Your financial data never leaves your iPhone. There is no account to create, no bank connection and no analytics. The one thing Pottle sends anywhere is what it needs to sell and check a Pottle Pro subscription — handled by Apple and by RevenueCat, our subscription provider — and that never includes anything you type into the app.
What stays on your device
The information you type into Pottle is saved locally on your iPhone so the app can show it back to you the next time you open it. This includes:
- The name you enter during setup
- Account names, types, balances and amounts owed
- Savings pod names, targets, icons, colours, challenges and progress, and the account you say a pod's money is kept in
- Dream photos you add to your pods. When you choose one, iOS opens its own photo picker: Pottle does not ask for access to your photo library and receives only the photo you pick. A smaller copy is saved in the app's own folder on your iPhone, and in backup files you create yourself.
- Contributions you record, including any notes and dates
- Money you take out of a pod: the amount, the date, any note, and whether you spent it or let it go
- Goals you have completed: their name, target, the amount saved and when you finished
- Income and expenses you record, with their category, account, date and note
- Transfers between your own accounts: the two accounts, the amount, the date and any note
- Your monthly spending budget and your category settings
- Recurring payment reminders: the name, amount, account, category and schedule you set for each
- A daily record of your net worth — your total assets and debts in the app's currency — kept so the app can follow how it changes over time
- Badges you earn, your streaks and the streak protections you use
- Your currency, language and reminder preferences, your default account, and when you first opened the app
- When an update changes how the app stores your information, a one-time copy of it from before the update, kept on your iPhone as a safety net
This information never leaves your device through Pottle, except in a backup file you choose to save yourself (see Device backups below). It is not uploaded, backed up to our systems, shared, sold or used for advertising. We have no way to see it.
Reminders and notifications
Pottle's notifications — reminders for your recurring payments and for your streak — are local notifications. The app schedules them on your iPhone and iOS shows them at the set time; no server sends them. Pottle has no push notification service and never requests a push token. A payment reminder can include the payment's name and amount; whether notifications appear on your lock screen is up to your iPhone's notification settings. You can turn them off in the app's Profile screen or in your iPhone's Settings.
Subscriptions: Apple and RevenueCat
Pottle Pro is an optional subscription. Apple takes the payment through your Apple ID; we never see your card or billing details. To know which subscription you have, Pottle uses RevenueCat, a service that checks App Store purchases for apps.
When Pro is available in the app, Pottle contacts RevenueCat's servers — for example when the app opens or you come back to it — to check whether you have Pro and to get the App Store's prices for the Pro screen. RevenueCat receives:
- A random app user ID. It is created on your iPhone the first time, looks like
$RCAnonymousID:followed by random characters, and is not your name, email or Apple ID. - Your purchase history for Pottle from the App Store: which plan you bought, when, its price and currency, trial and renewal dates, and the store's transaction identifiers.
- Technical details sent with each request: the app's version, the iOS version, the device model, your preferred languages, your App Store country, and the device's identifier for vendor — an ID that iOS gives each developer separately, so it cannot be matched with other developers' apps.
- Like any server on the internet, RevenueCat's servers see the IP address the request comes from.
RevenueCat does not receive your name, your accounts, balances, pods, contributions or anything else you enter. Pottle does not ask RevenueCat to collect advertising identifiers, and does not ask for permission to track you. RevenueCat processes this information to provide the subscription service to us; its own privacy policy is at revenuecat.com/privacy.
So that Pro keeps working offline, Pottle also keeps on your iPhone the last Pro status RevenueCat reported, and RevenueCat's own code keeps its app user ID and a copy of your purchase status there.
No bank connections
Pottle does not connect to banks or financial institutions. There is no Plaid integration or equivalent. We never ask for banking credentials, card numbers or account numbers, and the balances you enter are figures you type in yourself — not live data pulled from anywhere.
No tracking, no ads
Pottle contains no analytics tools, no advertising networks and no third-party tracking software. We do not use cookies, advertising identifiers or device fingerprinting, and we do not track you across other apps or websites. The subscription information above is used only to give you the Pro you paid for.
Device backups
If you have iCloud Backup or encrypted local backups enabled on your iPhone, iOS may include Pottle's stored information in those backups. This is handled entirely by Apple under Apple's own privacy terms — we have no access to it. You can manage or disable this in your iPhone's Settings.
Pottle can also save a backup file of everything you entered, your pods' photos included, when you ask it to from the Profile screen. You choose where it goes through the iOS share sheet — for example iCloud Drive or Files — and it never passes through us. The file is not encrypted, so keep it somewhere only you can reach.
Information Apple may receive
If you download Pottle from the App Store or subscribe to Pottle Pro, Apple handles that transaction and applies its own privacy policy. If you have chosen to share crash and usage data with developers in your iPhone settings, Apple may pass us anonymous crash reports. These reports contain technical diagnostics only — never the financial information you keep in the app.
Links that open outside the app
This policy, our Terms of Use and the support page open in a web browser from inside Pottle. Visiting them is a normal web request, and Pottle itself sends nothing along with it.
This website
This website is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Like any web host, Cloudflare receives the standard information a browser sends with each request, such as your IP address and browser type, to deliver the pages and protect the service. The site has no analytics, no advertising and no tracking, sets no cookies of its own, and loads nothing from other services.
Deleting your information
You are always in control:
- Erase all data in the app's Profile screen permanently deletes everything you entered, your pods' photos included, immediately. Backup files you saved yourself are not affected; delete them where you keep them. It leaves your Pro status in place, because a subscription belongs to your Apple ID, not to the data in the app.
- Deleting the app from your iPhone removes its storage along with it, including the saved Pro status and RevenueCat's app user ID.
- Cancelling a subscription is done in your Apple ID settings. Deleting the app does not cancel it.
We hold no copy of what you enter in the app. If you would like the subscription record RevenueCat keeps for your purchases deleted, write to us; because that record is anonymous, we may need a detail of the purchase, such as its date, to find it.
Children
Pottle is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. The only information that leaves the app is the anonymous subscription information described above.
Your rights
Privacy laws such as the GDPR and CCPA give you rights to access, correct, export or delete the personal data a company holds about you. What you enter in Pottle is held only by you, on your own device. For the subscription information RevenueCat processes for us, write to us and we will help you use these rights.
Changes to this policy
If a future version of Pottle changes how information is handled, we will update this page and change the date above before that version ships. Material changes will also be described in the App Store release notes.
Contact
Questions about this policy? Write to us and we will get back to you.