Privacy policy
Effective 25 October 2026
In short: Spends reads your bank and payment messages on your phone and keeps what it finds on your phone. There is no account, no bank login and no cloud sync. The app sends anonymous usage analytics (which screens and features are used, and counts), never your messages, amounts, merchant names or personal details, and you can turn that off in Settings. We don't sell data.
This policy covers the Spends Android app (“the app”) and the website at spends.abdus.net (“the website”). “We” and “us” means the developer of Spends, who you can reach at abdus@abdus.net.
1. What the app does with your data
Spends builds a record of your payments from the SMS and app notifications your bank and payment apps send you. All of this happens on your phone:
- Messages. The app reads SMS and notifications to find payment alerts. It ignores messages from personal phone numbers. Message text is processed on the device to extract the amount, merchant, account and time of a payment.
- The model. The machine-learning model that decides whether a message is a real payment runs on your phone. Messages are not sent anywhere to be classified.
- What gets stored. Payments, amounts, merchants, categories, notes, and any photos or PDFs you attach are stored in the app's private storage on your phone.
- No account, no sync. You don't sign up, and the app doesn't connect to your bank or upload your payments to any server, ours or anyone else's.
If you have Android's own device backup turned on, Android may include app data in the backup it keeps in your Google account. That is handled by Android and Google under your Google account settings, not by Spends.
2. Permissions and why
| Permission | Why Spends asks for it |
|---|---|
| Read and receive SMS | To read bank and card alerts, including your past messages on first launch and new ones as they arrive. Messages from personal numbers are ignored. |
| Notification access | To read payment alerts from UPI and bank apps such as GPay, PhonePe and Paytm. Chat and email apps are skipped; any other notification is checked on the phone and dropped straight away if it isn't a payment. Nothing is stored or sent. |
| Post notifications (optional) | To tell you when a payment has been recorded, if you turn that on. |
| Internet | To send the anonymous usage analytics described below. It is not used to upload your messages or payments. |
Photos and PDFs are only read when you choose to attach one, through Android's file picker.
3. Analytics in the app
To understand which parts of the app are useful, the app sends anonymous usage events to Mixpanel, an analytics service.
What is sent
- Which screens are opened and which features are used, for example opening Insights, exporting data or turning on privacy mode.
- Rough counts in ranges, for example “100–999” payments found when importing history. Never the payments themselves.
- Technical details Mixpanel’s library adds to each event: app version, Android version, device manufacturer and model, screen size, carrier and language, and a random identifier created for this install.
- No location. The app tells Mixpanel not to estimate a location from the IP address.
What is never sent
- The text of any SMS or notification.
- Amounts, balances, merchant names, account or card numbers, notes or attachments.
- Your name, phone number, email address or contacts.
Turning it off
You can turn analytics off in the app's Settings at any time. When it's off, the app sends no analytics events.
4. The website
The website also uses Mixpanel to count visits and understand which parts of the page are useful. It records:
- Page views, which sections of the page were scrolled into view, which questions in the FAQ were opened, switching between light and dark, and clicks on the download button (with the app version and which button was used).
- Standard details sent by your browser: page address, referring page, browser and operating system, screen size, and an approximate location (country, region, city) estimated from your IP address.
- A random identifier stored in your browser's local storage, so repeat visits can be counted. Your light or dark choice is stored there too, and never sent.
The website doesn't ask for your name or email and doesn't use advertising trackers. You can stop website analytics by blocking cdn.mxpnl.com with a content blocker; clearing site data for spends.abdus.net removes the stored identifier.
Like most web servers, ours keeps short-lived access logs (IP address, time, the file requested and your browser's user agent) for security and to keep the site running.
5. Sharing and selling
We don't sell, rent or trade any data. The only third party that receives data is Mixpanel, as described above, which processes it on our behalf. Mixpanel may process data outside India. We will disclose information only if required by law.
6. Your data, your control
- Export. In the app you can export everything to a zip file (CSV, JSON Lines and a README) and import it back.
- Delete. Uninstalling Spends deletes all of its data from your phone: payments, notes, attachments and settings. Clearing the app's storage in Android settings does the same. Because nothing is kept on a server, there is nothing else for us to delete.
- Analytics. Turn it off in Settings. To ask us to delete analytics already sent, email us; because those events are anonymous, it helps to tell us roughly when you used the app.
- Permissions. You can revoke SMS, notification access and notifications at any time in Android settings. Spends will stop recording new payments until they are allowed again.
7. Children
Spends is not directed at children under 18 and we don't knowingly collect data from them.
8. Security
Your payment data lives in the app's private storage, which Android keeps separate from other apps. Anyone who can unlock your phone can open the app, so use a screen lock. Privacy mode (the eye icon) hides amounts from people looking over your shoulder.
9. Changes
If this policy changes, we'll update it here and change the effective date at the top. If a change affects what leaves your phone, we'll say so in the app's release notes.
10. Contact
Questions, requests or problems: abdus@abdus.net.