This Privacy Policy explains how Expense Collector ("we", "us", the "App") collects, uses, and protects your information. By using the App you agree to this policy.
1. Information We Collect
- Account information — your name, email address, and a securely hashed password when you create an account.
- Expense data — the expenses you record: description, amount, currency, category, date, optional notes, and U.S. state.
- Receipt images — photos of receipts you choose to scan or upload, and the text extracted from them for auto-filling expense fields.
- Subscription status — your subscription tier and validation records for in-app purchases processed by Apple or Google Play.
- Sharing information — when you send expenses to someone for approval or reimbursement, the email address you enter for that person, and the decisions and notes they record in response.
- Basic technical data — limited diagnostic information needed to operate and secure the service.
2. How We Use Your Information
- To provide the core service: storing, organizing, and displaying your expenses across your devices.
- To extract data from receipt images (OCR) so fields can be auto-filled.
- To authenticate you and keep your account secure.
- To verify and manage your subscription.
- To send essential account communications (for example, email verification and password reset).
- To deliver expenses you choose to share to the person you send them to, and to return their decision to you.
3. How Your Data Is Stored
Your account and expense data are stored on our secured servers and associated with your account so your records are available when you sign in on any device. Passwords are stored only as salted bcrypt hashes — we never store your plain-text password. Receipt images are stored in secured cloud storage or our database.
4. Sharing & Third Parties
We do not sell your personal information.
Sharing with people you choose
The App lets you send expenses to another person — typically a manager, employer or accountant — so they can approve, decline, ask for more information, or mark them reimbursed. This is the only way your expense data reaches another person, and it never happens unless you start it.
When you share expenses:
- What they receive — a copy of the expenses you selected, including their descriptions, amounts, dates, categories, notes and the receipt images attached to them. They do not get access to any other part of your account.
- Who they are — the person you name by email address. They must already have an Expense Collector account with a verified email before a share will open, so expenses cannot be sent to an address that nobody has proven they control.
- What they see about you — your name and the email address on your account, so they know who sent the expenses. Likewise, their name and email address are shown to you with their decision.
- Taking it back — you can withdraw a share at any time, which removes the copy from the recipient. The original expenses remain yours.
If you enter someone's email address to share with them, you are giving us that address for the purpose of delivering the share and notifying them about it. We do not use it to market anything to them, and we do not add them to any mailing list.
Service providers
We otherwise share data only with service providers strictly necessary to operate the App, such as:
- Apple and Google Play — process in-app subscription payments and provide purchase receipts for validation.
- Google (Gemini API) — when you scan a receipt, the image is sent to Google to read it and extract the merchant, amount, date, tax and similar fields.
- OCR.space — also reads text from receipt images, used alongside or instead of the above depending on the receipt.
- Render — hosts our backend.
- Neon — hosts our database.
- Cloudflare R2 — stores your receipt images.
- Brevo — sends account and notification emails on our behalf.
If you would rather not have a receipt image leave the App, you can enter an expense manually instead of scanning it — nothing is sent to the providers above when you do.
We may disclose information if required by law.
5. Payments
All subscription payments are handled entirely by Apple's In-App Purchase system (on iOS) or Google Play Billing (on Android). We never receive or store your credit card or payment details.
6. Data Retention & Account Deletion
We retain your data for as long as your account is active. You can permanently delete your account at any time from Settings → Delete Account within the App. Deleting your account removes your profile, expenses, receipt images, folders, and subscription records from our active systems.
Expenses you shared with someone are emptied once the share has been settled and 90 days have passed, so a finished reimbursement claim does not sit in their account indefinitely. The record that the share happened, and its outcome, is kept.
7. Security
We use industry-standard measures — encrypted transport (HTTPS), hashed passwords, and access controls scoped to your account — to protect your data. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but we work to protect your information.
8. Children's Privacy
The App is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.
9. Your Rights
You may access, correct, export, or delete your data. Most of this is available directly in the App; for other requests, contact us below.
10. Changes to This Policy
We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by the "Last updated" date above.
11. Contact Us
Questions about this policy? Email support@expensecollector.app.