Who we are
Spendfeed (“Spendfeed”, “we”, “us”) provides the Spendfeed mobile apps and the website at spendfeed.app. For the personal data described here we act as the data controller under the UAE Personal Data Protection Law, Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 (“PDPL”).
Questions or requests: privacy@spendfeed.app.
Data at a glance
This mirrors the privacy labels on the App Store and Google Play.
| Data | Why | Linked to you | Used to track you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Financial info (transactions you capture or add, your plan, balances only if you opt in) | App functionality | Yes | No |
| Names (first name if you set one, and names you type in for people you split with) | App functionality | Yes | No |
| Messages you write in shared groups (comments, expense descriptions and notes) | App functionality | Yes | No |
| Identifiers (an account ID and a random device token) | App functionality, security | Yes | No |
| Purchases (Spendfeed Pro subscription status) | App functionality | Yes | No |
| App activity (usage events from a fixed list, no content) | Analytics | Pseudonymous | No |
| Diagnostics (counts of alerts captured or not understood per source, platform, app version) | App functionality | Yes | No |
Bank alerts and message text are processed on your phone and not uploaded. Phone numbers you add for WhatsApp reminders stay on your phone.
Data is never sold and never shared for advertising.
What we collect
- Transactions
- Amount, currency, date and time, merchant, category, the last four digits of the card or account, the bank or wallet name, and which channel captured it (Apple Pay, a message, a notification, a screenshot, open banking or typed). Plus any notes, edits and category changes you make.
- Bank alert text
- Alerts are redacted on your phone (see Redaction) and the redacted text stays on your phone, so you can see where a transaction came from. It is not uploaded: only the structured transaction syncs. The one exception is a bank you link through open banking: the bank’s own description of each transaction is redacted and stored on our servers with it.
- Balances
- Only if you opt in to keeping them. By default they are removed on your phone.
- Your plan
- Salary day, buffer, rent cheques, school terms, instalment plans, budgets, and the cards you add with their cashback rules.
- People, groups and splits
- Names you type for friends, group details, expenses, shares, receipt line items, settlements and comments. Comments, expense descriptions and notes you write in a group are visible to that group’s members. A phone number you add to send WhatsApp reminders stays on your phone and is used only to open WhatsApp. Spendfeed never reads your address book.
- Reports
- If you report a comment or an expense in a shared group, we store who reported what (identifiers only) and a reason from a fixed list. We don’t copy the reported text and you can’t add free text to a report. See Shared groups.
- Open banking
- Only if you link a bank: account details, balances and transactions shared with your explicit consent through Lean Technologies under the UAE Central Bank’s Open Finance framework. You can revoke this at any time.
- Device and app
- A random device token created when you install Spendfeed (our servers store only a hash of it), platform, app version, language and time zone. Once a day, per source (Apple Pay, texts, notifications, screenshots, pasted text, bank feed), when Spendfeed last saw an alert, how many it captured and could not understand in the last 7 days, and whether the source looks healthy, so we can fix a bank template that broke. No message content, merchant or amount is included.
- Subscriptions
- If you buy Spendfeed Pro, Apple (App Store) or Google (Google Play) processes the payment. We and our subscription provider RevenueCat receive the purchase status — never your card details.
- Usage analytics
- Events from a fixed list such as “onboarding completed” or “card shared”, sent to Spendfeed’s own servers and tied to a pseudonymous id. They never contain names, amounts, merchants or message text. They are on by default and you can switch them off under Settings → Account & privacy → Share anonymous usage stats.
- Support
- What you send us when you email for help.
What we never collect
- Your SMS inbox. iOS doesn’t allow it, and on Android Spendfeed never requests SMS permission.
- Your contacts or address book, your precise location, or your photos (screenshots are read on your phone).
- Full card numbers, CVVs, OTP or verification codes, Emirates ID numbers or IBANs.
- Bank usernames or passwords — linking a bank happens with your bank, through Lean, never inside Spendfeed.
- Advertising identifiers. Spendfeed doesn’t track you across other companies’ apps or websites.
