Your money is your business

 

Hi. Thanks for taking a look at Hearth.

 

Before we get into what the app does, we want to be upfront about how we treat your information. Hearth is a shared expense tracker — it lives in the place where people split rent, argue about groceries, and quietly buy each other birthday presents. That's a sensitive corner of life, and we built Hearth around that.

 

Here's the short version, and then the longer one.

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The short version

 

• We don't have your data. Hearth has no server. Your expenses live on your phone, and (if you turn it on) in your own private iCloud account.

• We don't track you. No analytics, no usage logging, no crash reporters, no advertising IDs. None of it.

• We don't link to your bank. Hearth never sees your statements, your accounts, or your card numbers.

• You decide what your household sees. Every expense has a privacy setting. Private means private — even from your partner.

• The app works without the internet. You can use Hearth on a plane with iCloud turned off and lose nothing.

 

If that's all you needed, you can stop reading. The rest is detail.

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What we collect

 

Nothing.

 

We say that plainly because people often expect a long list here. There isn't one. We don't have a database of our users. We don't know who you are, what you spend, or that you opened the app this morning.

 

The reason we can say this is that Hearth has no backend server. When you type an expense, it gets saved on your phone. That's the end of the journey. The data doesn't pass through us on the way there, and we don't get a copy.

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What stays on your device

 

Everything you put into Hearth.

 

• The expenses you log.

• The categories you create.

• Your household members and the way you've named and colored them.

• Your budgets, your private notes, your voice recordings — all of it.

 

This information lives in the app's storage on your iPhone. If you delete the app, it's gone. If you reset your phone, it's gone. If you never turn on iCloud sync, it never leaves your device.

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What happens if you turn on iCloud sync

 

iCloud sync is optional. It's off by default until you choose to turn it on.

 

When you do turn it on, here's what happens: your phone uses Apple's iCloud service to keep your data in sync between your own devices, and to share the household view with the people you've invited into your household.

 

A few things to know:

 

• iCloud is yours. It's your Apple account, your storage, your terms with Apple. We aren't a party to it. We can't see what's in there.

• We don't get a copy. Sync runs between your phone and Apple. We're not on that path.

• Other household members only see the household view. Your private expenses don't enter the shared space. More on that below.

 

If you've ever used iMessage or Notes with iCloud turned on, this is the same idea. Apple holds the data; we don't.

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How sharing with your household works

 

When you join a household in Hearth, you're inviting specific people to see specific things. There are three privacy levels for every expense you log:

 

Shared

Everyone in your household can see this — the merchant, the amount, the category, when it happened. Use this for the usual stuff: groceries, the rent payment, dinner out.

 

Contributed

Other members see that you spent something in a category, and they see the amount. They don't see what it was, where it was, or exactly when. Use this when you want credit for chipping in toward, say, "groceries" or "transit" without showing the merchant.

 

Private

Only you ever see this expense. Other household members see a small purple dot in your activity — that's it. They can tell you logged something private, but they can never see the amount, the merchant, the category, or anything else.

 

We chose to show the purple dot rather than hide private expenses entirely because we think trust works better when it's honest. Your household knows the private setting exists, knows you used it, and that's all they know. The contents are yours.

 

You can also set, per-person, how much of your activity each member sees — including "balances only" or "nothing at all." That lives in Settings → Privacy.

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What we do not do

 

We want to be specific here, because "we care about your privacy" is something every company says.

 

• No analytics. We don't use Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, PostHog, or anything else. We can't tell you how many people use Hearth, because we don't measure it.

• No telemetry. The app doesn't ping us when you open it, when you tap a button, or when you crash. We don't have a "feature usage" dashboard.

• No crash reporters. No Sentry, no Crashlytics, no Bugsnag. If the app crashes, Apple may give you the option to share a report with Apple — that's between you and Apple, and we don't read it.

• No advertising. Hearth has no ads. We don't sell ad space. We don't share data with ad networks. There is no advertising ID in use.

• No bank linking. Hearth never connects to your bank, your card issuer, or services like Plaid. We never see your accounts.

• No receipt scanning. Hearth doesn't take pictures of your receipts and we don't run them through OCR services.

• No "free with your data." We're not the product. You are the user.

 

If we ever change any of this, we'll tell you clearly, in the app, before it happens. We won't bury it in a privacy update.

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Voice and Apple Pay

 

Hearth has two features that touch sensitive parts of your phone, so we want to call them out specifically.

 

Voice

You can log expenses by speaking instead of typing. The speech recognition runs on your device using Apple's built-in Speech framework. Your voice doesn't get uploaded anywhere, and we don't keep an audio recording. The first time you use it, iOS will ask you for microphone and speech recognition permission — you can say no and the rest of the app keeps working.

 

Apple Pay(feature not available yet)

If you tap to pay with Apple Pay, Hearth can offer to log the expense for you afterward. We never see the card, the bank, or the merchant from Apple Pay's side — Apple Pay doesn't tell apps that. Hearth just gives you a quick prompt to confirm an expense after the tap. You can ignore the prompt, or turn the feature off entirely.

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Children's privacy

 

Hearth isn't designed for children. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone — and that includes children — because we don't collect information from anyone at all.

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If you stop using Hearth

 

Delete the app and the data on your phone goes with it. If you had iCloud sync on, the data in your iCloud account stays in your iCloud account until you delete it from there too. That's up to you — it's your iCloud.

 

There is no account to close on our side, because there was never an account to begin with.

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When things change

 

If we ever change how Hearth handles your information, we'll update this page and tell you in the app. We won't make a change that quietly broadens what we collect — that's the kind of move that breaks the thing we're trying to build.

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Getting in touch

 

If you have a question about any of this, or you spot something on this page that doesn't match how the app actually behaves, please tell us. The shortest path is to email us at breadbin.sour@gmail.com .

 

Thanks for reading. We hope Hearth feels like a calmer place to handle the money side of your home.

 

— The Hearth team