Privacy Policy

1Who is responsible for your information

Amanda Vanderheiden, carrying on business as BetterCents Budgeting, of 6 Highland Boulevard, Caledonia, Ontario N3W 1G6, Canada, is responsible for the personal information held by BetterCents Budgeting. Our privacy contact is Amanda Vanderheiden, Owner at privacy@bettercentsbudget.ca, who is accountable for our compliance with this policy and with Canadian privacy law.

2What we collect

• Your account details — your name, email address, and a securely stored version of your password.
• Your subscription details — which plan you are on, its status, and your billing history.
• What you enter into the app — your budget: income, spending categories, transactions, savings, goals, debts, net worth entries, and anything you write in notes. This is the most sensitive information we hold and we treat it accordingly.
• Basic technical information — sign-in times and device or browser information, kept for security purposes.
• Not your card details or billing address — you give those to Link when you subscribe (section 6). Card numbers never reach our systems and we could not see them if we wanted to.

3Why we collect it

To give you the budgeting service you subscribed to, to run your subscription and send you receipts, to keep your account secure, and to answer you when you contact us. We do not sell your information, we do not rent it, and we do not use it to advertise anything to you.

4How we ask for your consent

We ask plainly, before we collect anything, and we keep a record of what you agreed to.

• At signup — these terms and this policy are shown to you before you pay, and you accept them with a deliberate action. We record which version you accepted and when.
• Your budget — keeping the budget information you enter is part of what you agree to when you accept our terms and this policy at signup. We ask for it there, before you have entered anything, and record which version you accepted and when. Nothing else is switched on for you by default.
• Optional email is a separate choice — reminders and encouragement are chosen separately at signup and can be changed at any time, without affecting your subscription.
• Changing your mind — you can withdraw your consent at any time by closing your account, which you can do yourself in the app. Some records — payments and tax — we are obliged to keep for a period afterwards; section 7 says which and for how long.

5Who can see your budget

Nobody but you. This is not a policy choice we could quietly reverse — the app is built so that the people who operate it cannot view any subscriber's budget contents. Our support tools show account and subscription information only. No screen, report, export, or log available to our staff contains your financial figures.

There are exceptions, and they are the ordinary ones. We would disclose information if the law required it. Our hosting provider necessarily stores the encrypted data that makes the app work, with no right to look at it or use it. And the technical administrator who maintains the servers can, as any database administrator can, reach the underlying data — that is unavoidable in running any software. He is bound by written agreement to open a subscriber’s budget data only where a specific fault requires it, to look at only what that fault requires, never to copy it out, and to record every occasion.

6Who else is involved

Running the app requires a small number of service providers, each doing one job:

• Hosting — a provider that runs the servers and stores the encrypted database.
• Email — a provider that delivers verification emails, password resets, receipts, and notices.
• Payments — Link, LLC (“Link”), a Stripe company, sells you the subscription. It collects your name, email, billing address and card, takes your payment, handles sales tax, sends receipts, and answers payment questions. Link is responsible for that information under its own privacy policy, at link.com/privacy. It tells us whether your subscription is active and which plan you are on, never your card number.
• Technical administration — Architected Intelligence, which administers the servers on our behalf under a written agreement.

Apart from Link, each is bound by contract to use the information only to provide that service to us, and only on our instructions. Some of these providers store or process information outside Canada, including in the United States. While information is outside the country it is subject to the laws of that country, and may be accessible to that country’s courts and government authorities under those laws. We tell you this because you are entitled to know it — every provider we use is held to the protections described in this policy.

7How long we keep it

• While you are subscribed — we keep your information for as long as your subscription is active.
• After your subscription ends — twelve months — your account remains open in read-only form. You can sign in, look back over everything you budgeted, and export it all. Twelve months covers a full year, so last year's figures are still there when you need them.
• We warn you before anything is deleted — an email at ten months, and another thirty days before deletion. Each one gives you a single click to export everything, and a single click to resubscribe.
• Then we delete it — at twelve months your budget information is deleted from our live systems, or made permanently anonymous where it contributes to overall statistics that identify nobody.
• Backups take a little longer — deleted information remains in our encrypted backups until those backups are cycled out, within 30 days. We would rather tell you that than claim an instant erasure that is not technically true.
• Payment records are kept longer — records of the payments our business receives are kept for the period Canadian tax law requires of any business — generally six years. Link keeps its own records of each sale and the sales tax on it. These are transaction records, not your budget.
• You can ask us to delete sooner — at any time, and we will.

8How we protect it

• Encrypted in transit and at rest — everything travels over an encrypted connection, and the database is encrypted where it is stored.
• Extra protection for personal details — names and email addresses are individually encrypted, so they are unreadable even to someone with direct access to the database.
• Passwords are never stored — only a one-way fingerprint that cannot be turned back into your password — by us or by anyone.
• Leaked passwords are refused — when you choose a password, the first five characters of its one-way fingerprint are checked against Have I Been Pwned, a free public list of passwords known to have leaked. It is not one of our providers, and those five characters cannot identify you or your password.
• Passkeys, if you choose them — you can sign in with your device's fingerprint, face or PIN instead of a password. Your device keeps the private half of the passkey and never sends it to us; we store only the public half, which can confirm your device but cannot impersonate it.
• Staying signed in — "Remember me" keeps you signed in on that device with a cookie that identifies your session. Changing your password signs out every other device, and you can sign out from Settings on any device you use.
• Administrative accounts require two-step sign-in — and every administrative action is logged.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we can say is that we have built this one to keep your financial information unreadable to everyone but you.

9Your rights

Under Canadian privacy law you can:

• See what we hold — and get a copy — the app gives you this instantly through its export.
• Correct it — if something is wrong.
• Withdraw your consent — and stop using the service, subject to any legal or contractual requirements we still have.
• Ask us to delete your account — which you can do yourself in the app, or by asking us.
• Ask Link about payment information — Link holds your card, billing address and receipts, so ask Link to see, correct or delete them. If you ask Link to delete them, Link also cancels your subscription.
• Complain — to us first at privacy@bettercentsbudget.ca, and if you are not satisfied with our answer, to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

We will respond to any request within thirty days.

10If something goes wrong

If personal information were ever lost or exposed in a way that created a real risk of significant harm to you, we would tell you and report it to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, as the law requires.

We also keep a record of every breach of our security safeguards — not only the serious ones, and not only the ones we have to report — for at least twenty-four months. Canadian privacy law requires that record and entitles the Privacy Commissioner to ask for it.

11Cookies and tracking

We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in and to keep that session secure. We do not use advertising trackers, we do not embed third-party analytics, and we do not sell or share anything about your visit. The figures we look at to run the business — how many subscribers there are, how many are on each plan — are counted inside our own system as totals. They are not a record of what you did.

12Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell you before the change takes effect. Each version is kept on record with the dates it applied.