Privacy Policy

Effective Date: October 2026

Smart Expense Coach ("we", "our", or "us") is dedicated to protecting your privacy and personal financial data. This Privacy Policy details our data practices, third-party subprocessors, security measures, and data retention policies.

1. Information We Collect

Account Credentials: Username, email address, phone number, and cryptographically hashed passwords / OTPs. We never store or log plaintext passwords or OTP codes.
Financial Transactions: Expense records (amount, category, description, date), budget cycle limits, and peer split group settlements.
Voice & Message Inputs: Spoken audio and text commands sent via WhatsApp or our mobile application for automatic expense parsing.
Technical Logs: Device type, IP address (for rate-limiting and brute-force protection), and client error reports.

2. AI & Third-Party Subprocessors

To deliver real-time financial tracking and voice recognition, we utilize vetted industry-leading subprocessors:

Groq Inc. (AI Processing): Powers Whisper audio transcription and Llama-3 NLP models for expense extraction. Audio data is processed in-memory for transcription and is not retained or used to train public foundation models.
Neon / PostgreSQL (Database Hosting): Encrypted PostgreSQL cloud database storing user profiles, hashed credentials, and transactions with automated snapshot backups.
Meta / WhatsApp Business (Messaging Interface): Delivers conversational messaging and instant expense confirmations via WhatsApp.
Render (Application Hosting): Secure container hosting running our hardened Django backend and Gunicorn application servers.
Resend / Brevo: Delivers transactional OTP codes and account verification emails.

3. Data Retention & Deletion Policy

Active Accounts: User data and transaction records are retained as long as your account remains open to provide historical financial trends and budgeting insights.
Account Deletion: When an account is deleted via the app or admin interface, all user-linked transactions, notes, split memberships, profiles, and tokens are permanently and immediately purged from active databases via cascading deletes.
Analytics & Client Error Logs: Performance telemetry and client error traces are retained for a maximum of 90 days, after which they are systematically cleared.
Database Backups: Automated database snapshots are encrypted at rest and retained on a rolling 7-to-30 day lifecycle for disaster recovery before permanent purging.

4. Security & Cryptography

We enforce strict security boundaries: all data in transit is encrypted using TLS 1.3/HTTPS, authentication tokens are stored securely (using SecureStore on mobile), cookies are marked Secure and SameSite, and OTPs are hashed using HMAC-SHA256.

5. Contact & Data Subject Rights