Privacy Policy

• Analytics data: We use Google Analytics 4 to understand site traffic, page performance, and how the calculators are used. This may include IP address, device and browser details, pages viewed, time on page, and engagement metrics like clicks and scroll depth. We do not record session replays of your screen.
• Advertising and retargeting data: We use the Meta Pixel, Google Ads tag, Microsoft Advertising UET, and Reddit Pixel to measure marketing effectiveness and to show relevant ads on those platforms after you visit our site. These tools record page visits and custom engagement events such as which calculator you viewed, whether you completed a result, whether you engaged with an email signup form, and how many pages you viewed in a session. They are told that you finished a calculator, never what you entered or what your result was, and they never receive anything you type into a form. They are not loaded at all on pages that show your own saved results. When a link carries someone's numbers — a shared result, or your percentile as you move from a calculator to another page — the numbers are taken out of the page address before any of these tools can read it, or the tools are not loaded on that page at all.
• Account data: If you create an account, we collect your email address and profile information through our authentication provider (Clerk). Creating an account, including with Google's one-tap sign-in, also puts your email address on our launch list: we will email you when the app opens, and with product updates before then. Every email has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and your address is not shared with the advertising trackers above.
• Financial data: If you choose to connect a bank account through Plaid, we receive account balances, transaction history, and, for credit cards, balances, due dates, interest rates and monthly statements. Your bank credentials are never stored by Efficient Dollar — they are handled entirely by Plaid. See Plaid's privacy policy for details.
• Email submissions: When you submit your email to a waitlist or newsletter form, the email is sent to our server and stored for the product updates you signed up for. It is not shared with the advertising trackers above.
• Notification emails: If you connect a bank, we may email you when we see something time-sensitive about your money, such as an overdraft we can see coming or a paycheck that hasn't arrived. They go to the email address on your account. You choose which ones you get in Notification settings, and every one has a link to stop them. Stopping them doesn't remove anything from the app, and doesn't change whether you get product updates.
• Email opens and clicks: Our emails contain a tiny invisible image, and their links pass through our email provider before reaching the page. That tells us whether an email was opened and when, and which links were clicked — for a click, also the device and network address it came from — so we can learn which emails are worth sending. Some mail apps load images automatically, so an "open" is an estimate. If an address turns out not to exist, keeps bouncing, or reports one of our emails as spam, we stop emailing it for good.

In the app

• To work out your own numbers: what you can safely spend, your bills and income, what you owe on your cards and when it is due, and your net worth. Your financial data is used to run the app for you and to fix it when something goes wrong. It is never used for advertising.
• To read card statements with AI. Some card companies don't give Plaid a card's statement dates or balance. When that happens, we get your monthly statement from your card company through Plaid and send the PDF to Anthropic, whose AI reads the balance, the dates, the minimum payment and the interest rate off it. A statement also shows your name, your address and every transaction in that month, so Anthropic receives those too. We keep only the figures it reads; we do not keep the PDF. This happens automatically, with no step from you, so that every card can be counted the same way.
• To answer your questions with AI. When you use the app's assistant, your question and the financial context it needs to answer — your income, balances, debts, goals, recent transactions and your earlier conversation — are sent to Anthropic's AI to write the reply.

On the website

• To monitor site performance, improve the calculators, and understand which content is useful.
• To measure how visitors arrive and what they engage with, so we can prioritize the topics and tools to build.
• To show relevant ads about Efficient Dollar to visitors who have engaged with the site, on Meta (Facebook, Instagram), Google (Search, YouTube, partner sites), Microsoft (Bing, partner sites), and Reddit. This is called retargeting.

A small number of companies run parts of Efficient Dollar for us. Each one is listed here with what it receives. We do not sell your financial data or your account information to anyone.

What Anthropic may do with your data. Anthropic's commercial terms do not allow it to train its AI models on what we send it. It deletes that data within 30 days, unless the law requires it to keep it longer or it needs it to investigate misuse of its service (Anthropic's retention policy).

Plaid has its own privacy policy for the data it handles. If we start working with another company that receives your data, it is added to this list before it receives anything.

• Encrypted in transit and at rest. Every connection to the website and the app is encrypted, and browsers are told never to connect without encryption. Our databases are encrypted on disk by Cloudflare.
• Your bank connection is encrypted a second time. The key Plaid gives us to read your accounts is encrypted with a key of our own before it is stored, and is decrypted only for the moment it is used.
• We never have your bank login. You sign in to your bank inside Plaid's own window, and all we receive back is that key.
• Read-only. The access we ask your bank for can see balances, transactions and statements. It cannot move money, open accounts or change anything.
• Only your own data, on every request. Every request to the app checks who is signed in and returns only that person's data. An automated test tries to read one person's data while signed in as someone else, and no change to the app can ship unless that attempt fails.
• One person can reach it. Efficient Dollar is run by its founder, who is the only person with access to production systems. Every one of those systems requires two-step verification to sign in. To build and fix the app, he works with a copy of the database kept on one computer with full-disk encryption.
• Two-step verification for you. You can turn on two-step verification with an authenticator app in Settings.

• Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta, Microsoft Ads, and Reddit each set cookies to identify visitors across visits.
• A small amount of data is kept in your browser's local and session storage to count pageviews per session and recognize returning visits — for example, ed_page_count, ed_session_start, ed_first_visit, ed_session_count. These contain timestamps and counters only; no personal information.
• An ed_aid first-party cookie holds an anonymous identifier (a random UUID) so we can measure how visitors move through the site and the app at app.efficientdollar.com — for example, linking a calculator completion to a later newsletter signup, or seeing whether people who try the app go on to create an account. The same identifier is used in both places so one person is not counted twice. It contains no personal information. Activity inside the app is sent only to us; the advertising and analytics companies listed above are not used there.
• Some calculators keep your inputs in your browser's storage so your work is still there when you come back or refresh the page. We don't receive those inputs.
• When you save a calculator result, that result is sent to us and stored on our servers — the number, which calculator it came from, and the date. You do not need an account for this. Without one, it is stored under an anonymous identifier held in an ed_gid first-party cookie, shared between efficientdollar.com and app.efficientdollar.com so your saved numbers appear in both. No name or email address is attached to it.
• Saved results are kept for two years after your last visit — coming back resets the clock, so they stay as long as you keep using the site. Clearing your cookies removes the identifier that connects you to them, and we cannot recover them afterwards — without an account there is nothing to look you up by. If you create an account later, the results already saved under that identifier are moved onto your account and are kept as long as the account is.

Every kind of data we hold has a stated lifetime, and each one is enforced by a job that runs on a schedule rather than by good intentions.

When you connect a bank, Plaid gives us up to two years of past transactions so the app can recognise your regular bills and income from the start.

If you unsubscribe, we keep your email address. That record is the only thing that stops us emailing you again, so deleting it would defeat the point. Twenty-five months after you unsubscribe we delete everything on it that describes you — how you found us, the ad or link you arrived through, which page you landed on, and any age range you gave us. We keep the anonymous browser identifier, because it is what lets us find and delete the rest of your data if you ever ask. If you would rather it all went now, delete your account or email jared@efficientdollar.com.

Two small things outlive the 25 months, and both exist so that deleting your account actually works: an anonymous browser identifier, and the single record linking it to your account. Everything else on that record — the page, the link you came from, the campaign, your city, your device — is deleted on the same 25-month schedule as the rest. Without the link we would have no way to find your browsing history when you asked us to erase it.

One record survives an account deletion: the bare fact that one signup happened on a given date, with nothing on it that identifies anyone. It carries no name, no email address, no identifier and no device information. It exists so that deletions don't quietly rewrite our own count of how many people have signed up.

• Delete your account, and everything in it goes with you. The button is in Settings. Every bank connection is revoked at your bank first; then your transactions, balances, goals, plan, conversations and settings are erased, along with your email address, our record of emails we sent you, and the browsing history we can link to your account. Your login closes with it.
• It happens immediately, and it cannot be undone. There is no grace period and no way to restore an account. Signing up again later starts from nothing.
• Backups take up to 30 days. Our database provider keeps automatic snapshots for about a month, and a snapshot cannot be selectively edited — that is what makes it a backup. So your data is gone from the live system straight away, and out of those snapshots within 30 days. We would rather say that plainly than claim it vanishes everywhere at once.
• Disconnecting a bank is not the same as deleting. Disconnecting stops new transactions arriving; what has already been recorded stays until you delete your account.
• You can unsubscribe from email using the link at the bottom of any email we send, without deleting your account.
• There is no download-your-data button yet. If you want a copy of what we hold, email jared@efficientdollar.com and we will put one together.

• See what we hold. Email jared@efficientdollar.com and we will send you a copy.
• Delete it. Delete your account from Settings and everything in it is erased, as described above.
• Stop new data arriving. Disconnect a bank in Settings, or revoke access from your bank's own website.
• Stop our emails. Every email we send has an unsubscribe link.
• You can block or delete tracking cookies in your browser settings.
• Browser-level tracking protection (Safari Intelligent Tracking Prevention, Firefox Enhanced Tracking Protection, Brave's built-in shields) blocks most or all of these trackers automatically.
• Ad blockers (such as uBlock Origin) block all of the advertising and analytics scripts above.
• You can opt out of personalized advertising at the Network Advertising Initiative and the Digital Advertising Alliance.
• Each platform also has its own ad preference controls — Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Reddit each let you adjust or disable personalized advertising in your account settings.

The site may link to external sites. Their privacy practices are their own; review their policies before sharing information.

We update this policy when the website, the app or the companies we work with change. The "Last updated" date above shows the latest version.

Questions about this policy or your data: jared@efficientdollar.com.