Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

TailorBudget ("TailorBudget", "we", "us") is a personal and household budgeting application operated by CNEstate3 LLC. This policy explains what personal information we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, and what you can and cannot currently do about it.

We have written this policy to describe what our software actually does today, not what we intend it to do later. Where a capability does not exist yet, we say so plainly rather than implying it exists. Sections marked "Current limitation" describe real gaps in the product as built.

2. Information we collect

2.1 Information you give us when you create an account

When you register for a TailorBudget account, we collect:

• First name and last name
• Email address: this is also your login identifier and must be unique.
• Password: see Section 5.1 for how this is handled. We never store your password in readable form.
• Date of birth: requested by our signup form, and used to confirm you meet our minimum age requirement (Section 9) and to group you into an age range for comparison features. Your date of birth is not displayed to other users, including anyone who shares your household.

2.2 Information you give us as you use the app

• Budget categories and budget amounts you create or adjust. You can rename categories, so whatever you type becomes part of your stored data.
• Income streams: a nickname you choose (for example, "Ana's paycheck"), pay frequency, expected amounts, and keywords used to recognise matching deposits.
• Transactions you enter manually or import from a CSV file: date, amount, description, category, and any note you add.
• Onboarding and profile answers, including, if you use the investment features, your stated risk tolerance, your investing experience level, and the market sectors you say you are interested in.
• Support requests: if you contact us through the in-app help form, we store the name, email address, category, and free-text description you submit, together with your account ID if you are signed in.

2.3 Information from your bank, via Plaid

Connecting a bank account is an optional, paid-tier feature. If you choose to connect one, we use Plaid Inc. to establish and maintain that connection.

• You enter your bank credentials directly into Plaid's interface. Your bank username and password are never sent to, seen by, or stored by TailorBudget.
• Plaid returns to us an access token, which lets us request your transaction data. We store this token encrypted (Section 5.2).
• We request the transactions product from Plaid only. From each transaction we store the merchant or description, the amount, and the date.
• We also store the name of your financial institution (for example, "Chase") so we can show you which bank a connection belongs to.

What we do not collect through Plaid: we do not request or store account balances, account or routing numbers, account holder names, or investment holdings. Our integration requests transaction data only.

We use this bank data for one purpose: to populate your budget with your spending and income so you do not have to enter it by hand. We do not use it for advertising, credit decisions, underwriting, scoring, or resale.

Plaid handles your information under its own privacy policy, which we encourage you to read.

2.4 Billing information

If you subscribe to TailorBudget Pro, payment is processed by Stripe, Inc.

• Checkout happens on a Stripe-hosted page. Your card number, expiry, CVC, and billing address are entered directly with Stripe.
• TailorBudget never receives or stores your card number or any raw payment details. This is a property of how the integration is built, not just a policy commitment.
• We send Stripe your email address and an internal reference to your account so the payment can be matched to you.
• We store, on our side, only: your Stripe customer ID, your Stripe subscription ID, your current plan tier, whether the subscription is set to cancel at the end of the period, and the date the current billing period ends.

Stripe processes your payment information under its own privacy policy.

2.5 Waitlist signups

If you enter your email address on our pre-launch "coming soon" page, we store that email address and the date you submitted it, so we can contact you when TailorBudget launches. Nothing else is collected on that form.

2.6 Invitations

If you invite a partner to your household, or refer someone to TailorBudget, we store the email address you entered for that person, your account ID as the sender, the household the invitation relates to, and the invitation's creation and expiry times.

Please note: we store an invited person's email address whether or not they ever accept the invitation or create an account. Invitations expire after 30 days and can only be used once.

Current limitation: there is currently no way to cancel or revoke an invitation after it has been sent, and redeemed invitation records are retained rather than deleted.

2.7 Information we do not collect

To be explicit, because budgeting apps are often assumed to do these things:

• We do not use third-party advertising networks, analytics platforms, or tracking pixels. There are no Google Analytics, Meta, Segment, Mixpanel or similar trackers in the application.
• We do not sell your personal information.
• We do not share your personal information with data brokers, advertisers, or marketing partners.
• We do not collect your location, contacts, device identifiers for advertising, or biometric data.

3. How we use your information

We use the information described above to:

• Create and maintain your account and keep you signed in.
• Display your budget, spending, income, and trends.
• Automatically sort transactions into budget categories.
• Generate budgeting insights and suggestions.
• Let the members of a shared household see the same household budget.
• Process and manage your subscription.
• Respond to support requests you send us.
• Send transactional email that is necessary to operate the service, such as a password reset link.

4. Automated processing and AI

TailorBudget uses artificial intelligence in several places. We think you should know precisely what is sent where, so this section is specific.

We use Anthropic's Claude models (currently Claude Haiku 4.5) via Anthropic's API. There are three distinct uses, and they send very different amounts of data:

4.1 Transaction categorisation: sends your real transaction data

To sort your transactions into budget categories, we send the transaction's description (for example, the merchant name) and its amount to Anthropic, along with the names of your budget categories, and ask the model which category each transaction belongs to.

