Privacy policy

Overview

Zadd is a personal finance app built around the United Arab Emirates, and usable from anywhere. This policy explains what information we collect, why we collect it, where it's stored, and your rights over it.

What we collect

• Account info— your Apple Sign In identity: the name you choose to share and your email (or Apple's private relay address). Zadd never sees or stores a password.
• App data — budgets, categories, accounts and transactions, investment holdings, gold and valuables, and customisations you create inside the app. This lives on your device, not on our servers.
• AI processing data— when you use the AI features (automatic categorisation, insights, budget drafts), the app sends merchant names and computed figures to our backend for processing. To file a shop it hasn't seen before, it can include up to six of your earlier merchants that look most like it, each with the category you filed it under, so the answer follows how you use your categories. Nothing else about those purchases. Never account numbers, never bank credentials — Zadd has none to send.
• Shops, learned together— unless you turn off “Learn shops together” in Settings, Zadd shares the name of each shop you filed from a bank alert, card tap or statement, and the name of the category you filed it under, so other people's new shops land in the right place the first time (and theirs help yours). It is stored with a one-way code in place of your account, so it can't be traced back to you, and a shop is only shown to anyone once three different people have filed it (a category name, once two have). Never amounts, dates, balances or names you typed yourself.
• Your spending pattern, for the read on your Insights page — to say something about your habits rather than repeat numbers you can already see, that feature sends the merchants you spent the most with this month and last, each with how many times you paid them and the total. Nothing else about them: not the dates, not the individual purchases, not your balances. It is what lets Zadd notice that eleven delivery orders is a habit and not eleven separate facts.
• Bank alert context— if you set up the bank-messages or bank app notifications automation, the text of a bank transaction alert (an SMS, or a bank app's notification with the app's name) is sent together with a small slice of your recent ledger: the amounts, dates and types of the transactions from the ten days around that alert, the last four digits of your cards, and the names you gave your accounts. Never merchant names, never balances, nothing from outside that window. That slice is what lets Zadd recognise a payment you already logged instead of asking you about it twice.
• Files you import— when you import a spreadsheet, its column headings and a few sample rows are sent so Zadd can tell which column is which, and the category names in it so they can be matched to yours. When you import a PDF statement or screenshots, the words are read on your phone first, and that text — the statement's transactions, with their dates, descriptions and amounts — is sent to be read into rows. The images themselves never leave your phone. Nothing you import is kept by us once the answer comes back.
• Usage counters — a daily count of your AI requests, kept to enforce fair-use limits.
• Diagnostics — when automatic logging refuses something the AI proposed, we record the shape of that mistake: which check refused it, what kind of message it was, and how far off the figures or dates were. Never the message itself, never merchant or account names, never your actual amounts or balances. It exists so a bad pattern can be found before it becomes your problem.
• Anonymous weekly stats— once a week the app sends a summary that helps us improve automatic logging: how many of that week's transactions were logged from bank messages, Apple Pay, statements or by hand; how often a balance had to be corrected; which banks sent alerts (recognised bank names only); when you changed a category Zadd picked, from which category to which; and your spending mix as rounded percentages (want vs need, share per category, a savings-rate band). Category names are sent only when they are Zadd's built-in ones or common generic names like "Restaurants" or "Parking" — any other name you gave a category is sent as "Custom". It is not stored with your account or any device identifier, and it never includes amounts, balances, merchant or account names, or message text. It is on by default; turn it off any time in Settings → Preferences → Share anonymous stats.

Where it's stored

Your financial ledger is stored on your iPhone. Our backend (Supabase, a managed Postgres platform) stores only your sign-in identity, AI usage counters, the diagnostics and the anonymous weekly stats described above, with row-level security so only your own signed-in session can touch rows tagged with your user ID. The weekly stats carry no user ID at all.

AI requests are processed transiently: the merchant names, figures and bank alert context sent for categorisation, insights or automatic logging are not written to our database.

Who we share with

• Anthropic— our AI provider. Merchant names, computed figures, the spending pattern described above, the text of files and screenshots you choose to import, and — if you set up the bank-messages automation — the text of bank transaction alerts with the name-free ledger slice described above are processed through the Anthropic API to answer your request or file the transaction, and are not used to train their models. Only bank-style transaction alerts ever leave your phone: verification codes, personal messages and notifications that aren't transactions are checked on-device and destroyed immediately, never stored, never uploaded. Their privacy policy is at anthropic.com/privacy.
• Supabase — our backend infrastructure provider. Their privacy policy is at supabase.com/privacy.
• Apple — when you sign in with Apple, the standard Apple Sign In flow applies.

We don't sell or rent your data to anyone, for anything.

Your rights

• Access and export — your data is visible inside the app at all times. We can provide a structured export on request.
• Delete your data — your ledger lives on your phone; deleting the app deletes it. To remove your Zadd account (sign-in identity and usage counters), email privacy@zadd-ae.com — in-app deletion arrives before public launch.
• Use Zadd without AI — signed out, the AI features simply switch off and nothing leaves your phone.

Security

Connections to our backend use TLS 1.2+. Sign-in is handled by Apple — there is no Zadd password to steal. Authentication tokens are stored in the iOS Keychain on-device, and the app offers Face ID lock.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Email privacy@zadd-ae.com.