured AI provider endpoint, which the Worker restricts to an allowlist of opencode.ai and api.deepseek.com. Both the host and the exact path are pinned, so a misconfigured address is refused rather than called. If no provider key is configured, preset explanations are answered from the site’s own built-in text and contact nobody, and the free-form box declines to answer rather than reaching out.
Retention
Question text is not logged and is not stored. Request logs record the outcome, timing, and whether a preset or the free-form box was used — never the content of a question. Answers are cached for up to 24 hours, which is the currently configured lifetime, so repeat readers do not trigger a new request. The cache is keyed by the rounded band plus a one-way SHA-256 hash of the question, so no readable question text is stored; the rounded band itself is stored in readable form as part of that key. Retention at the AI provider is governed by that provider’s own terms.
Abuse prevention and network addresses
To stop the AI endpoints from being abused, our server derives a rate-limiting identifier from your network address using a salted one-way hash, falling back to your browser’s user-agent string if no address is available. Your address itself is not stored and is not logged, and the derived value is used only to count requests. Once the short-lived session cookie described above exists, it replaces the network address for this purpose.
Controls
The AI features are optional and are never required to use a calculator or read a page. Use the preset questions to avoid sending any typed text, or ignore the feature entirely — every figure on the page is computed in your browser without it.
Limits
The assistant answers questions about the pay and tax figures on the page. It declines off-topic questions and requests for individual tax, legal, or financial advice, and its answers are educational estimates rather than advice.
Hosting
The site and its AI endpoints are hosted on Cloudflare. As with any web host, Cloudflare receives and retains standard request information — including your IP address, the pages requested, and timing — under its own terms, independently of anything described above. A request identifier is returned in the response headers so a specific request can be traced when diagnosing a fault.
Privacy choices
If optional services are configured in a future build, the privacy-choice control records your analytics and advertising selections as described under Cookies and browser storage. Optional adapters must remain inactive until both the relevant feature and provider are configured and you have granted that category. You can reopen Privacy choices to withdraw consent. Calculator inputs continue to be processed in your browser regardless.
Contact and updates
Questions, corrections, and privacy requests can be sent to contact@paycheckbase.com. Material privacy changes will be reflected on this page, and the effective date above records the current version.