Privacy policy

The short version

Your income, expenses, debts and notes are stored on your device and are not transmitted to anyone. The app has no analytics. We run one small server, and it holds your account and nothing else: your email address, your name if you gave one, a hash of your password and the token that keeps you signed in. Your budget records never reach it. The only data that reaches Google is the account you sign in with, a subscription receipt if you buy Premium, and, only if you set up a shared family budget, the records of that budget in the shared Drive folder you and the other members choose. Your backup never reaches us either: the app writes a file and you decide where it goes.

There is one exception, and it only applies to the free tier. The free tier is permanent — it is not a countdown — and on it the app shows you advertising from Google AdMob: a banner at the bottom of the home screen, and a full-screen ad now and then. Premium users and users inside their trial never see an ad. Your budget records are never sent to an advertiser and are never used to target ads; see Advertising below.

What the app stores on your device

These records live in the app’s private storage. Uninstalling the app removes them. On the mobile app you can also erase them at any time with Settings → Data → Delete all data.

• Income sources, expense templates and debts, with their amounts and currencies.
• Monthly plans and entries, including which ones are paid and any note you write.
• Your preferences: currency, theme, accent colour, list density, language and reminder timing.
• An optional app lock (PIN or biometrics) and the key material that protects it.

Google sign-in

The app can be used with a Google account so that your sign-in works on a new device. When you sign in, Google gives the app your name, your email address and your profile picture, and the app stores only what it needs to show your account and to keep you signed in. It never reads your Gmail, your Drive files outside the shared folder of a family budget you set up yourself, your contacts or your location.

You can remove the app’s access to your account at any time in your Google account security settings.

Your account on our server

You can use Finanz with a Google account alone — then we hold nothing at all. If you would rather not use Google, the app also offers an account of your own: an email address and a password. That account lives on a server we run, and it is the only thing on that server that belongs to you.

What the server keeps: your email address, the name you typed if you typed one, a hash of your password (never the password itself), and the tokens of your sessions so that you stay signed in. A hash is a one-way value — the server cannot turn it back into your password, and a copy of the database would not let anyone log in as you.

What the server does not keep: your income, your expenses, your debts, your notes, your categories, your budget, your PIN. Those live on your device only. The server never sees a budget record, not even to work out a total for you.

Where it runs: on a small server in the European Union, operated by SEDO Apps. The connection is encrypted with TLS, so the session token does not travel in the clear.

How long we keep it: until you delete it. You can delete your account at any time in the app, under Settings → Email account → Delete account. That removes the account, its sessions and the budget on that device in one step, and it cannot be undone. If you only sign out, the account stays and you can sign in again with the same address.

If you would rather not use the email account at all, you do not have to: Google sign-in works on its own, and the app is fully usable without any account of ours.

Your backup (optional)

Your records never leave the device on their own. If you want a copy, the app writes a backup file and you choose where it goes: the Google Drive app on your phone, OneDrive, a NAS, a USB stick, or an e-mail to yourself. The app does not upload it, does not see which service you picked, and asks for no permission to do it.

The encrypted backup is the one we recommend. It is encrypted with a passphrase that you type and that the app never stores, so nobody — including us — can read it without that passphrase. Keep it where you keep the things that matter; you will need the passphrase to restore it, so keep that somewhere safe too. The plain JSON export is there if you would rather read the file yourself.

A backup file counts against the storage of whatever you put it in, the same as any other file, and deleting it there deletes the backup. The app cannot restore a file that is gone, so keep the one you made.

Shared family budget (optional)

Starting a shared family budget is a Premium feature. Once you are a member of a pool, the pool keeps working for you even if the membership ends later — a shared budget that stops syncing would be worse than the feature is worth.

If you set up a shared family budget, the app asks for the wider Google Drive permission once, at the moment you switch the pool on. That permission lets the app read and write the files of the single shared folder it creates for the family. It does not give the app access to the rest of your Drive.

Inside that folder, the app keeps one small file per member and nothing else. Each file holds the records that member changed — income sources, fixed expenses, debts, monthly plans, plan notes and paid entries — so the two of you can work on the same budget at the same time without one overwriting the other. When you sync, the app merges the members’ files and writes the result back.

A month can carry a note from each member, and every note says who wrote it. The other member’s note is read-only for you: you can read it, and only the member who wrote it can change or delete it. The author is identified by the Google account address of that member, which the app already has in order to know who the member is.

The member who wrote a note can hand it over to the shared budget, for example a shopping list written for the other member. A note that was handed over can then be changed by either member, and it still says who wrote it. Only the author can hand a note over or take it back.

The members of the family are the people you name. They are listed in the family screen in the app, and every member can see the records of the shared budget. You can remove a member at any time; after that the app stops writing to the folder for them. Leaving a family stops the sharing as well. Deleting the shared folder in Drive deletes the shared records with it, so keep your own backup if the records matter to you.

Payments

The Premium subscription is sold and billed by Google Play. Your payment details never reach Finanz; we only receive confirmation from the Play store that a subscription is active, and we store that fact on your device. You can cancel through your Play Store account.

Advertising (free tier only)

If you are on the free tier — no Premium, and your first-run trial has ended — the app shows you advertising from Google AdMob. The free tier is permanent, so this is where the app is paid for. Premium subscribers and users inside their trial never see an ad, and neither does anyone who has not agreed to ads.

There are two places where an ad can appear. A banner sits at the bottom of the home screen, above the navigation bar. A full-screen interstitial appears now and then, when you come back to the app after a pause — never while you are entering a number, never on top of the action you just finished, and never more than a few times a day. The app counts the ads it has shown and keeps the full-screen one rare on purpose, because an app that gets in the way is an app people delete.

Before any ad is served, the app asks Google for consent through the User Messaging Platform. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland the choice is yours: you can accept, decline or let the ads stay limited to what they do not need to personalise. You can change that choice at any time in Settings → Privacy → Ad privacy in the app. Only a user on the free tier is asked, and only once — a Premium subscriber and a user inside the trial are never shown an ad, so they are never asked about them either. If you change your answer, the app reads it again right away.

Google may read the device’s advertising identifier so that it can serve and measure ads. The app itself never gives your budget records, your notes, your debts or your file names to an advertiser, and it never uses them to pick which ad you see. Your financial records stay on your device.

Ads come from Google and from the advertisers Google works with. Clicking an ad takes you to a site that is not ours and that has its own privacy policy. We do not see which ads you click or which sites you visit afterwards.

What we do not do

• No analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting to a third party.
• No advertising in Premium, and no advertising to anyone who has not agreed to it.
• No advertising built from your budget: your income, expenses, debts and notes are never shared with an advertiser and never used to target ads.
• No selling or sharing of your data. We do not pass it to anyone, and the one server we run is our own, with no third party behind it.
• No reading of your files, photos, contacts, location or browsing history — the only files the app reads are the ones in its own backup area and, if you use a shared family budget, the ones in that family’s folder.

Children

Finanz is a budgeting tool for adults. It is not directed at children and it does not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the app will show the new version and the date above will change. The policy is kept with the app’s source code, so its history is public.

Contact

This app is published by SEDO Apps, a sole trader (Einzelunternehmer) operated by Sema Doğan in Germany. Questions about this policy, or a request to delete data we hold (we hold none of your finances, but we do hold the address of an account you created with us), go to info@sedoapps.de.