Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 7, 2026

Budget Pilot ("Budget Pilot," "we," "us," or "our") provides a household budgeting and personal-finance application. This Privacy Policy outlines what information we collect, how we handle and protect it, and the rights and choices available to you.

Because Budget Pilot handles sensitive personal financial data, we believe in radical transparency and plain language rather than unnecessary legal jargon. If you have questions about how your data is handled, you can reach us directly at mark@trybudgetpilot.com.

1. Information We Collect

We collect only the minimum information necessary to provide and operate the Service:

• Account Information: Your email address and a display name visible to other members of your Household.
• Billing and Payment Information: When you subscribe to a paid tier, your transaction and billing credentials are processed directly by our payment processor, Stripe. We receive only transaction confirmations, subscription statuses, and basic billing identifiers (such as the card brand and last four digits) to maintain your account access.
• Financial Data You Provide: Information you manually enter, paste, or import via CSV/files — such as account titles, balances, transaction logs, budget categories, bill schedules, debt interest rates, and minimum payment amounts.
• Financial Account and Transaction Data (Connected Accounts via Plaid):

  If you choose to link a bank, credit card, or other financial account instead of entering it by hand, we use Plaid Inc. ("Plaid") to retrieve and securely transmit your data from that institution to Budget Pilot. Depending on which accounts you link, this can include:

  • Account identifiers (account name, account type, and the mask/last 4 digits of the account number).
  • Real-time and historical account balances.
  • Transaction history (date, amount, payee/merchant name, category, and description).

  No access to bank credentials: you enter your online banking username, password, and any multi-factor authentication code directly into Plaid's own secure interface — Budget Pilot never views, transmits, or stores those credentials on our servers. By using this feature, you agree that your information will be collected, stored, and processed by Plaid in accordance with the Plaid End User Privacy Policy.

• Optional AI Assistant ("Sterling"): If you choose to ask a question to Budget Pilot's built-in AI assistant, the text of your question — and, only for questions about your own spending, a snapshot of relevant account and budget figures computed in your own browser — is sent to Google's Gemini API to generate a response. This request is made under Google's paid API tier, under which Google does not use your prompts or Google's responses to train or improve its models. Budget Pilot does not store the content of your questions or the assistant's answers; we log only the date and time a question was asked, in order to enforce a daily usage limit. This feature is entirely optional and is never used unless you choose to open the assistant and ask it something.
• Household Information: When you create or join a shared Household workspace, members of that workspace can view and edit the financial entries associated with it.
• Authentication Data: If you choose third-party Single Sign-On (such as Google), we receive basic profile details (your name, verified email, and profile avatar) strictly to authenticate and recognize your account. Signing in itself never grants us access to your external files, cloud drives, emails, or contacts.
• Optional Cloud Save (Google Drive): If you choose to save a report to Google Drive, a separate permission step — distinct from Google sign-in — lets Budget Pilot create that one file in your Drive. This uses Google's most restrictive file-access scope (drive.file), which only ever sees files Budget Pilot itself creates; it cannot see, list, or modify your existing files or folders. This permission is requested only when you click "Save to Google Drive," and you can revoke it at any time from your Google Account's third-party access settings.
• Essential Technical Storage & Cookies: We use local browser storage and first-party session tokens solely for authentication, security verification, and workspace state. We do not use tracking pixels, advertising cookies, or third-party behavioral analytics scripts.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect exclusively to:

• Power application features: dashboards, debt payoff models, cash flow statements, and budget tracking.
• Automate Budgeting Workflows: Where you've linked an account via Plaid, to synchronize, categorize, and present your recent transactions and balances within your Household workspace, so you don't have to import a CSV or enter transactions by hand.
• Compliance & Aggregation Limits: We use aggregated financial data retrieved via Plaid solely to deliver budgeting and personal financial management features. We do not use it to evaluate creditworthiness, offer credit products, or act as a consumer reporting agency under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
• Authenticate your identity and manage Household permissions.
• Transmit essential account service communications (such as password reset links or security notices). We do not send marketing or promotional emails without your explicit consent.
• Diagnose bugs and resolve technical issues.

Our Core Privacy Pledge:

• We do not sell your personal or financial data.
• We do not share your data for cross-context behavioral advertising.
• We do not monetize your transaction records or financial metrics.

