Privacy policy

Who is responsible

Gusi Budget is provided by Gusi Studios LLC, at 2200 W 4th St. Apt. B, Hattiesburg, Mississippi 39401, United States. For anything in this policy, including a request to see or delete your data, write to support@gusistudios.com.

The short version

Gusi Budget keeps the expenses you type in, so that you and the people in your household can see them. It does not sell anything about you, it does not build a profile of you, and it does not share your spending with anyone outside your household. You can export everything and delete your account from inside the app, without asking us.

What is stored

This is the complete list, and it is the same list the in-app export produces.

Your account

• Your email address, which is how you sign in and how we reach you about the account.
• The date the account was created.
• An internal account identifier.
• Whether you have paid to remove ads, and the store order reference for that purchase.

If you sign in with Google, Google tells us your email address and confirms it is yours. We do not receive your Google password, your contacts, or anything else from your Google account.

If you sign in with Apple, Apple tells us your email address and confirms it is yours. We do not receive your Apple password or anything else from your Apple account. Apple offers a Hide My Email option at that moment: if you choose it, the address we are given is a private relay address ending in privaterelay.appleid.com, Apple forwards our mail to your real inbox, and we never learn your real address. That relay address is then the whole of what we hold, and it works the same as any other for signing in, resetting a password and being reached about the account. If you later stop the forwarding from your Apple account settings, our mail stops arriving and we have no other way to contact you.

Your household

• The household name, when you joined it, and whether you are its owner.
• The currency and monthly budget the household has chosen.
• The categories the household uses, with their colours and any monthly caps.
• Every expense in the household: date, amount, category, and the note you typed.

The note is a free text box, so please do not put sensitive personal information in it. It is meant for things like “weekly shop” or “train to Basel”. It is not the place for health details, identification numbers, or anything about somebody else that they would not want the rest of your household to read. Everyone in the household can see every note.

A household is shared by design. Everyone in it can see all of its expenses, including the ones you entered, and that is the point of the feature. Expenses record which member entered them.

On your device

• Your sign-in session, so you are not asked to sign in every time.
• Your appearance preference (light, dark or system).
• A copy of your latest budget, so the app still shows something with no signal.
• Expenses you logged offline, until they reach the server.

All of that is removed when you sign out or uninstall the app.

What is never stored

No bank account or card details, no location, no contacts, no advertising identifier tied to your account, and no health, biometric or government identification data. Gusi Budget does not connect to your bank.

Why it is stored

• To run the app. Your expenses exist so the app can show them to you and to your household.
• To sign you in and keep you signed in.
• To honour a purchase, so the app knows the ads are gone.
• To keep the service working and secure, including diagnosing faults.

Where a legal basis is required, it is the performance of our agreement with you. Advertising is covered separately below, because what the app does there depends on where you are.

Advertising

Your first 30 days have no advertising

For the first 30 days after you create an account, Gusi Budget shows no advertising at all. During that period the Google Mobile Ads SDK is not started, so no advertising identifier is read or shared for advertising. The 30 days run from the day you create your account, not from the day you install the app. It is a promotional offer and may change; see our Terms of Service.

After that

Once those 30 days end, the free version of Gusi Budget shows ads supplied by Google AdMob. AdMob never receives your expenses, your categories, your notes, or anything about your household. Buying the ad removal stops advertising entirely.

If you are in Europe, the ads are not personalised

In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, Gusi Budget serves non-personalised advertising only. That means the ads you see are not selected on the basis of a profile of you, and Google and its advertising partners are not building one from your use of this app.

Google still needs to store and read a small amount of information on your device to show an ad at all, to stop you seeing the same one repeatedly, and to count it. That is what the consent form asks you about when you first open the app. It is asking about that storage, not about profiling, because there is no profiling to ask about. You can change the answer at any time from Settings, under Ad privacy.

Everywhere else

Outside those countries, the ads may be personalised: Google and its partners may use an advertising identifier from your device, together with information they hold from elsewhere, to choose which ad to show and to measure it. That is Google’s processing rather than ours, and we do not receive it, store it, or connect it to your account.

In the United States, several states give you a right to opt out of that. The app asks, and honours the answer.

