Spends
Privacy Policy
Last updated: May 2, 2026
This Privacy Policy explains how Spends ("Spends", "we", "us", or "our") collects, uses, stores, and protects information when you use the Spends mobile application and related services.
Spends is a personal expense tracking app. It helps you track spending by reading bank and credit card alert emails from Gmail, extracting transaction details, and showing those transactions, summaries, categories, and trends in the app.
Information We Collect
Google Account Information
When you sign in with Google, we may collect your Google account name, email address, user identifier, and profile photo URL so that we can create and manage your Spends account.
Gmail Data
If you grant Gmail access, Spends requests the gmail.readonly permission from Google. This lets Spends read Gmail messages but does not let Spends send, edit, or delete your email.
Spends uses Gmail access only to identify and parse bank and credit card alert emails for the providers you select or add in the app. These alert emails may contain transaction details such as merchant name, amount, transaction date, payment method, bank or card provider, and partial card or account identifiers.
Spends does not use Gmail access to read unrelated emails for advertising, marketing, profiling, or resale.
Expense and Financial Tracking Information
Spends may collect and store information needed to show your expenses, including:
- Parsed transaction details from bank or credit card alert emails, such as merchant, amount, date, payment type, provider, and category.
- Manually added spends, including merchant, amount, category, payment type, and whether the spend is a credit card bill payment.
- The last 4 digits of a card or account if you enter them to label a payment method. Spends does not ask for or store full card numbers, CVV, PIN, net banking passwords, or card expiry dates.
- Custom categories, category colors, shared amounts, filters, and other expense organization choices.
- Bank or card alert sender information that you add or select, such as alert email addresses and display names.
App and Device Information
We may collect basic app, device, and performance information needed to operate, secure, debug, and improve the service, such as app version, platform, device type, crash or error information, and authentication status.
Local App Storage
The app stores authentication tokens and user profile data in secure device storage where supported by the operating system. The app may also store onboarding state and cached app data locally to keep the app working smoothly.
How We Use Information
We use your information to:
- Sign you in and keep your session active.
- Read selected bank and credit card alert emails from Gmail.
- Parse transaction details from those alert emails.
- Transmit email content securely (HTTPS/TLS 1.2+) to Spends servers (
spends-api.arjunaghera.com) for parsing. We never store the raw message body — only the parsed amount, merchant, and date. - Create and show your expense list, summaries, categories, and trends.
- Let you add, edit, categorize, search, filter, and manage spends.
- Let you select which bank or card alert senders should be tracked.
- Sync app data with the Spends backend.
- Detect authentication failures and refresh app sessions.
- Provide account deletion, logout, support, security, debugging, and service maintenance.
Google API Limited Use Disclosure
Spends's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
In particular:
- Spends uses Gmail data only to provide or improve user-facing expense tracking features that are prominent in the app.
- Spends does not sell Gmail data.
- Spends does not use Gmail data for advertising.
- Spends does not use Gmail data to determine creditworthiness or for lending decisions.
- Spends does not allow humans to read Gmail data unless you have given consent for support, it is necessary for security or abuse investigation, it is required by law, or the data has been aggregated and anonymized for internal operations.
- Spends transfers Gmail data only as necessary to provide and secure the app, comply with law, or as part of a change in ownership such as merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, subject to appropriate protections.
Retention
We keep account, transaction, category, tracked sender, and related app data while your Spends account is active or as long as needed to provide the service.
When you delete your account, Spends is intended to permanently delete your account data, parsed transactions, tracked senders, categories, refresh tokens, and Gmail-related server data, and to revoke our Google access where supported. Some limited records may be retained only if required for security, fraud prevention, legal compliance, backup recovery, or dispute handling.
Cached data on your device may be removed when you log out, delete your account, uninstall the app, clear app storage, or when the operating system clears app data.
Your Choices and Controls
You can:
- Choose whether to sign in with Google and grant Gmail access.
- Choose which bank or card alert senders are tracked in the app.
- Add, edit, categorize, and delete expense records where supported by the app.
- Log out from the app, which clears local app tokens and user state from the device.
- Delete your Spends account from Settings > Security and Privacy > Delete Account.
- Revoke Spends's access to your Google Account at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
- Request help or deletion by contacting trackspends.app@gmail.com.
Security
We use reasonable technical and organizational safeguards designed to protect your information. The app uses HTTPS for backend communication and secure device storage for local tokens where supported. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.
Children's Privacy
Spends is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided information to us, contact us so we can take appropriate action.
International Processing
Your information may be processed and stored in countries other than where you live. By using Spends, you understand that your information may be transferred to and processed in those locations, subject to applicable law.
Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes, we will update the "Last updated" date and, where appropriate, provide additional notice in the app or through other reasonable means.
Contact
Operator: Arjun Aghera
Email: trackspends.app@gmail.com