3. Data Storage, Architecture & Security

We employ industry-standard technical and organizational safeguards designed to protect personal financial data:

• Transport Encryption: All traffic between your browser and our application is encrypted in transit using modern HTTPS/TLS protocols.
• Database Isolation & Row-Level Security: Budget Pilot is powered by Supabase (hosted PostgreSQL). Financial records are protected by database-level Row-Level Security (RLS) policies, ensuring that only authenticated members of your specific Household can query or write to your records.
• Credential Protection: Passwords and OAuth tokens are never stored in plain text; they are processed using secure cryptographic hashing algorithms.
• Security Incident Response: While no web application can guarantee impenetrable security, in the event of a confirmed security incident affecting unencrypted personal data, we will notify impacted users in accordance with applicable state and federal data breach notification requirements.

4. Third-Party Infrastructure Providers (Subprocessors)

We rely on a small set of established cloud infrastructure vendors to run the Service:

• Supabase: Hosted database, authentication engine, and backend infrastructure.
• Netlify: Application hosting, content delivery, and frontend deployment.
• Plaid Inc.: Provides the secure connection used to retrieve balances and transaction data from your financial institution, for households that choose to link an account. Plaid processes your banking credentials, account identifiers, balances, and transaction history under its own security and privacy protocols (see the Plaid End User Privacy Policy).
• Stripe, Inc.: Payment gateway and billing infrastructure provider. If you purchase a paid subscription, your payment details (such as credit card numbers, billing zip code, and expiration dates) are collected directly by Stripe via embedded, PCI-DSS compliant elements. Budget Pilot never views, transmits, or stores your raw credit card numbers or CVV codes on our servers. (See the Stripe Privacy Policy.)
• Google: OAuth identity provider for optional social sign-in, and, separately, the Google Drive API for the optional "Save to Google Drive" export feature — limited to files Budget Pilot creates at your request.
• Google Gemini API: Powers the optional Sterling AI assistant described above. When you ask Sterling a question, that question — and, for spending-related questions, a browser-computed snapshot of relevant figures — is sent to Google's Gemini API to generate a response. This is a separate data flow from the Google sign-in/Drive integration above, governed by Google's Gemini API Additional Terms of Service rather than Google's general consumer privacy policy. We access the Gemini API under Google's paid service tier specifically so that this data is not used by Google to improve or train its models.

Each infrastructure provider processes data solely on our behalf under strict enterprise data-protection and confidentiality commitments.

5. Data Retention & Deletion

We retain your account and financial data for as long as your account remains active.

• User-Initiated Deletion: You may request complete deletion of your account and associated financial data at any time by emailing mark@trybudgetpilot.com. Upon receiving your request, we will permanently purge your data from active production databases, typically within 30 days, subject only to temporary backup retention cycles or legal compliance obligations.
• Disconnecting Linked Accounts: You may unlink any connected financial account at any time from within Budget Pilot. When you do, we immediately instruct Plaid to revoke that connection's access token, so it stops fetching new transactions or balances and can no longer be used to reach your account at the institution. Transactions already saved to your Household workspace from before the disconnect are not automatically removed — they remain in your budget ledger unless you delete them yourself or delete your Household workspace entirely. If you permanently delete your account or Household, all associated Plaid connections and previously synced transaction data are permanently deleted from our primary database per the retention schedule above. You can also view, manage, or revoke access to your connected institutions at any time through the Plaid Portal.

6. Your Rights and Data Control

You retain full control over your financial data:

• Data Portability & Export: You can export your financial reports (Income Statement, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow Statement) as standard CSV files at any time. Your data is never locked into the platform.
• Modification & Deletion: You can edit or delete any individual account, transaction, or budget item directly in the app.
• Leaving a Workspace: You may leave a shared Household at any time via your Household settings panel.
• State Statutory Privacy Rights: If you reside in Arizona or another jurisdiction with consumer privacy protections, we honor your rights to know, access, correct, port, and delete your personal data. We do not discriminate against users who exercise these privacy rights.

7. Children's Privacy

Budget Pilot is not intended for or directed to individuals under the age of 18 (and under no circumstances children under 13). We do not knowingly collect personal data from minors.

8. Changes to This Policy

If we make material updates to this Privacy Policy, we will revise the "Last updated" date above and post a clear notice within the application or via email prior to the changes taking effect.

9. Contact Us

For questions regarding this Privacy Policy, data deletion requests, or security inquiries, please contact:

Email: mark@trybudgetpilot.com
Location: Arizona, United States