Effective date: April 11, 2026 Last updated: May 19, 2026
BudgeTrak is a personal budgeting app. Your financial data lives on your device. If you choose to enable the SYNC feature to share your budget across multiple devices in your household, that data is end-to-end encrypted before it leaves your device — neither we nor any cloud provider can read your transactions, balances, or merchant names. If you opt in to the in-app Help Chat assistant, the text you type into it is sent to Google Gemini to generate answers and is stored anonymously on our servers for up to 7 days for quality review (not linked to your identity). We do not sell your data, we do not show it to advertisers, and we do not analyze it to build a profile of you. The full policy below explains exactly what is collected, where it goes, and how to delete it.
BudgeTrak is published by Tech Advantage LLC (“we”, “us”, “our”). You can contact us at techadvantagesupport@gmail.com for any privacy-related questions or requests.
We try to collect as little as possible, and we keep most of it on your device only.
When you use BudgeTrak, the following information is stored on your device in the app’s private storage:
This data never leaves your device unless you explicitly enable a feature that sends it elsewhere (described below). If you uninstall BudgeTrak, all on-device data is deleted by Android automatically.
BudgeTrak includes an optional feature called SYNC that lets you share a single household budget across up to five devices. SYNC is off by default and only activates if you explicitly create or join a SYNC group.
If you enable SYNC, the following happens:
When you leave a SYNC group or dissolve it, your local data is preserved on your device but the cloud copy is deleted (with a 90-day cleanup window for orphan data).
To keep BudgeTrak stable and identify bugs, we use Google Firebase Crashlytics for crash reports and Google Firebase Analytics for anonymous usage telemetry. Both are on by default and share a single opt-out at Settings → Privacy → Send crash reports and anonymous usage data. Unchecking that box stops both immediately.
When this collection is enabled, the data we collect includes:
healthy, dead, or off); the number of devices in your SYNC group; and the date of your last period refresh.ocr_feedback records whether you changed the merchant, date, or amount on a transaction populated by AI receipt scanning (deltas and booleans only — never the values themselves), and health_beacon records once a day whether your SYNC listener is connected and the count of records on your device.first_open, session_start, app_update) recording that the app was used, but no information about what you did inside it.Crash and telemetry data do not include the contents of your transactions, merchant names, amounts, dates, descriptions, categories, receipt photos, encryption keys, or any other personal financial information. We hash the only piece of financial data that touches diagnostics (your cash balance) so that even we cannot read it. We have also disabled IP-based country/region derivation in our Analytics configuration, so no approximate location is collected.
If you disable diagnostic reporting, none of the above is collected — the daily heartbeat used to confirm devices are healthy and the OCR-accuracy events used to improve receipt scanning are both skipped. We recommend leaving it on so we can detect and fix bugs that affect real users, but the choice is yours.
If you use SYNC, BudgeTrak signs you in to Firebase using anonymous authentication (no email or password required). The same anonymous sign-in is also used if you have enabled the Help Chat feature and have not already signed in for SYNC — your device is granted an anonymous Firebase user token solely so the Help Chat transcript upload can pass our server’s authentication requirement. Your device is verified using Google Play Integrity (App Check) to prevent unauthorized clients from accessing the cloud relay. Neither of these systems collects personal information about you.
If you upgrade to a paid tier or subscribe to BudgeTrak Premium, the purchase is processed entirely by Google Play Billing. We do not see your payment method, credit card number, or billing address — Google handles all of that. We only receive a confirmation that your purchase is valid, used to unlock the corresponding features in the app.
The free tier of BudgeTrak displays native ads served by Google AdMob. AdMob may collect a limited advertising identifier and basic device information to serve ads, subject to Google’s own privacy policy. You can reset or limit your advertising identifier in your Android device settings at any time. If you upgrade to a paid tier or subscribe to Premium, ads are removed and AdMob is no longer loaded.
We want to be specific about this. BudgeTrak does not collect:
We use the limited information we collect for exactly these purposes, and nothing else:
We do not:
No system is perfectly secure, but we follow industry best practices and have designed BudgeTrak to minimize what we ever have access to.
BudgeTrak relies on the following third-party services. Each has its own privacy policy that governs how they handle the limited data we share with them.
| Service | Purpose | What it sees |
|---|---|---|
| Google Firebase Firestore | Encrypted SYNC data relay | Encrypted blobs only |
| Google Firebase Cloud Storage | Encrypted receipt photo storage (SYNC) | Encrypted blobs only |
| Google Firebase Realtime Database | Device presence (online/offline) | Anonymous device IDs |
| Google Firebase Authentication | Anonymous sign-in for SYNC | Anonymous user token |
| Google Firebase App Check | Anti-abuse verification | Play Integrity attestation |
| Google Firebase Crashlytics | Crash reports and diagnostics | Crash data, no financial data |
| Google Firebase Analytics | Anonymous usage events (OCR accuracy + daily heartbeat) | Counts and booleans only — no transaction content, no location |
| Google Gemini (opt-in AI features only) | Receipt reading; CSV transaction categorization; Help Chat assistant | Receipt image contents; merchant and amount of imported bank transactions; the text you type into Help Chat plus a relevant excerpt of the app’s help documentation |
| Google Play Billing | Subscription and one-time purchases | Payment info (handled entirely by Google) |
| Google AdMob (free tier only) | Native advertising | Advertising ID, basic device info |
You can review Google’s privacy practices at https://policies.google.com/privacy.
