Information We Collect
When you create an account, we collect your email address and display name. When you connect bank accounts, we receive transaction data (amounts, dates, merchant names, categories) and account information (names, types, balances) through your chosen data provider. We also store your budget configuration and preferences. If you use the optional voice-input button in the AI assistant, your spoken audio is sent to your device's speech-recognition service (provided by Google) and converted to text — PaceBudget itself does not record or store audio and receives only the resulting text.
How We Use Your Information
We use your data solely to provide PaceBudget's budgeting features: calculating daily spending pace, tracking fixed obligations, categorizing transactions, and sending budget notifications. Some of these features use artificial intelligence (see “AI Features” below). We do not sell, rent, or share your personal or financial data with third parties for marketing purposes.
AI Features
PaceBudget uses a third-party AI provider, Anthropic (Claude), to power two things: automatic categorization and recurring-charge detection when your transactions sync, and the in-app AI assistant you can chat with about your budget.
- What is sent: the messages you type or speak to the assistant, and relevant transaction records — amounts, dates, merchant names, and categories, including individual transactions when your question is about a specific merchant. We de-identify this data before it is sent — your name is removed from transaction descriptions.
- What is not sent: your bank login credentials, access tokens, full account numbers, email address, or password.
- Training: your data is never used to train AI models. Anthropic processes it only to return the result to you.
- Consent: the AI assistant asks for your explicit consent before you use it for the first time. Anthropic's practices are described in their Privacy Policy.
Third-Party Services
- Plaid — We use Plaid to securely connect to your bank accounts and retrieve transaction and account data, with your explicit authorization during the connection flow. Plaid's privacy practices are described in their Privacy Policy.
- Google Play Billing — If you subscribe through the Android app, your subscription is processed by Google Play in-app billing. We do not store your payment details; these are handled by Google per their Privacy Policy.
- Stripe — If you subscribe through the web app, we use Stripe to process subscription payments. We do not store your payment card details; these are handled entirely by Stripe per their Privacy Policy.
- Firebase — We use Google Firebase for authentication and push notifications. Firebase's data practices are governed by Google's Privacy Policy.
- Anthropic (Claude) — We use Anthropic's AI models to categorize transactions and power the in-app AI assistant. See “AI Features” above for what is and isn't shared. Anthropic's practices are described in their Privacy Policy.
- Sentry — We use Sentry for crash and error diagnostics. Error reports are scrubbed of personal and financial data before they are sent. Sentry's practices are described in their Privacy Policy.
- Google (device speech recognition) — If you use voice input in the AI assistant, your device's speech service transcribes your audio to text. This is governed by Google's Privacy Policy.
Data Security
All bank access tokens are encrypted at rest using the ASP.NET Core Data Protection API. All communications are transmitted over HTTPS. We use cookie-based authentication with secure, HTTP-only cookies and rate limiting on authentication endpoints.
Data Retention & Deletion
We retain your data for as long as your account is active. You can delete your account at any time from the Settings page, or from our public account deletion page if you've lost access to your sign-in. Account deletion permanently removes all your data from our systems, revokes third-party access tokens, and deletes your authentication record. This action cannot be undone.
Contact
If you have questions about this privacy policy or your data, please contact us at support@pacebudget.com.