This means real descriptions and real amounts from your account, including transactions imported from your bank, are transmitted to Anthropic for processing. We do not send your name, email address, date of birth, account numbers, or bank credentials as part of this.

Because you can rename your budget categories, please be aware that whatever you name a category is also sent as part of this request.

TailorBudget also builds a private, per-household statistical model from your categorised transactions so that over time more categorisation can happen locally, on our own servers, without an external call. That model stays within your household's own data and is not shared with other households.

Current limitation: there is currently no setting that lets you turn off AI categorisation or opt out of this processing while continuing to use the app.

4.2 Budgeting advice: sends summary figures only

The smart-advice feature sends only aggregated figures: the percentage of each budget used, month-over-month movement, over/under-budget streaks, an overall savings rate, and how many months of history exist. Category names are replaced with generic placeholders before the request is sent. No transaction descriptions and no dollar amounts are sent for this feature.

4.3 The Budgee assistant: sends your questions, not your finances

Budgee is a help assistant that answers questions about how to use TailorBudget. We send your question, the recent back-and-forth of that conversation (a limited number of recent turns), and the name of your subscription tier to Anthropic. Budgee is not given your transactions, balances, or budget figures.

Please do not type sensitive personal or financial details into Budgee, since whatever you type is sent for processing.

4.4 Investment signals

TailorBudget's investment feature analyses a fixed, pre-set list of publicly traded stocks and cryptocurrencies using public market data and AI-generated commentary. This analysis is the same for every user and is not generated from your personal financial data. Your saved risk tolerance, experience level, and sector preferences are then used on our own servers to re-order and filter that shared list for you.

Nothing in this feature is investment advice. See our Terms of Service, "Not Financial, Investment, Tax, or Legal Advice."

4.5 Training

We do not send your data to Anthropic for the purpose of training AI models.

5. How we protect your information

These are the specific protections actually implemented in TailorBudget today.

5.1 Passwords

Your password is never stored in readable form. We store it using PBKDF2 with HMAC-SHA256, 260,000 iterations, and a unique random salt for every user. We cannot read, recover, or tell you your password. If you lose it, it can only be reset, not retrieved.

Password reset links are single-use, expire 45 minutes after they are issued, and only a hashed form of the link is stored on our side. Requesting a new reset link immediately invalidates any earlier one. Completing a reset signs your account out of every device. Reset requests are rate-limited.

5.2 Bank access tokens

The access token that allows us to retrieve your transactions is encrypted before it is written to our database, using authenticated symmetric encryption (Fernet: AES-128-CBC with an HMAC-SHA256 integrity check), with the encryption key supplied to the application through its environment rather than stored in the database alongside the data. A stolen copy of the database alone does not yield usable bank access tokens.

5.3 Sessions

Signing in creates a random session token with a 30-day lifetime. Expired sessions are cleared automatically. You can end a session by signing out, and a password reset ends all sessions on the account.

5.4 Honest limits on these assurances

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not claim ours is. In particular:

• We are a small operation. We do not hold SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, or any other security certification, and we do not claim to.
• We have not undergone an independent third-party security audit or penetration test.
• We do not currently operate a formal, documented breach-notification programme, although we will notify affected users of a breach affecting their data as required by applicable law.

6. Who we share information with

We share personal information only with the service providers needed to run TailorBudget:

We also share information where we are legally required to (for example, in response to a valid legal process), or to protect the rights and safety of our users or of TailorBudget.

If TailorBudget is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We would notify you before your information became subject to a materially different privacy policy.

7. Household sharing: please read this carefully

TailorBudget is designed for couples and households, and household sharing is deliberately all-or-nothing.

When someone accepts your partner invitation and joins your household, they can see all of that household's financial data. That includes:

• every transaction in the household, including transactions imported from a connected bank account, with descriptions and amounts;
• all budget categories and budget amounts;
• all income streams, including their nicknames and amounts;
• which bank institutions are connected.

There are no per-category, per-account, or per-member privacy controls. A household member sees the whole household budget.

Members do not gain access to each other's account credentials, password, or date of birth.

Current limitation, this is important: there is currently no way to leave a household, remove a partner from your household, or split a household back into two separate accounts. Once a household is shared, the only available action is to delete your own account (Section 10), and doing so does not remove the household's financial data, which remains visible to the remaining member. Please consider this carefully before inviting someone, particularly if your living situation may change.

Note also that if you accept an invitation to join someone else's household, any budget data already associated with your own previous household is left behind rather than moved with you, and is no longer reachable from your account.

8. Your choices and rights

8.1 What you can do today

• Access and correct your information. You can view and edit your profile, budgets, income streams, and transactions directly in the app at any time.
• Delete individual transactions and categories within the app.
• Disconnect your bank. Disconnecting a linked institution instructs Plaid to revoke our access token and removes the stored connection from our systems. Transactions that were already imported remain in your budget unless you delete them.
• Close your account. See Section 10.
• Contact us with a privacy question or request (Section 12).

