Privacy Policy

YewSave ("we", "us", or "our") operates the YewSave mobile application (the "App"). We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting the personal and financial information you share with us.

This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you use our App.

1. Information We Collect

A. Personal Information You Provide

• Account Data: Email address and password (when signing up via email/password) or profile credentials (when using Google Sign-In).
• Profile Details: Name or display preference, profile settings, and app preferences.
• Phone Number: Only if you turn on two-step verification by text message. The number you type is sent to Firebase Authentication (Google), which texts your sign-in codes to it and keeps it on file for your second sign-in step. YewSave uses it only for those codes. Google says it also stores and uses phone numbers to help prevent spam and abuse across its services. To remove the number from your account, open Settings → “Two-step verification” and tap Turn off next to your number. Deleting your account removes it from your account too; Google's own spam-and-abuse use is covered by Google's privacy policy.

B. Financial Data Entered by You

• Transaction Records: Transaction dates, amounts, categories, types (income, expense, transfer, investment, debt payment), and notes.
• Budget Targets & Financial Goals: Monthly budget limits, category spending goals, and debt/asset balance entries.
• Learning & Coaching Progress: Saved lesson progress, interactive exercise answers, and coach interaction notes.

C. Bank Account Data (Only If You Connect a Bank)

Connecting a bank account is entirely optional. The App works fully without it, and nothing in this section applies unless you choose to connect one.

If you do, we use Plaid Inc. to make the connection:

• You enter your bank credentials with Plaid, never with us. Your online banking username and password are typed into Plaid's own secure window. YewSave never sees, receives, or stores them, and has no way to.
• What we receive from Plaid: your transaction history (dates, amounts, merchant names, categories), account balances, and — for credit cards, student loans and mortgages — the balance, interest rate and minimum payment, plus the next payment due date and last statement balance for credit cards, for the accounts you choose to connect.
• What we deliberately do not request: your full account and routing numbers, and identity verification data. YewSave does not use Plaid's Auth, Identity, or Balance products — it cannot move money, and it has no ability to make a payment or transfer on your behalf.
• The connection key is never in the App. The token that lets us fetch your transactions is stored server-side only, in a location the App itself cannot read, and is used solely to refresh your transactions.
• You can disconnect at any time from within the App. Disconnecting stops all future access immediately.

Plaid's own handling of your information is governed by the Plaid End User Privacy Policy.

D. Technical & Usage Data

YewSave has no crash-reporting or analytics service. Two things fall under this heading:

• Diagnostic logs. The app holds its last 100 error entries — error messages and, for crashes, the stack trace — in memory only while it runs; nothing is written to disk or sent on its own. They reach us only when you open Settings → “Report a problem” and tap Send. A report carries those entries, the app version, your account id and how you signed in. We keep only your most recent report, and it is deleted with your account.
• A daily count of how many times the coach’s background reading ran for your account, kept against your account id. That reading runs between your visits, so this count can change while the App is closed. Section 3B says why we keep it, where it lives and for how long.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect solely to provide, maintain, and improve YewSave, including to:

• Create and manage your account across your devices.
• Materialize recurring financial entries and generate monthly budget breakdowns.
• Provide supportive financial coaching, cash-flow forecasts and net worth calculations, including reading your transaction history to learn the rhythm of your income.
• Save and sync your educational progress and preferences.
• Respond to customer support inquiries and send security alerts or administrative updates.

3. Data Sharing and Third-Party Services

We do NOT sell, rent, or trade your personal or financial data to third parties.

We share data only with trusted cloud service infrastructure providers required to operate the App:

• Google Cloud / Firebase: Used for secure authentication (Firebase Auth), database storage (Cloud Firestore), and app hosting.
• Cloudflare (Worker Relay): Used for processing AI coach interaction requests securely without exposing server credentials, and to hold the daily counts described in Section 3B.
• OpenAI (API): Used when you send a message to the coach, and, once the coach's background reading is switched on for your account, to read the shape of your income between visits. Sections 3A and 3B say exactly what is sent in each case.
• Plaid Inc.: Used only if you choose to connect a bank account, to establish that connection and retrieve your transactions, balances and the loan details listed in Section 1C.
• RevenueCat: Used to run and check your subscription. Opening the upgrade screen asks RevenueCat for today's prices. Your YewSave account id is sent when you start a purchase, so the subscription is attached to your account, and our server uses that same id to check your subscription with RevenueCat afterwards, including when it renews or ends on its own with the app closed. RevenueCat knows which plan you are on and when it renews. It never receives your money data, your transactions, or your bank connection.
• A household partner: YewSave Household covers two people on one subscription and pools the plan's six bank connections between you. Your money data is not shared. Your partner signs in to their own account, and their accounts, balances, transactions, budget, bills, goals and coach conversation are theirs alone, as yours are yours. Neither of you can see or change the other's, and neither of you sees the other's device logs or coach usage. Either of you can end the seat at any time, from inside the app, and nobody gets a seat unless you give them a code.

Where your data is stored and processed. The services named above (Google Cloud and Firebase, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Plaid and RevenueCat) store or process information in the United States, and may also do so in other countries. If you live in Canada, including Quebec, this means your information may be sent outside your province and outside Canada. While it is in another country, courts, police and national security authorities there may be able to access it under that country's laws. For privacy questions, write to support.yewsave@gmail.com.

A. What the AI coach is sent

The coach is powered by a model from OpenAI, which runs on OpenAI's servers rather than on your phone. Talking to the coach is optional — every other part of YewSave works without it, and nothing is sent to OpenAI unless you send a message.

