How we think about security and privacy

Pipal handles real transactions, real addresses, and real conversations between buyers and sellers across Nepal. That's a responsibility we treat as core to the product, not something bolted on afterward. Here's how we approach it.

Your data, isolated by design

Every table in our database enforces, at the database level, who is allowed to read or write a given row. That check doesn't live only in the app's screens; it lives underneath them. So if one screen has a bug, another buyer's cart, orders, or messages aren't sitting one wrong request away. Access is scoped to you by default, everywhere, not just where someone remembered to add a check.

Payments, without us holding your card

We don't store your card or bank details ourselves. Payments run through eSewa, Khalti, and IME Pay, established Nepali payment providers built for exactly this. Inside Pipal, wallet transfers use row-level locking so a balance can't be double-spent, and every transaction is scoped so only its owner can see it.

Accounts and access

Sessions are handled through short-lived, auto-refreshed tokens rather than long-lived passwords sitting around. Sellers and delivery partners go through a verification step before they can list products or accept deliveries, so both sides of a transaction are people we've actually checked. You can delete your account and your data whenever you want.

We audit ourselves, on purpose

We run internal security reviews of our own systems on an ongoing basis: authentication, database access rules, and payment flows, the way an outside attacker would look at them. When we find something, we fix it. This week, that meant hardening how a set of internal database functions resolve their permissions, closing off a class of privilege-escalation bug before it was ever an issue in practice.

Tell us if you find something

If you ever find a security issue in Pipal, we want to hear about it before anyone else does. Email us at security@pipal.life and we'll respond.

Nothing here is a claim that we're perfect. It's a description of how seriously we take getting better at this, continuously.