Data & Privacy
BetterBudgets is built around a specific decision: it never connects to your bank.
What we never ask for
- ›Bank account credentials or logins
- ›Any open-banking connection
- ›Card numbers
- ›Your bank's transaction history
- ›Your Social Security Number or national ID
There is no place in the app to link a bank account, because the feature doesn't exist.
Why not
Most budgeting apps work by connecting to your accounts and reading your transactions. That's convenient, and it means the app holds access to your entire financial history — every purchase, every account, permanently, updating in the background.
BetterBudgets asks you to type in your income, your bills, and your debts instead, and to tick bills off as you pay them. It's more work. In exchange, the app never has access to your accounts, and there's no transaction history to lose.
There's a secondary effect that some people value more than the privacy: manually marking bills off keeps you in contact with your own finances. Automatic categorization is efficient precisely because it lets you stop paying attention.
What the app stores
Only what you enter:
- ›Budget inputs — income, housing, expenses, debt balances and rates
- ›Tracking — which bills you've ticked, any amounts you've adjusted, and any spending you've logged under a bill
- ›Canvases — your drawings and notes
- ›Account details — your name, email address, username, photo, and phone number
- ›Profile basics — your country and state, plus the age range, education, occupation, and debt details you give during setup
- ›Preferences — notification settings and appearance
No transaction data, because there isn't any to store.
If you subscribe, your plan and its status come from the app store or the web checkout. Card numbers never reach BetterBudgets.
Storage
Your budgets are stored on BetterBudgets' servers rather than only on your device, which is what lets you sign in on another device and find your budgets there. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Selling data
We don't sell your data to advertisers, and your financial inputs aren't used for anything other than running the app for you.
Before sharing a canvas
Canvas exports contain real figures — your income, bills, and debts. The export is exactly what's on the page, with no redaction step, so it's worth a look before sending one anywhere shared.
See Sharing & Exporting.
Deleting your account
Settings → Delete Account, at the bottom of the screen. The app asks you to confirm, then deletes everything and signs you out.
This permanently removes your account and everything in it — all budgets, all tracking history, all canvases, your notifications, your uploaded photos and exports, and your login. It cannot be undone, and there's no recovery period.
A few records outlive the account with your identity removed from them: feedback you sent, anonymized budget statistics, and the record that a referral happened if someone referred you. Your username is retired so nobody else can claim it.
Cancel your subscription first. Deleting your account doesn't cancel an App Store or Google Play subscription — the store keeps billing until you cancel it there. See Managing Your Subscription.
If you can't access the app, you can request deletion by email from your registered address. Full details, including what's deleted and what's retained, are on the account deletion page.
Deleting vs. downgrading
If what you want is to stop paying rather than to erase everything, cancel your subscription instead. Your data stays intact and you keep the free plan.
Canceling and deleting are different actions with very different consequences. See Managing Your Subscription.
Full policies
The Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are the authoritative documents. This page is a plain-language summary of the parts most people want to know.
Both are also in the app, under Settings → Privacy & Terms. When either one changes, the app asks you to review and acknowledge it.