You are trusting us with the working history of your herd — animals, treatments, lab results, sales, and the money that moves through it. Here is how that information is handled, in plain language, without the legal fog.
Short version: card numbers never touch the ranch platform, ranch records live in managed Postgres infrastructure with encryption and backups, each ranch's data is walled off from every other ranch, and the AI work Gus does runs through enterprise tooling that does not retain your prompts or train on your data.
Card numbers are handled by a PCI-certified payment infrastructure provider. GusRanch keeps a reference, not a card.
Managed PostgreSQL with encrypted connections, encryption at rest, access controls, and backup and recovery safeguards.
Enterprise AI tooling for business use, configured for zero data retention on chat completions.
Payments, ranch records, AI workflows, and the separation between ranches. Those are the four questions ranchers actually ask us, so those are the four we answer here.
GusRanch does not store raw credit card numbers in the ranch platform. When you verify your account or a commission is charged on a sale, the card details are collected and held by the payment processor. What comes back to us is a reference — a token that lets us charge the saved method again without ever seeing the number.
That certification belongs to the payment provider and the payment environment it operates — not a claim GusRanch makes about itself.
Animals, pastures, notes, lab results, treatments, measurements, sales, and lineage live in managed PostgreSQL infrastructure operated by a specialist database provider. We do not run a server in a closet, and we do not keep your herd history on somebody's laptop.
Photos and lab PDFs are kept in dedicated object storage rather than mixed into the records database.
When Gus reads a field note, classifies a lab report, or drafts a summary, that work runs through enterprise AI tooling licensed for business use — not a consumer chatbot account. The privacy and security posture of that tooling is what protects your ranch text.
Those reports and assessments describe the AI provider's environment. GusRanch is not claiming its own SOC 2 or HIPAA certification.
Every ranch on the platform gets its own account scope. Your animals, notes, photos, and sales are tied to that scope, and every request the platform serves is answered inside it. Another ranch cannot see your herd, and you cannot see theirs.
Failing closed is the deliberate choice: an error message is always better than the wrong ranch's data.
Card handling is a specialty. Instead of building it ourselves, GusRanch runs payments through a PCI-certified payment infrastructure provider that does this at a scale no ranch platform could match — which means its security work is tested continuously by everyone else using it.
Figures above are published by the payment infrastructure provider in its 2025 annual update and its Black Friday–Cyber Monday 2024 report. PCI Service Provider Level 1 status applies to that provider's environment, not to GusRanch.
No. Card numbers are collected and stored by the payment processor. The ranch platform holds only a payment reference, which lets us charge your saved method for a commission without ever handling the card itself.
No. Each ranch is scoped to its own account, and every read and write is filtered to that account. If the platform cannot confirm which ranch a request belongs to, it returns an error rather than serving data from any ranch.
No. The AI tooling GusRanch uses is licensed for business use and configured so customer API data is not used to train models. Prompt and response content is not retained through the chat completions API — zero data retention is in effect.
Operational metadata for billing and reliability: token counts, which model ran, a timestamp, how long the call took, and which API key made it. Not the content of your notes or the answers Gus gave.
No, and we will not imply otherwise. The certifications and assessments described on this page belong to the providers we build on — the payment processor's PCI certification, the AI provider's SOC 2 Type II Report and 2025 HIPAA Gap Assessment, and the database provider's hosting controls. GusRanch's job is to choose those providers carefully and use them correctly.
Ranch records sit in managed PostgreSQL infrastructure with backup and point-in-time recovery safeguards, so an accidental deletion or a bad day is recoverable rather than final. Photos and lab documents are held in separate object storage.
Email support@gusranch.com. If you need provider-level detail for your own compliance review, tell us what you need and we will point you at the right documentation.
We would rather be straightforward about how your ranch data is handled than dress up someone else's paperwork as our own.
A note on certifications. Any certification, audit report, or assessment referenced on this page was issued to the infrastructure GusRanch builds on, for those environments — not to GusRanch. GusRanch does not hold its own SOC 2 attestation or HIPAA certification. Our job is to choose that infrastructure carefully and use it correctly.
If you need provider-level documentation for a compliance review of your own, email support@gusranch.com and we will handle it directly with you.
For how we collect and use information across the platform, see the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Questions we haven't answered here go to support@gusranch.com.