How capture works on your phone
iPhone
- Apple Pay automation. A Shortcuts automation that you create runs Spendfeed’s “log payment” action when you pay with Apple Pay, passing the amount, merchant and card name.
- Bank message automation. A Messages automation that you create passes the text of matching messages to Spendfeed. Spendfeed checks it against bank templates on your phone; anything that isn’t a bank transaction is discarded immediately and is never stored or sent. Spendfeed has no access to your inbox.
- Screenshot Radar (optional). With the Photos access you grant, Spendfeed looks at new screenshots and reads them on your phone using Apple’s on-device text recognition. Images are never uploaded. You can use the share sheet instead, with no Photos permission at all.
Android
- Notification access. Spendfeed’s notification listener reads notifications only from the bank and wallet apps and bank sender IDs on its list. Everything else is ignored without being stored. Spendfeed never uses SMS permission or accessibility services. Details are in Android notification access.
Typing
What you type in Spendfeed’s Tell bar (“lunch 45”) is understood on your phone first. See AI assistance for the rare cases where help from a model is used.
You can turn any capture source off at any time — delete the automation, revoke notification or Photos access in system settings, or unlink a bank in Spendfeed.
Android notification access
On Android, Spendfeed reads bank alerts through Android’s notification access (a special permission you grant in system settings), not SMS permission. Spendfeed never requests READ_SMS or any other SMS permission, and never uses accessibility services.
What is read
Android delivers every notification your phone shows to an app with notification access. Spendfeed’s listener drops, without reading or storing it, anything that is not from the allowlist: the banking, wallet and buy-now-pay-later apps of the UAE banks Spendfeed supports (narrowed to the banks you pick during setup) and, for text messages, notifications of your messaging app. A text is kept only if its sender ID is one of those banks’ sender IDs; any other message — a chat, an email, a friend’s text — is dropped without being stored as soon as that check fails.
What happens to an alert that matches
- It is redacted on your phone before it is written anywhere: OTP and verification codes, full card numbers, CVV-like codes, Emirates ID numbers, IBANs and long account numbers are removed, and balances too unless you opted in to keeping them (see Redaction).
- The redacted text waits in a private queue on your phone until Spendfeed has turned it into a transaction.
- Only the structured transaction (amount, merchant, date, last four digits, bank or wallet, channel) syncs to our servers. The redacted message text stays on your phone.
Turning it off
Switch Spendfeed off under Android Settings → Apps → Special app access → Notification access (names vary slightly by phone maker). Spendfeed then receives no notifications at all; everything already captured stays, and you can keep adding transactions by typing. Uninstalling Spendfeed removes the permission too.
Redaction
Before anything is saved or sent, Spendfeed’s on-device redactor removes:
- OTP and verification codes;
- full card numbers (replaced by the last four digits, e.g. ••••4417) and CVV-like codes;
- Emirates ID numbers, IBANs and long account numbers;
- balances, unless you have opted in to keeping them.
Amounts, merchant names, dates and the last four digits are kept, because Spendfeed needs them to work. Our servers run the same redaction again on anything they receive.
How we use data
- To run Spendfeed: sync and back up your data, and calculate Safe-to-Spend, the Horizon, cliffs, card advice and split balances.
- To categorise merchants and detect duplicates across channels.
- To publish the settle cards you choose to share, and to detect the transfer that settles one.
- To send the notifications you’ve enabled.
- To improve bank templates, from the per-source counts above and from example alerts you choose to email us.
- To answer support requests, keep Spendfeed secure, prevent abuse and meet legal obligations.
We don’t sell or rent personal data, we don’t use it for advertising, and we don’t build profiles for anyone else. Where the PDPL requires consent, we ask for it in the app; otherwise we rely on what’s needed to provide the service you asked for, legal obligations, and our legitimate interest in keeping Spendfeed secure.
AI assistance
When the rules on your phone can’t confidently understand a sentence you typed in the Tell bar, or can’t categorise a shop name, Spendfeed can ask an AI model provider (currently OpenAI or Anthropic; the app names it when you turn this on) to interpret it. This only happens if you turn AI assist on in the app. You can switch it off at any time; Spendfeed keeps working with on-device rules.