BudgeTrak offers three optional AI-assisted features powered by Google’s Gemini models. The first two are available to Paid and Subscriber tiers and are accessed through Firebase AI Logic. The third, Help Chat, is available to all tiers (including Free) and goes through the Gemini API directly.
When a subscriber taps the sparkle icon in the transaction dialog, BudgeTrak sends the receipt photo to Google Gemini to extract the merchant, date, amount, and category. The response is returned directly to your device and stored only in your transaction record.
When enabled in Settings, BudgeTrak sends the merchant name and amount of newly-imported bank transactions to Google Gemini to choose the best-matching category for each one. The transaction date is not sent. Only transactions that BudgeTrak’s on-device categorizer cannot confidently classify are sent.
If you enable the Help Chat checkbox in Settings → Privacy → Allow Chatbot to transmit and store your messages… and tap Accept on the in-app consent dialog, BudgeTrak’s Help Chat feature lets you type questions about how the app works and receive AI-generated answers grounded in the app’s help pages. When the feature is enabled:
Free-tier users have access to Help Chat (with consent) but not to AI Receipt Scanning or AI CSV Categorization.
You have full control over your data in BudgeTrak.
If you want us to confirm what data we hold about you (note: in nearly all cases, the answer is “nothing personally identifying”) or have any other privacy request, contact us at techadvantagesupport@gmail.com.
You can request deletion of your BudgeTrak data through any of the following options:
Open BudgeTrak → Settings → SYNC → Dissolve Group. This permanently deletes all server-side data for the group: transactions, categories, recurring expenses, income sources, savings goals, amortization entries, period ledger, encrypted receipt photos, and group metadata. The cascade is performed by a Cloud Function that removes data from Firestore, Realtime Database, and Cloud Storage. Each member device retains its local copy unless they also uninstall the app.
Open BudgeTrak → Settings → SYNC → Leave Group. Your device is marked as removed in the group’s device roster, your real-time presence record is deleted, and your device’s encryption keys to the group are wiped. The shared data itself stays in the group for the remaining members; if you want the entire group deleted, the admin must dissolve it.
Uninstalling BudgeTrak removes all on-device data immediately (transactions, settings, receipt photos, encrypted backups stored in the app’s private folder). If you only used BudgeTrak in solo mode (no SYNC), no cloud-side data ever existed and uninstall fully completes the deletion.
SYNC groups that have not been opened by any member device for 90 consecutive days are automatically and permanently deleted by a server-side cleanup process. This includes all transactions, encrypted photos, and metadata. There is no recovery from this automatic cleanup; ensure you have a local backup before letting a group go inactive.
BudgeTrak deliberately does not associate your cloud data with your name, email address, or any identifier we could use to look up “your” records on request. Anonymous authentication, end-to-end encryption, and randomly-generated group identifiers are what make the privacy guarantees in this policy possible — but the same design means that if you email asking us to delete a specific group, we have no way to verify the group is yours or even to locate it among the encrypted blobs on our servers.
If you have lost access to your device or to a group whose admin you can no longer reach, the 90-day inactivity cleanup above is the deletion mechanism. Make sure you have a local backup of any data you would like to keep before that window expires.
What deletion does not affect: anonymous Crashlytics records (retained by Google for 90 days per their standard policy regardless of in-app actions), and AdMob advertising identifiers (managed by Google at the device level — reset via your Android settings).
BudgeTrak is a personal finance tool intended for users aged 13 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, please contact us at techadvantagesupport@gmail.com and we will take steps to delete it.
BudgeTrak is published from the United States. If you use the app from outside the United States, please be aware that any data you choose to sync to the cloud (which is encrypted before it leaves your device) may be relayed through servers operated by Google in the United States or other countries where Google maintains infrastructure. By using BudgeTrak’s SYNC feature, you consent to this relay.
We may update this privacy policy from time to time, particularly when we add or remove features that affect what data is collected. When we make material changes, we will update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, notify you within the app. Your continued use of BudgeTrak after a policy update constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.
If you have questions about this privacy policy or BudgeTrak’s data practices, please contact:
Tech Advantage LLC Email: techadvantagesupport@gmail.com
We will respond to legitimate privacy inquiries within a reasonable time, typically within 30 days.