Means — Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 1, 2026

1. Overview

Means ("we", "our", "the app") is an AI-powered budgeting application. We are committed to protecting your privacy and financial data. This policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and your rights.

2. Data We Collect

• Account Information: Email address and encrypted password (if you create an account). Device identifier for anonymous users.
• Financial Data: When you connect your bank accounts through Plaid, we access your account balances, transaction history, and account metadata (account name, type, institution).
• Budget Configuration: Monthly income, bills, and savings targets you enter manually.
• Purchase Information: If you subscribe to a paid plan, we receive your subscription tier, status (such as trialing, active, or expired), and renewal dates from the app stores via RevenueCat. Payment is handled entirely by Apple — we never see your card number or billing details.
• Diagnostics: Crash and error reports (such as error messages and app version) to help us find and fix bugs. These are not linked to your identity and are never used for advertising.

3. How We Use Your Data

• Calculate your daily, weekly, and monthly spendable amounts
• Provide AI-powered spending analysis and answers about your own transactions, but only if you have turned AI on (see section 6a). Means is a budgeting tool, not a financial adviser, and does not provide financial, investment, tax, or legal advice
• Detect spending patterns and recurring transactions
• Send push notifications about your budget status (with your permission)

4. Plaid Integration

We use Plaid to securely connect to your financial institutions. When you link a bank account:

• Your bank login credentials are entered directly into Plaid's secure interface — we never see or store your bank username or password.
• Plaid provides us with an access token that allows us to retrieve your account and transaction data.
• Access tokens are encrypted using AES-256-GCM before being stored in our database.
• You can disconnect your bank accounts at any time.

Plaid's privacy policy: https://plaid.com/legal

5. Data Security

• All data is transmitted over HTTPS/TLS encryption.
• Financial access tokens are encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM.
• User passwords are hashed using bcrypt with salt rounds.
• We use JWT tokens for authentication with automatic expiration.
• Our servers are hosted on secure cloud infrastructure with regular security updates.

6. Data Sharing

We do not sell or rent your data, and we never share it for advertising or marketing.

We share data only with the service providers below, strictly to operate the app:

• Plaid: To retrieve your bank account and transaction data.
• Anthropic (Claude AI): only if you turn AI on. See section 6a below for exactly what is sent.
• RevenueCat: Our subscription-management processor. RevenueCat receives your app user ID and store purchase receipts to keep your subscription status in sync across devices. It does not receive your financial data. RevenueCat's privacy policy: https://www.revenuecat.com/privacy
• Expo: If you turn on notifications, your device's push token is shared with Expo's push service solely to deliver those notifications. Push messages carry no transaction details, balances or amounts.
• Amazon Web Services: Our hosting and email provider. Your data is stored in AWS in the United States, and account emails (verification, password reset) are delivered through Amazon SES.
• Law enforcement: Only when legally required by court order or subpoena.

6a. AI and your money (Anthropic)

AI is off until you turn it on. Means asks you before anything is sent, shows you this same wording in the app, and sends nothing to Anthropic unless you have said yes. You can turn it off again at any time in Settings, and the app stops sending immediately.

The wording below is word-for-word the wording shown in the app on the AI screen, so nothing here is broader than what you agreed to.

What gets sent when your bank syncs

• The name of the place you spent — for example, Blue Bottle Coffee
• Whether the money went out or came in
• The rough category your bank already gave it — for example, Food and Drink

Labelling never sends the amount.

What gets sent when Means checks your recurring payments

When Means works out which payments repeat, it sends the payee name, how often it repeats and the amount of each one — so it can tell a real bill apart from a one-off. This happens on its own, without you asking.

What gets sent when you ask a question

Your question, your budget numbers, and your recent transactions — including their amounts and dates — so the answer can use your real figures. To answer a question about a longer stretch, it can also send totals from up to two years of your history, added up by place, by category or by month.

What gets sent when you open your month story

When you tap to read your month story, it sends that month in totals: what you spent against what you had to spend, your top categories and how they changed, the amount and category of your biggest purchase, how many paydays landed and how many weeks ran over, and the name of your savings goal and how much it grew. It does not send your individual transactions.

What is never sent

Your name, your email address, your account numbers and your balances are never sent, either way.

Who it goes to

Anthropic, the company that makes Claude. Anthropic uses it only to produce the answer and does not train its models on it. Anthropic's privacy policy: https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy

Why

So your spending gets labelled without you doing it by hand, and so you can ask questions about your money in plain English.

You can change your mind

You can turn this off at any time in Settings. Means works without it — your number, your budget and everything on Home are unaffected.

7. Data Retention

• Your data is retained as long as your account is active.
• You can delete your account and all associated data at any time through the app's Settings.
• Upon account deletion, all data Means holds — including encrypted tokens, transactions, settings, and our record of your subscription events — is permanently removed within 30 days.
• Purchase records held by Apple and by RevenueCat (our subscription processor) are not removed when you delete your Means account. Those processors keep the records of any subscription you bought — your app user ID (a random identifier, not your name or email) and the store receipts — for their own legal, tax, and accounting needs, under their own privacy policies. These records contain no bank or transaction data.
• Deleting your Means account does not cancel a subscription. Cancel it in your app store's subscription settings (on iPhone: Settings → your name → Subscriptions).

8. Your Rights

You have the right to:

• Access all data we have about you
• Request deletion of your data
• Disconnect bank accounts at any time
• Turn AI on or off at any time in Settings — it is off unless you turn it on
• Opt out of push notifications
• Export your transaction data

9. Children's Privacy

Means is not intended for users under 18 years of age. We do not knowingly collect data from children.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify users of significant changes through the app.

11. Contact

For privacy questions or data requests, contact us at: privacy@means.finance