What is sent: the sentence you typed, the names of the people you have added (so it can tell who you mean), or a shop name and amount, with phone numbers, email addresses, card and account numbers removed first. Bank messages, notifications, screenshots, balances and your transaction history are never sent. Our agreements with these providers forbid training models on it or keeping it longer than their short abuse-monitoring windows.
Where your data is stored
We are building Spendfeed to keep user data in the UAE. During the public beta, Spendfeed’s servers run on Vercel and Neon infrastructure, so your data may be stored or processed outside the UAE — for example in the European Union or the United States. These transfers rely on contractual safeguards with each provider, as the PDPL permits. We will move user data to a UAE region before general availability and update this policy when we do.
Shared groups
Groups are invite-only: there is no search, directory or public feed. What you write in a group — comments, expense descriptions and notes, the names you use — is visible to the members of that group. If you delete your account, what you added stays in the group for the other members, no longer linked to an account.
You can report a comment or an expense, and block a member, from inside the app. A report stores identifiers and a reason from a fixed list, never the text, and the group is not told who reported. A block is a list on your own phone that hides that member’s comments and expense descriptions for you; amounts still count. The rules for groups are in the terms.
Settle cards
When you share a split, Spendfeed creates a page at an unguessable link (spendfeed.app/s/…). It shows only first names, the amount, a merchant label and line items — never balances, card numbers or account details. The page is hidden from search engines, and the link stops showing anything but an “expired” notice 30 days after it was created. Anyone you send the link to can see it, so share it only with the person it’s for.
How long we keep data
- Account data: for as long as you keep your account.
- When you delete your account: removed from our live systems immediately, and from backups within 30 days.
- Settle-card links: 30 days from creation.
- Redacted alert text: on your phone only, until you delete the transaction or erase Spendfeed’s data. For a linked bank, the redacted bank description stays on our servers with its transaction until you delete your account.
- Usage events and capture-health counts: kept with your account and removed when you delete it.
- Reports of group content: kept without the reported text for as long as the group exists, with your account detached if you delete it.
- Purchase records held by Apple, Google and RevenueCat: governed by their own policies, and may remain after you delete your Spendfeed account.
- Server logs (such as IP address and request details): up to 30 days, for security.
- Support emails: up to 24 months after the conversation ends.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest. Device tokens are stored only as hashes, access to production data is limited to the people who need it, and full card numbers and OTPs never reach our servers in the first place. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your data we will notify you and the UAE Data Office as the PDPL requires.
Your rights
Under the PDPL you can:
- Access and take your data with you — Settings → Account & privacy → Export all data (JSON) gives you a file of everything on your phone plus what our servers hold.
- Correct it — edit any transaction, category or note in the app.
- Erase it — delete your account (see Deleting your data).
- Restrict or object — turn off any capture source, AI assist or usage stats in the app.
- Withdraw consent at any time, without affecting processing that already happened.
- Complain to the UAE Data Office.
Email privacy@spendfeed.app for anything you can’t do in the app. We reply within 30 days. Spendfeed doesn’t hold your name, email or phone number, so we find your data by your Account ID — the userId value in the export file — or by the order number of a Spendfeed Pro purchase. A request with neither can’t be matched to an account.
Deleting your data
In the app (iPhone and Android): Settings → Account & privacy → Delete account. This removes your data from our servers and erases it from the phone; backups are purged within 30 days. If you no longer have the app, email us. Step-by-step instructions, including what is deleted and what we may keep, are on spendfeed.app/delete-account.
Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription. Cancel Spendfeed Pro in the App Store (Settings → your name → Subscriptions → Spendfeed) or in Google Play (profile icon → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions → Spendfeed → Cancel subscription). Apple, Google and RevenueCat keep their own purchase records under their own policies.
Children
Spendfeed is made for adults managing their own money and isn’t directed at children under 18. If you believe a child has given us personal data, contact us and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
We will update this page when our practices change and adjust the date at the top. If a change is material, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, and ask for your consent again where the law requires it.
Contact
Privacy: privacy@spendfeed.app
Everything else: support@spendfeed.app
An Arabic version of this policy is at spendfeed.app/ar/privacy. If the two differ, the English version applies.