PCS Account & billing
What you paid for, how to get it free if you're E-4 or below, and exactly what happens to your photos.
Your license
PCS Pal is $99, once. It is not a subscription, it does not renew, and there is no per-move or per-shipment charge.
That one purchase covers every PCS you make for the rest of your career, and covers a move end to end:
- Filming your house and building your catalog
- Reading the movers' handwritten inventory sheets
- Delivery-day check-off and the Door Report
- Damage logging, the drafted claim, and the DPS-ready package
- All shipments in a move — household goods and unaccompanied baggage both
- Deadline tracking through to settlement
Check your status any time on your Account page, or in the app under Settings → Plan.
Free for E-4 and below
Service members in paygrades E-1 through E-4 use PCS Pal free. Junior enlisted families take the worst of the moving system and have the least room in the budget — charging them for the fix would be backwards.
Two ways to get it:
- A support code from your base support office. Ask them for a PCS Pal code, then enter it on your Account page or in the app and tap Apply code.
- Email us. Write to [email protected] with your rank, branch, and base, and attach proof of rank. We'll set you up directly.
Complimentary access covers your current move. Your Account page shows the date you're covered until, and the exact terms are in the Terms of Service.
If complimentary access ends, your evidence stays yours. Expiry stops new AI processing — it never removes what you've already captured. Your photos, sheets, catalog and claim remain in your account and in your vault export.
Promoted to E-5 mid-move? Access already granted for that move stays granted. Reach out if anything looks wrong.
Money-back guarantee
If PCS Pal isn't working for your move, email [email protected] at any point during your covered move and we'll make it right. It's handled case by case, by a person.
Refunding a purchase deactivates access to the app, so if what you need is help rather than your money back, say so — most problems are fixable and we'd rather fix them.
Receipts and payment
Payment is processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card number.
Stripe emails your receipt when you buy. Keep it — it's also your proof of purchase for a reimbursement claim if your unit or spouse-club program covers tools like this.
Your Account page has a Billing & receipt entry for your purchase. If you can't find a receipt, write to us with the email address you purchased under and we'll dig it out.
Phones and devices
One phone runs a move. PCS Pal isn't built for two people capturing the same house at once — that produces two half-finished inventories and no single source of truth. Pick the phone that will be at pack-out and at delivery.
Getting a new phone mid-move
What you've sent up is safe in your account — sheet photos, catalog results, damage photos, documents — and your finished claim is always at pcspal.app. But the app can't yet rebuild a move in progress onto a fresh phone, so plan on one phone from pack-out through claim. If a phone dies or is lost mid-move, write to us before you switch and we'll help you carry the move over.
Keep the old phone until your claim is finished. Raw room walkthrough videos are the one thing that never leaves the device that filmed them — only the still keyframes are uploaded. Everything the claim needs is in your account, but the original footage lives on that phone.
Phone and website together
Sign in at pcspal.app with the same email or Google account. The phone captures; the website is where you read your finished claim and file it in DPS. Nothing needs to be transferred by hand between them.
Signing in and out
There are no passwords. You sign in with a 6-digit code sent to your email, or with Google.
Sign out in the app under Settings → Sign out, or with Sign Out in the website nav.
Signing out doesn't delete anything from your account. Sign back in with the same address and your move is where you left it. Signing in as a different account, though, shows you that account's moves — if your move looks empty, check which email you're signed in with first.
Your data
What leaves your phone
- Still keyframes extracted from your room videos — not the videos themselves.
- Photos of inventory sheets and the high-value form.
- Damage photos and delivery-day photos.
- Documents you add to the Vault — orders, weight tickets, mover paperwork.
- Move details you enter: dates, route, branch, paygrade, shipment types.
What stays on your phone
- Raw room walkthrough videos. They're gigabytes, and the keyframes are what the claim runs on.
- A full local copy of everything else, so the app works with no signal.
How it's handled
- Your photos and videos are processed by AI (Anthropic's Claude) solely to provide the features — building your catalog, reading sheets, drafting your claim. They are not used to train AI models.
- Data is stored with Cloudflare, payments run through Stripe, email through Resend.
- Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Sign-in uses one-time codes or Google, so there's no password of yours to steal.
- We do not sell your personal information, and we don't share your move documentation except as needed to run the service or as required by law.
The full detail is in the Privacy Policy.
Exporting everything
Your documentation belongs to you, and you can take a copy whenever you want. In the app, open the Vault tab and tap Export my vault.
You get a single zip you can send to yourself, save to cloud storage, or hand to a claims office. It holds your inventory sheets, damage and delivery photos, delivery forms, high-value item photos, catalog frames, and documents, sorted into folders with an index.
Raw room videos aren't in the zip — they'd make it too big to email, and they're not the claim evidence. They stay on the phone that filmed them.
For a claim specifically, the website's Download Claim Packet is usually what you want: a folder per item with its Evidence Packet PDF and raw photos. See Filing in DPS.
Deleting your data
Email [email protected] to request a copy of your data or its deletion. Deletion requests are honored within 30 days.
Export first, and don't delete while a claim is open. Deleted evidence can't be recovered, and your claim can stay open for months after your move — through the TSP's response window and any counteroffer or Military Claims Office transfer.