Privacy Policy

Last updated 25 July 2026.

Who runs this

Buggie.tools is a private personal-finance application operated by Michael Gehring. It is used by the operator and their immediate family to manage their own household and business accounts. It is not a commercial service, it is not offered to the public, and it does not serve third-party customers.

Questions about this policy: site@buggie.tools.

What is collected

• Account details — your email address and authentication credentials. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes; passkeys are stored as public keys.
• Financial data you provide or connect — account names, balances, transaction dates, amounts and descriptions, and, for credit accounts, statement and interest details. This arrives either from files you upload or from a bank connection you explicitly authorise.
• Data you create — categories, rules, budgets, goals and notes.

No analytics, advertising or third-party tracking is used. There are no tracking cookies; the only cookie set is the one that keeps you signed in.

Bank connections

Where you choose to link a bank account, the connection is made through Plaid Inc., a regulated financial data provider. You authenticate directly with your bank through Plaid — your banking username and password are never seen by, sent to, or stored by this application.

Plaid returns an access token that permits read-only retrieval of account and transaction data. That token is encrypted at rest before it is stored. This application requests only the data needed to show your accounts, transactions and obligations. It cannot move money, initiate payments, or change anything at your bank.

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

How your data is used

Solely to operate the application for you: showing balances and transactions, categorising spending, detecting recurring bills, projecting future cash, and tracking goals.

Your financial data is not sold, rented, shared for advertising, or used to train any machine-learning model.

If the optional assistant features are enabled, short transaction descriptions may be sent to Anthropic's API to suggest a category. Only the merchant description, amount and date are sent — never your name, account numbers, balances or credentials — and Anthropic does not train models on API inputs. This feature is off unless explicitly enabled.

Who can see your data

Each set of books is a separate ledger, and you can only see a ledger you have been explicitly granted access to. A personal ledger is private to its owner by default, including from other people using this application. Sharing happens only when the owner grants it, and can be revoked at any time.

Where it is stored

On private infrastructure operated by Michael Gehring in the United States. The database is not reachable from the public internet. All traffic to the application is encrypted with TLS 1.2 or better. Access requires authentication, with phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (passkeys) available and in use.

Retention and deletion

Financial data is kept while your account is active, because the application's value comes from long history — trend analysis and recurring-bill detection need years of it. Records you delete inside the app are marked deleted and stop appearing anywhere, then are purged permanently after 90 days.

You may delete your account at any time from Account → Delete personal data. Doing so permanently removes your login and every ledger you solely own, including all accounts, transactions, merchants, rules, budgets and goals, and revokes any bank connections you created. This cannot be undone and is not recoverable from backup after 90 days.

You may also disconnect a linked bank at any time without deleting your account. Doing so stops all future data retrieval immediately; already-imported transactions remain until you delete them.

This policy is reviewed at least annually and whenever the application's data handling changes.

Your choices

• Export everything held about you from Account → Personal data.
• Delete your account and all data you own, as described above.
• Disconnect any linked bank without deleting history.
• Correct or remove any individual record from within the application.

Children

This application is not intended for and is not made available to anyone under 18.

Changes

Material changes will be reflected here with an updated date, and anyone with an account will be notified by email before the change takes effect.