8.2 Current limitations we want to be honest about

• There is no automated data export. TailorBudget does not currently have a "download my data" feature. If you want a copy of your data, you must contact us and we will handle it manually.
• Closing your account does not erase all of your data. See Section 10.
• There is no opt-out of AI transaction categorisation (Section 4.1).
• There is no way to leave a shared household (Section 7).

8.3 Legal rights that may apply to you

Depending on where you live, you may have legal rights over your personal information, such as rights to access, correct, delete, or port it, or to object to certain processing.

We want to be straightforward: TailorBudget does not currently operate a formal GDPR or CCPA/CPRA compliance programme, has not appointed a Data Protection Officer, and has not established the automated mechanisms those regimes typically expect. We do not claim to be certified or formally compliant with any privacy regime. Not having a formal programme does not mean these laws do not apply to us. Where a privacy law legally applies to TailorBudget, it applies regardless of whether we have built a programme around it, and we remain obligated to comply with it.

If you make a privacy request, we will do our best to honour it manually, and we will honour requests we are legally required to honour.

9. Children's privacy

TailorBudget is not intended for children under 13.

Our registration form asks for your date of birth, and when a date of birth is supplied, a signup indicating an age under 13 is rejected, both in your browser and again on our server.

An important limitation, stated plainly: our server does not currently require a date of birth in order to create an account. The signup form always asks for one, but the underlying registration interface will accept an account created without one, and in that case no age check is performed. We would rather describe our age verification accurately than overstate how strong it is.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have, we will delete it.

Please also note that this check relies on the date of birth entered at signup. It is not identity verification, and there is no parental-consent flow. Users aged 13 to 17 can currently register without parental involvement.

10. Closing your account, and what happens to your data

You can close your account from within the app. You will be asked to confirm your password.

When you close your account, we delete:

• your user record, including your name, email address, password hash, and date of birth;
• all of your active sessions, signing you out everywhere;
• any outstanding password reset tokens.

When you close your account, the following is NOT currently deleted:

• your household's transaction history, including transactions imported from a connected bank, with their descriptions and amounts;
• your household's budget categories and budget amounts;
• your household's income streams;
• any remaining bank connection records for that household, including the encrypted access token;
• the statistical categorisation model built from your household's transactions;
• any support tickets you submitted;
• your waitlist signup, if you joined the waitlist.

This is a real limitation of the product as built, and we would rather tell you than let you assume otherwise. If you want this data removed as well, please contact us at the address in Section 12 and we will remove it manually.

If you have an active subscription, closing your account does not automatically cancel your Stripe subscription. Please cancel your subscription through the billing portal before closing your account. See the Terms of Service.

11. Data retention

• Sessions expire 30 days after sign-in and are automatically cleared.
• Password reset tokens expire 45 minutes after they are issued.
• Invitations expire 30 days after they are created.
• Account, budget, transaction, and bank-connection data is retained for as long as your account is open, and (as described in Section 10) household financial data currently persists after an account is closed.

We do not currently operate a defined retention schedule that automatically deletes old data after a fixed period, and we are not going to invent a number here that our systems do not actually enforce. Waitlist emails, support tickets, and redeemed invitations are currently retained indefinitely.

12. Contact us

Questions about this policy, or privacy requests, can be sent to:

[email protected]

13. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will update the "Last updated" date above. If the changes are significant (particularly if they change what we collect, who we share it with, or how AI processes your data), we will make a reasonable effort to notify you directly rather than relying on you to notice the change.

14. Note on current transparency gaps

For completeness, and so this is not discovered later: the waitlist form does not present this policy for acceptance. We use a cookie to keep you signed in, and Google's reCAPTCHA sets its own cookie on the sign-in, registration, and waitlist pages to block automated bots (never for advertising or tracking) and say so in the cookie notice shown the first time you visit.

15. California privacy rights

If you're a California resident, the CCPA/CPRA gives you rights over your personal information, but the most relevant one is easy to answer directly: TailorBudget does not sell or share your personal information, and has not done so in the preceding 12 months (see Section 2.7). There is nothing to opt out of, because no sale or sharing happens in the first place.

You separately have the right to know what personal information we hold about you, request its deletion, request correction of inaccurate information, and not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights. Section 8 (Your choices and rights) and Section 10 (Closing your account) already describe how to do most of this in practice. To make any request under California law specifically, email [email protected] and say so; we'll respond using the same process described in Section 8.

As stated in Section 8.3: we don't operate a formal CCPA compliance programme (no separate CA-specific intake form, no automated identity-verification flow) and don't claim to. The rights above are real and we'll honor them; we're just telling you plainly that the process behind them is a person reading an email, not dedicated infrastructure.