When you do, your message is sent together with a short summary of your financial situation, so the coach can answer about your money instead of in generalities. That summary contains:

• Figures you can see on your own screens: money in and out this month, spending by category, your budget totals, what is safe to use, your net worth and emergency fund.
• Your upcoming bills, and the names, balances and interest rates of any debts you have added.
• What the coach has worked out about your income, once the background reading described in Section 3B is switched on for your account: whether your income is steady or varied, how sure the model was, and when it was worked out — and, for each source that pays you, its name, the typical amount it has paid so far, how often it pays, and how many payments that is based on. Business names are sent. Where a bank description shows a person paid you through a recognised transfer service, the name is replaced with a stand-in before it leaves our server, with the same three exceptions Section 3B names.

What is never sent with a chat message: your bank login credentials (YewSave never has them), your account or routing numbers (YewSave never requests them), your email address, or your transaction history. What the coach reads between visits is different and is described in Section 3B.

OpenAI processes this under its published API terms and its API data controls documentation. YewSave uses the paid OpenAI API, under which OpenAI does not use your prompts or the coach's replies to train its models (its published policy as of September 19, 2026).

B. What the coach reads between your visits

The coach can also read your transaction history on its own, so that the next time you open the app it already knows whether your income is steady or comes in bursts. This reading happens on our server and uses the same OpenAI model as the chat. It is switched off for every account until we turn it on, and we are turning it on for a small group first.

What is sent. Before anything leaves our server it is rebuilt from a short, fixed list of fields: the kind of entry (income, expense, transfer, investment, debt payment), the amount, the date, the category, whether it is still pending, and a shortened label for who paid or was paid. For the income reading, the model does not even see individual entries: it sees each source of income with how many times it paid and on which days, and the total income for each full month.

What is not sent. Your bank sign-in (we never have it). Account and routing numbers (we never ask Plaid for them). Balances. Any note or memo you typed on an entry. The bank's own reference numbers. Your email address. A category you named yourself is sent as "Other". Runs of digits inside a bank description, such as a card tail, are replaced with a # before it leaves.

Names of people. Business names are sent, because the coach needs to know what money was for. Where a bank description shows a person paid you or was paid by you through a recognised transfer service (Zelle, Venmo, Cash App, Apple Cash, a check, a wire, and similar), the person's name is replaced with a stand-in like "PERSON 1" that means nothing outside that one request. We cannot promise a person's name never leaves. Three cases get past this: a name you typed in yourself as the payee of an entry; a bank that writes a person-to-person transfer without naming the service it went through; and a PayPal Friends-and-Family payment, which looks exactly like a PayPal purchase from a shop. If you would rather a name did not travel, type a description that leaves it out.

What OpenAI does with it. YewSave uses the paid OpenAI API. Under its published policy (as of September 19, 2026), OpenAI does not use these requests or the model's answers to train or improve its models, and keeps them only to detect abuse, for up to 30 days unless longer retention is required by law. The current policy is at https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/your-data.

What we keep. The answer is written into one small record in your own account: the shape of your income and how sure the model was. We keep no copy of what was sent or what came back. That record is deleted with everything else when you delete your account.

What else we keep. We also keep a count of how many times this reading ran for your account each day. It is stored on our Cloudflare relay rather than in your account, and it is a date, your account id, and a number. It holds nothing about your money, and none of it is sent to OpenAI. We keep it so the running cost stays inside the limits we set. Each day’s count deletes itself automatically within 48 hours of the last run it counted. Deleting your account does not remove it any sooner, because it is not stored with your account data.

If the diagnostic view is switched on for your account, the day’s number is shown under Settings → “Report a problem”. It is off for most accounts; if it is off for yours, write to us and we will look up the current day’s number while it is still there. Asking for the number uses none of your coach passes and sends nothing about your money.

4. Data Security

• Encryption in Transit: All data transmitted between the App and cloud servers is encrypted using industry-standard TLS / HTTPS encryption.
• Strict Access Controls: Cloud Firestore security rules ensure that your money data is accessible only by your authenticated account. A partner holding your household's second seat cannot reach it either. A household shares a subscription and its bank-connection allowance, and only our server can create or end a seat.

5. Account Deletion & Data Retention

• Exporting Data: You can export your transaction history to CSV directly from the Transactions screen in the App at any time.
• Deleting Account & Data: You can delete your account and all of its data at any time from Settings → Your account → Delete your account in the App, or by contacting us at support.yewsave@gmail.com from your sign-up address. Upon account deletion, all user profile records, transactions, budgets, bank connections, lesson progress and anything the coach has worked out about you are permanently removed from Cloud Firestore, and any bank connections are revoked at Plaid so no further data can be retrieved. Full instructions, including how to delete your account if you can no longer sign in, are at yewsave.web.app/delete-account.
• A few counters outlive deletion, briefly. We keep small counters on our Cloudflare relay so that deleting an account and starting again cannot clear that day’s limits. They are not stored with your account data, so deleting your account does not erase them, and each one deletes itself automatically within 48 hours either way. Each is just your account id and a small number or two — a date, a count, or when you may retry. The daily count described in Section 3B is one of them.
• Inactive accounts. We are introducing a dormancy rule: if you have not signed in for 23 months, we will email the address on your account to say so, and if you still have not signed in a month after that — 24 months without a sign-in — we will delete your account and its data, exactly as described above. No YewSave account is yet old enough for this to apply.

6. Children's Privacy

YewSave is intended for general audiences and is not directed to children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

7. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page and updating the “Last Updated” date.

8. Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at:

• Email: support.yewsave@gmail.com
• Website: https://yewsave.web.app

Person in charge of protecting personal information. Our Privacy lead is responsible for protecting the personal information YewSave holds. You can reach the Privacy lead at support.yewsave@gmail.com with any privacy question, request or complaint.