Privacy Policy

Overview

PennyFinch ("PennyFinch," "we," "us") operates the personal-finance app at pennyfinch.com. This Privacy Policy explains what we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and your choices. By using PennyFinch you agree to this policy.

Information we collect

Account information. Your email address and a securely hashed password. Optionally, your display currency and how you heard about us.

Financial account data (via Plaid). When you connect a bank, card, or loan, we use Plaid Inc. ("Plaid") to access it. We receive account balances, account and institution names, account types, and transaction details (date, amount, description, merchant, category). We never receive or store your bank login credentials — those are handled directly by Plaid.

Payment information. If you subscribe, payments are processed by PayPal. We receive your subscription status — not your card or bank-account numbers.

Usage data. Basic product events (e.g., page views, connecting an account, sign-in) and limited technical data (browser, approximate device) to operate and improve the product.

Communications. Messages you send us, and emails you request (e.g., a password reset).

How we use your information

Provide the service — aggregate your accounts; categorize transactions; show balances, spending, reports, and net worth; detect recurring charges; and send notifications you enable.

Improve and secure the product, debug issues, and prevent abuse.

Communicate with you — transactional emails (such as password resets), alerts you opt into, and product updates.

Process subscription payments.

AI categorization

To label transactions (for example, turning "MTA" into "Public Transit"), we may send the transaction description or merchant name to our AI provider (Anthropic). We send only the text needed to classify the transaction — not your identity, account numbers, or balances.

Reading a debt statement (optional)

If you choose to upload a statement or notice for a debt you've added by hand (for example an IRS balance page), we send that file to our AI provider (Anthropic) so it can read the debt's interest rate, penalties and payment off it. The file may contain whatever the document shows, such as your name and address. We use it only to fill in the debt's terms for you to review, and we do not store the file. Anthropic handles it under its commercial API terms, under which it does not train its models on that data by default.

Connecting an AI assistant (optional)

You can choose to connect an AI assistant, such as Anthropic's Claude, to your PennyFinch account (see Connect Claude). This is off unless you turn it on, and you approve each connection on a screen that explains it first.

When you connect one, the assistant can read your account names, types and balances, your transactions (dates, amounts, descriptions, merchants and categories), and, if we can work it out, your hourly wage, so it can express amounts as hours of your working life. Access is read-only, unless you tick one of the separate options when you connect it. With budget editing, it can create, change and remove budgets on your Plan screen, and budgeting one of your bank's category labels saves it as a category. With tagging, it can add and remove tags on your transactions and leave transactions out of your budgets. An assistant can never move money, or change a transaction's amount, date, merchant or category.

When an assistant changes a budget, tags transactions or leaves them out of your budgets, we record the change itself (for example the category, amounts and months, or the tag name and how many transactions it covered), the same record we keep when you make that change in the app.

What the assistant reads is sent to the company that runs it and is handled under that company's privacy policy, not ours. We cannot retrieve or delete data once it has been sent.

For each connection we keep: which app it is, when it was created and last used, your hourly wage at the time you connected, and one-way hashes of its access credentials (never the credentials themselves). We record that a tool was used, how long it took, whether it succeeded and which kinds of filter it used, but not the questions you ask or the search terms, merchants or amounts you look up.

You can disconnect at any time under Settings → Connect an AI assistant; access stops immediately.

How we share your information

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with service providers that help us operate the product, under contract:

• Plaid — secure connectivity to your financial institutions.
• Hosting & database — our cloud hosting and managed database providers store your data.
• Email — our email provider sends transactional messages.
• Payments — PayPal processes subscriptions.
• AI — Anthropic, for transaction categorization (merchant text only).
• AI assistants you connect — only if you connect one, and only what it reads on your behalf (see above).

We may also disclose information if required by law, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of our users or others.

Plaid

We use Plaid to connect your financial accounts. By using PennyFinch, you also agree to Plaid's End User Privacy Policy, available at https://plaid.com/legal/#end-user-privacy-policy. You can review and revoke connected accounts at any time within PennyFinch, and through Plaid at my.plaid.com.

Security

We use measures designed to protect your information, including encryption in transit (HTTPS), hashed passwords, encryption of sensitive credentials, and restricted internal access. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, but we work to protect your data.

Data retention and deletion

You can disconnect any institution at any time; we delete the data associated with that connection.

You can delete your account and all associated data from Settings, or by emailing admin@pennyfinch.com.

We retain data while your account is active and as needed for legal and operational purposes.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or export your personal information, and to opt out of certain processing. To exercise these, contact admin@pennyfinch.com.

Cookies and local storage

We use essential cookies and browser storage to keep you signed in and remember your preferences. We do not use third-party advertising trackers.

Children

PennyFinch is not directed to children under 18, and we do not knowingly collect their information.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. We will post the new effective date here and, for material changes, take reasonable steps to notify you.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Email admin@pennyfinch.com.