Privacy notice
Alva Compare (alvacompare.com) is a free comparison of Irish energy tariffs and solar installers, for people and for AI assistants. We collect as little as we can: no accounts, no advertising, no tracking cookies, and we never sell data. Last updated 16 October 2026.
Who is responsible
Alva Compare, based in Ireland, is the data controller for the processing described here. You can reach us through the contact form.
What we process and why
| What | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Request data your browser or app sends to any web server: IP address, browser or app name (user agent), the page or API address, referring page. | To serve the site and API and keep them secure (legitimate interests). Processed by our host, Vercel. | Vercel's short-lived request logs; we don't keep copies. |
| What you enter in the calculators (county, usage, unit rate, system size, prices). These are sent in the page address. | To work out your estimate. We don't store them or link them to you. | Only in the request logs above. |
| Page-view statistics (Vercel Web Analytics): page, referring site, country, device and browser type. No cookies; visitors are counted with a hash of the request that resets every day. | To see which pages are useful (legitimate interests). | Aggregated statistics only. |
| Usage counters: daily counts of API and MCP calls, page views and outbound clicks, grouped by type of visitor (for example “ChatGPT”, “search crawler”, “browser”) and referring service. No IP addresses or identifiers. | To understand how people and AI assistants use the service (legitimate interests). | 400 days. |
| Contact form messages: your message and, if you give them, your name and email address. | To reply to you (legitimate interests, or steps you ask us to take). | Deleted automatically after 12 months, sooner on request. |
The website stores nothing on your device: no cookies and no local storage, so there is no cookie banner.
Links to suppliers and installers
Links to suppliers' and installers' websites go through alvacompare.com/r/… so we can count clicks, and they add utm_source=alva_compare to the address so the other site knows the visit came from us. Nothing that identifies you is added. Once you are on their site, their privacy policy applies. If Alva has a commercial agreement with a supplier, it may earn a commission when you switch; that never changes the order of results.
Who else processes data
- Vercel Inc. hosts the website and API and provides Web Analytics (United States; transfers under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses).
- Upstash (through Vercel) stores the usage counters and contact messages in an EU (Ireland) database.
- GitHub runs our daily price refresh. It processes no visitor data.
We don't share your data with suppliers, installers, advertisers or data brokers.
AI assistants
When you ask an AI assistant a question and it calls our API or MCP server, we receive only what the assistant sends (for example a county and usage figures) and the assistant's name. We don't receive your conversation or your account details. The assistant's own privacy policy covers everything else.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, have it corrected or deleted, object to processing or restrict it. Because we don't keep identifiers, the only personal data we can usually find is a contact form message. Use the contact form and we'll reply within a month. You can also complain to the Data Protection Commission in Ireland or, in Northern Ireland, the Information Commissioner's Office.
Changes
We'll update this page if what we collect changes, and change the date at the top.