Spendlet Privacy Policy
Effective date: October 18, 2026
Spendlet is a pocket expense ledger: snap a receipt, say an expense or type it, check the details, and save it. This policy is laid out like a ledger page — what gets written down, where it is kept, and the single optional entry that is sent out.
Balance sheet
- Kept on your iPhone: every expense, draft, receipt photo, category, budget, template, spending question and setting.
- Sent out, only if you allow AI: the text of the receipt, sentence or question you are working on — with money amounts removed — plus your category names, to DeepSeek.
- Never collected: bank logins, account sign-ins, contacts, location, advertising identifiers or cross-app tracking data.
- Not present: ads, analytics or attribution SDKs, in-app purchases, and App Tracking Transparency prompts.
What Spendlet writes down
When you save an expense, Spendlet records its amount, currency, date, merchant, note and category in its local files. Around that ledger it keeps:
- unfinished drafts, including the text they came from, so you can pick up where you left off;
- receipt photos you attach, stored as local files beside the expense;
- your categories, and merchant-category preferences — created only when you choose "use for this merchant next time";
- expense templates and monthly category budgets you set up;
- spending questions you asked, the period or filter used, and the answer calculated from your ledger;
- your AI consent choice and other settings.
Amounts are parsed and totalled on the device in whole minor units, and each currency is totalled separately. Spendlet never converts currencies and has no connection to any bank or card.
How things get in
| Input | Permission | What happens | | --- | --- | --- | | Receipt photo with the camera | Camera, asked when you tap Snap receipt | The photo is read on your iPhone with Apple's text recognition and can be kept as the expense's receipt | | Receipt from your library | None — the system photo picker | Only the single picture you pick is shared with Spendlet; it cannot browse the rest of your library | | Spoken expense or question | Microphone and Speech Recognition, asked when you hold to speak | Speech is transcribed on the device only; if on-device recognition is not supported, you type instead. Recordings are not stored or sent | | Typing | None | Text stays in the draft until you save or discard it |
Each permission is optional and can be changed in the iOS Settings app. Declining one leaves the other ways of adding an expense available.
The optional AI entry
Spendlet can suggest a merchant and category for a draft, or work out what a spending question means, using DeepSeek's AI service. Nothing is sent until you choose Allow AI; choosing Not now keeps everything local.
For an expense draft, DeepSeek receives the current receipt text, typed sentence or transcript with money amounts removed, your active category names, and — if you created one — the preferred category for that merchant (as one name from the same list).
For a spending question, DeepSeek receives the question with money amounts removed and your category names. It returns a structured interpretation, such as a period and category; Spendlet then finds the matching expenses and calculates every total itself.
Never included: amounts, saved expenses, earlier questions or answers, totals, receipt images, audio, ledger identifiers or device identifiers.
Removing money amounts does not remove every personal detail a receipt or sentence might contain. Leave out names, addresses and account numbers, or use the manual path for anything sensitive.
The request travels over an encrypted connection straight from your iPhone to DeepSeek; there is no Spendlet server in between. DeepSeek can see the connection's IP address and processes the request under its own privacy policy, which you can open from AI service policy in the app. We cannot promise how long DeepSeek keeps completed requests.
AI only proposes. It never supplies amounts, and nothing becomes a saved expense until you review and save it.
Turning it off: switch off Use AI to read receipts in Settings. That stops new requests for both expenses and questions, cancels anything in progress and ignores late replies. Turning it back on asks for your consent again. Switching off cannot recall text DeepSeek already received.
Sharing you start yourself
When you export a month of expenses, Spendlet creates a CSV file on the device and opens the iOS share sheet. The file goes only where you send it — for example to Mail, Files or a spreadsheet app — and that destination's own policies then apply.
Purchases and Apple services
Spendlet is free, with no subscriptions or in-app purchases. Apple handles App Store downloads under its own terms. If your iPhone's backups include app data, that copy is managed by iOS and your Apple account settings.
Keeping and deleting
- Edit or delete any saved expense; deleting asks for confirmation and removes its receipt photo when no other expense uses it.
- Rejecting a draft does not save an expense or learn a preference.
- Categories can be archived or reassigned, and learned merchant preferences removed, in Categories.
- Everything else stays until you delete it or remove the app. Uninstalling Spendlet deletes its local data; because there is no account or cloud copy, we cannot recover it.
Spendlet's files live inside its iOS sandbox, protected by your device's passcode encryption. The credential used to reach the AI service is part of the app and is not stored with your expenses.
Changes
If Spendlet begins storing or sharing information differently, we will update this policy and its effective date before that version is released.
Contact
Privacy questions: tallydesk@spendlet.app