Privacy Policy

Last updated: June 29, 2026

Captain Frugal helps households track budgets, transactions, receipts, planned expenses, reimbursements, rewards, and subscription status. This policy explains the data handled by the Captain Frugal mobile app, website, beta signup flow, and backend services. It also explains the choices available for optional analytics, AI-assisted category suggestions, and account deletion.

Controller and contact

Captain Frugal is responsible for the personal data described in this policy. For privacy questions, account access, deletion, or consent withdrawal, contact support@captain-frugal.com.

Data we collect

• Account data, such as your email address, display name, authentication provider, and household membership.
• Budgeting and finance content that you enter, including transactions, categories, budgets, recurring items, and reimbursement status.
• Receipt content that you upload, including receipt images or PDFs, AI/OCR extracted merchant data, totals, dates, categories, line items, and user-confirmed category choices.
• Rewards data, including Captain Coin balances, pending rewards, earning events, redemption events, premium preview passes, and companion-related reward choices.
• Subscription and purchase information needed to verify app entitlements through Apple or Google platform services when those features are available.
• Beta request data you choose to send, such as name, email address, platform, device model, consent record, verification status, request status, and admin review notes.
• Technical data needed to operate and protect the service, including app version, device model, authentication tokens, security tokens, logs, diagnostics, and request metadata.
• Support messages you send to us, including the contact details and issue details you provide.

How we use data

• To provide the app's budgeting, receipt, household, reimbursement, rewards, beta, and subscription features.
• To authenticate users, protect accounts, prevent abuse, and enforce household-level data access.
• To process receipt uploads with AI/OCR assistance and show extracted receipt details back to you for review and correction.
• To suggest existing receipt line-item categories from your household history, your confirmed aliases, optional AI assistance, and optional anonymous aggregate category patterns.
• To verify subscription entitlements and restore purchases.
• To verify beta request email ownership, notify the admin when a verified request is ready for review, send beta invitations, respond to beta requests, and manage tester access for iOS and Android.
• To respond to support requests, troubleshoot issues, and maintain service reliability.

Legal bases

Depending on the feature, Captain Frugal processes data to provide the service you request, to protect accounts and operate the service, to comply with legal obligations, or with your consent where consent is requested, such as a voluntary beta contact request, optional analytics, optional AI receipt category suggestions, optional anonymous aggregate category patterns, or future optional marketing choices.

Third-party services

Captain Frugal uses service providers to operate the app and website, including Google, Apple, and OpenAI. These providers support app and website infrastructure, authentication, storage, app distribution, support and beta email workflows, optional analytics, purchases and subscriptions where available, and AI-assisted receipt processing where the relevant feature is enabled. Providers process data only as needed to provide their services to Captain Frugal. A practical provider list is available on the Subprocessors and Transfers page.

AI-assisted receipt scanning

Captain Frugal uses AI/OCR assistance to read receipt images or PDFs and suggest receipt details such as merchant, date, total, category, and line items. The app is designed to let you review and correct extracted details. AI-assisted receipt scanning is not financial, tax, accounting, legal, investment, or credit advice, and it is not used to make legal or similarly significant decisions about you.

Receipt category suggestions

Captain Frugal can suggest categories for individual receipt line items. Local suggestions use your household's past category choices. Optional AI receipt category suggestions are off by default; when enabled, the backend may send only normalized item text, optional normalized merchant text, and your household's existing category names to OpenAI to choose from those existing categories. The AI category feature is not allowed to create new categories or assign categories without your review. Optional anonymous aggregate category patterns are also off by default and use hashed normalized item aliases and aggregate category-name counts without raw merchant names, item names, amounts, receipt IDs, user IDs, household IDs, category IDs, or prompt text.

Beta requests

If you request beta access, Captain Frugal stores the information you submit so we can verify your email address, review the request, and manage TestFlight or Google Play tester access. A request is not ready for review until you use the verification link sent to the email address you provided. After verification, the request may be reviewed by the Captain Frugal team using internal beta administration tools.

Beta request data is used only for beta operations, support, withdrawal handling, security, abuse prevention, legal compliance, platform requirements, or disputes. You can withdraw a beta request by contacting support from the signup email address where practical.

Tracking and advertising

Captain Frugal does not sell personal data and does not use collected data for third-party advertising tracking. The landing page stores your analytics consent choice and keeps analytics storage denied by default. If you accept analytics, the page can send aggregate events, such as page views and CTA clicks, to Captain Frugal's analytics provider. Advertising cookies, ad personalization, and remarketing are not used. More detail is available in the Cookie and Analytics Notice.

Data retention

We keep account and app data while your account is active. Beta verification tokens expire after 48 hours. Unverified beta requests are deleted after 14 days. Beta abuse telemetry is retained for 30 days unless needed for an active security investigation. Verified beta requests and support emails are kept only as long as needed to manage the beta, respond to requests, maintain records, support app-store access, protect the service, or resolve disputes. If you delete your account, we delete or anonymize account-associated data unless retention is required for security, fraud prevention, accounting, legal compliance, platform requirements, or dispute handling.

Your rights and choices

• You can update or delete app content inside the app where the feature supports it.
• You can request or start account deletion from the app settings.
• You can ask to access, correct, delete, restrict, or receive a copy of your personal data.
• You can object to certain processing where applicable.
• You can withdraw consent for beta contact or future optional consent-based processing by contacting support.
• You can turn AI receipt category suggestions and anonymous aggregate category patterns on or off separately in app settings. Local household suggestions can remain enabled even when those optional sources are disabled.
• You can change the landing page analytics choice from the Analytics preferences control in the homepage footer.
• You can contact support for privacy questions or account access issues.

International transfers

Some service providers may process data outside your country or the European Economic Area. Where required, transfers should rely on appropriate safeguards such as adequacy decisions, standard contractual clauses, or platform transfer mechanisms.

Children

Captain Frugal is intended for personal or household finance management by adults. Do not use the service if you are not old enough to create an account under the rules that apply where you live.

Security

We use technical and organizational measures intended to protect account and finance data, including authentication, platform security controls, access controls, and service logging. No online service can guarantee perfect security.

Complaints

You can contact us first so we can try to resolve your concern. You may also contact your local data protection supervisory authority if you believe your data protection rights have not been respected.

This policy may be updated as Captain Frugal changes. The latest version is always available at this URL.