Your data
What happens to your receipts.
A receipt is not a number. It is a record of where you were, when you were there, and what you bought — and handing a pile of them to a stranger is a real thing to hesitate about. This page is the answer in plain words. The privacy policy says the same things in the form a lawyer would want.
The short version
Five things, and none of them has an asterisk.
- Your receipts are never sold. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anybody, in any form. There is no version of this business where that changes, because the paid plan is the business.
- Nothing you do here is used to advertise to you. There are no advertising networks on this site or in the app.
- A machine reads your receipts, and it is not learning from them. The reading is done by Google's Gemini as a paid service, and under the terms for paid services what is sent is not used to train it.
- They sit on one server in Helsinki, rented from Hetzner. Backups sit in the same place.
- You can take everything out at any time, on either plan, in a format any spreadsheet opens. Leaving is not a negotiation.
The reading
Who actually looks at the photograph.
When you photograph a receipt, the picture goes to our server and from there to Google's Gemini, which reads what is printed on it and hands back the shop, the date, the lines, the tax and the total. We pay for that reading. It is a paid service, and Google's terms for paid services say the material sent is not used to train their models. That is written down in section 4 of the policy.
One other thing travels with the photograph, and only one: which currency your books are kept in, so that a slip printed without a symbol is read as the right money. Not your email address, not your name, not the rest of your books, not your other receipts. The reader gets a picture and a currency, and nothing that says whose it is.
Where they sit
One server, in Finland.
Your account, your receipts and the photographs themselves are on a server in Helsinki, rented from Hetzner Online GmbH. Backups are kept the same way and in the same place. Section 5 says it formally.
Being honest about the part that is less tidy: we are in Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada, the machine is in Finland, and some of the services we use operate elsewhere, including the United States. That means your information crosses borders and can, in principle, be reached by the courts of those countries under their own laws. That is true of every service of this kind; it is stated here rather than left for you to work out.
What is not here
One cookie, and nothing that follows you.
There is a single cookie and its only job is to keep you signed in. No advertising networks. No analytics that follow you from site to site. Not even a typeface loaded from somebody else's server — the fonts on this page come from our own machine, so that reading it does not tell a third company you read it.
You can check that claim rather than take it: open your browser's network panel on this page and count who it talks to. It should be us, and nobody else.
Leaving
Taking it all back out.
A copy, whenever you like. The export is in the app, on both plans, and it holds everything — receipts, lines, categories — in a plain format any spreadsheet opens. You do not have to ask us, and we are not told when you do it.
Deleting from the app. A receipt you delete leaves your books at once and stops appearing anywhere. A hidden copy is kept so that a mistake can be undone; it is not read, not counted, and not used for anything.
Gone from the server. That is a request rather than a button, so that it cannot happen by accident. Write to hello@expensegauge.com or send it from inside the app, and say what you want erased — one receipt or the whole account. It is done within 30 days and we tell you when. We do not ask why. Backups taken before the request age out within a further 14 days.
The part nobody likes writing
What we cannot promise.
A page like this is worth nothing if it only contains the comfortable half.
- Your mailbox is the key. There is no password here, which means there is no password to steal — and it also means that whoever can read your email can sign in as you. Protect that mailbox as you would protect this account.
- No service can promise it will never be broken into. Ours cannot either. What we can promise is that if it happens and it puts you at real risk, you will be told, and it will be reported as the law requires.
- The reader is a machine and machines misread. A faded line, a crease, a shop that prints its totals oddly. Every total is checked against what the paper says and the app tells you when they disagree — but it will get things wrong, and the correction is yours to make.
- Erasure is not instant. It is a request answered within 30 days, by a person, and backups age out after that. A button that promised "gone now" would be a promise about somebody else's backup tapes.
Straight answers
The questions people actually ask before they sign up.
Do you sell my receipts?
No — not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anybody, and not in an anonymised form either. The paid plan is how this is paid for, which is the whole reason the answer can stay this short.
Is my data used to train an AI?
No. The reading is done through Google’s Gemini as a paid service, and under the terms for paid services what is sent is not used to train their models. Section 4 of the policy says so.
Where is my data physically?
On one server in Helsinki, Finland, rented from Hetzner, and the backups are there too. Section 5.
What happens if I stop paying?
Nothing is deleted. The account returns to the free plan and everything you have entered stays where it is. See pricing.
What happens if you shut down?
You would be told, with enough notice to take your books out, and the export that does that is already in the app today and does not depend on us being around to run it.
Do you use cookies to track me?
There is one cookie and it keeps you signed in. No advertising networks, no cross-site analytics, and no third-party fonts or scripts. Section 7.
How do I get everything erased?
Write to hello@expensegauge.com or send the request from inside the app. Within 30 days it is gone from the server and you are told; backups age out within a further 14 days. Section 9.
Who else is involved in running this?
Hetzner hosts the server, Google provides the reading, Stripe takes payment and never lets your card number reach us, an email provider delivers your sign-in codes, and Telegram only if you choose to link it. None of them may use your information for their own purposes. Section 6.
Still uneasy? Ask.
A question about your data is answered within 30 days, by a person, at hello@expensegauge.com. The full policy is at privacy, and the agreement itself is in the terms.