On iPhone and iPad, Apple asks you as well

The identifier Google uses on an Apple device is Apple’s own, the advertising identifier (IDFA), and iOS will not let any app read it without your permission. So the first time you open Gusi Budget on an iPhone or iPad, after the European consent step where that applies, iOS shows its App Tracking Transparency prompt asking whether Gusi Budget may track you across other companies’ apps and websites.

Saying no changes nothing about the app. Every feature keeps working, the ads keep appearing, and they are simply chosen without that identifier. Saying yes lets Google use it to choose and measure ads. Either way your expenses, categories, notes and household are never shared with anyone, and we neither receive the identifier nor store it. iOS remembers your answer and you can change it at any time in Settings › Privacy & Security › Tracking.

Apple also operates SKAdNetwork, a system that tells an advertiser that an install or an action happened without identifying who did it. It works whether or not you allow tracking, because it is designed not to identify anyone. That measurement is between Apple and the advertiser; we do not receive it.

Google’s own handling of advertising data is described at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

Payments

The one-time purchase that removes ads is billed by Google Play on Android and by Apple on iPhone. Payment details go to Google or Apple and never reach us. We receive confirmation that the purchase happened and an order reference, which is kept so the purchase can be restored and reconciled.

Who else sees it

Nobody buys it and nobody is given it for their own purposes. It is handled by a small number of suppliers who run parts of the service for us:

• Supabase, which hosts the database, the authentication and the API.
• Google, for sign-in with Google, for AdMob advertising, and for Play billing.
• Apple, for sign-in with Apple, for the Hide My Email relay if you use it, and for App Store distribution, billing and measurement on iPhone and iPad.
• Cloudflare, which serves this website.
• Resend, which sends account emails such as sign-in confirmations and password resets.

We will also disclose data where the law genuinely requires it, and we will tell you unless we are forbidden from doing so.

Where it is stored

The database is hosted in the United States, in Amazon Web Services' us-east-1 region. We are a United States company, and our personnel administer it from the United States and from Switzerland.

So if you are outside the United States, your information is transferred to and stored there. Our agreement with the hosting provider carries the standard contractual clauses for that transfer, in the versions that apply to each region: the European Commission's clauses, the United Kingdom's international data transfer addendum, and the Swiss-amended clauses recognised by the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.

How long it is kept

Your expenses are kept for as long as your account exists, because a budget is only useful with its history. Delete your account and the account, its membership, its settings and its entitlement are removed immediately. Backups are overwritten on a rolling basis and are fully replaced within 30 days.

Deleting a single expense or a category removes it from the app straight away, and we erase it permanently 90 days later. We hold it for those 90 days so that a mistake can be undone and so a shared household's history stays consistent for everyone in it. After that it is gone automatically, without anyone having to remember.

One thing does not disappear: expenses in a household you shared with somebody else stay with that household. They are that household's records as much as yours. The other members rely on those entries for a shared total they have been budgeting against, and removing them would silently change somebody else's figures for months they have already closed. The app tells you this before you delete, and offers to take your own entries with you when you leave a household, which is the way to remove them if that is what you want.

Your rights, and how to use them without asking

You can do the two that matter most yourself, from Settings in the app:

• Export everything. Settings, Export my data. It produces a complete machine-readable file of everything listed above.
• Delete your account. Settings, Delete account. It shows you exactly what will go and what will stay before you confirm.

Beyond those two, we will correct anything that is wrong, stop doing something you object to where we reasonably can, and tell you what we hold about you. We offer this to everyone, wherever you live, rather than only to people whose local law happens to require it. Write to support@gusistudios.com and we will answer within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with how we have handled something, you may be able to raise it with the data protection authority for the country you live in. We would rather you came to us first, because in most cases we can simply fix it.

Children

Gusi Budget is not directed to children, and you must be at least 16 to use it. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone younger, and the app is not designed, marketed or rated for children. If you believe someone under 16 has created an account, write to support@gusistudios.com and it will be removed.

Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit and the database is encrypted at rest. Access to your rows is enforced by the database itself, per request, on the basis of who you are signed in as, rather than by the app asking nicely. Nobody can read another household's expenses, including us in the ordinary course of running the service.

No system is perfect. If data is ever exposed, we will tell affected people and the relevant regulator within the time the law allows.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects you, the app will say so before the change takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.

Related

Terms of service · How to delete your account · Security