Privacy policy

Part 1 — Mero Paisa for Android

What we collect

Everything you record, and everything the app reads — including SMS and notifications, if you switch those on — stays on your device, with one exception: Ask Me. Asking it a question sends your ledger to our server to be answered, and is described in full under Ask Me below.

Ask Me needs a Mero Paisa account; nothing else in the app does. If you create one, our server holds the email address, first and last name you give, your password (only as a hash, never in a form we could read back), and the Ask Me usage records described below. It is the same account the web app signs in with. We email that address a link to verify it is yours, and again only if you ask for a new link; the account cannot sign in until it is verified.

The app contains no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising and no third-party tracking code.

The permissions it asks for

These six, and nothing else. Several permissions that the app's libraries would otherwise add — access to your photos, videos, audio and external storage — are explicitly removed from the released app, because it has no use for them.

Reading your bank's SMS

The app can read your bank's transaction alerts so you do not have to type them in. This is off until you set it up, and setting it up means picking the sender for each account yourself from the list of senders on your phone — only their names are listed, and no message is read to build that list.

• The inbox query always names the senders you configured, so messages from anyone else are never returned to the app. That is a property of how the query is written, not a promise about restraint.
• It looks in your inbox only when you open the app. There is no background service and no receiver, so nothing happens as messages arrive.
• What it finds is shown to you to approve, edit, ignore, or mark as not a transaction. Nothing is recorded without you.
• Message contents are read on your device and never transmitted. A message is parsed where it is read and its text is not stored, so nothing is left for anything else to send — including Ask Me, which sends the entry you approved, not the message it came from.

Reading wallet-app notifications

eSewa, Khalti, IME Pay and most mobile-banking apps confirm a payment with a push notification and nothing else — there is no SMS to re-read later. So the app can also read notifications, from the apps you link to an account.

• