Privacy Policy

Budget Factor — last updated August 11, 2026

Budget Factor is a personal budgeting app. This page explains what information the app collects, why, and how it's protected. It's written in plain language rather than legal boilerplate — if anything here is unclear, contact us using the details below.

What we collect

Account info: the email address and password you sign up with.
Budget data you enter: income, envelope categories and amounts, and transactions you add by hand.
Receipt photos: if you scan a receipt, the photo is sent to our server for one-time processing and is never stored — only the extracted text (merchant, items, amounts) is kept.
Bank connection data: if you connect a bank account through Plaid, we receive and store transaction data (merchant, amount, date) from that connection. The credential Plaid gives us to access your bank (an access token) is stored on our server and is never sent to or readable by the app itself.

How we use it

Solely to provide the app's own features: showing your budget, splitting transactions across categories, scanning receipts, syncing bank transactions, and suggesting budget categories from your spending history. We don't sell your data, and we don't use it for advertising or share it with data brokers.

Sharing your budget with someone else

You can choose to share your budget with one other person — typically a spouse or partner — by sending them a single-use invite code. This is entirely optional and never happens automatically. If you do:

You both see and can change the same budget, envelopes, transactions, receipt-derived line items, and connected bank accounts. That includes financial data you added before they joined.
Bank connections are shared: a bank either of you connects can be viewed and disconnected by both of you.
Each of you keeps your own login, password, and two-factor authentication. Your credentials are never shared.
Either of you can leave at any time, which ends your access to the shared data. Neither of you can remove the other, and leaving does not delete the shared budget for the person who remains.
Joining replaces your own budget. If you already had a budget of your own, joining someone else's permanently deletes your months, envelopes, and transactions — they are not merged into the shared budget. We tell you exactly what will be deleted and ask you to confirm before this happens, but it cannot be undone afterward. Any bank you had connected is disconnected and closed with your bank first.

Who we share it with

We use a small number of service providers to run the app, each only for its specific job:

Supabase — hosts our database, authentication, and server functions.
Plaid — powers bank account connections and transaction syncing, when you choose to connect a bank.
Google (Gemini) — reads receipt photos and helps categorize transactions. Photos are processed and discarded immediately; they are never stored by us or, to our knowledge, retained by Google beyond that request.

None of these providers use your data for their own purposes beyond providing the service to us.

Security

All traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit (TLS).
Your data is encrypted at rest by our database provider.
Database access rules ensure you can only ever read or write your own household's data — not other users'.
Bank access tokens are stored server-side only and are never exposed to any client app.

Data retention and deletion

We keep your data for as long as your account is active. To request deletion of your account and associated data, contact us using the email below — we don't yet have a self-service deletion option in the app. See our full Data Retention and Disposal Policy for detail on retention periods by data category and how disposal works.

Children's privacy

Budget Factor is not directed at children and is not knowingly used to collect data from anyone under 13.

Changes to this policy

We review this policy, including the data retention and deletion practices above, at least annually and whenever our data practices change. If this policy changes in a meaningful way, we'll update the date at the top of this page.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: davejensen175@gmail.com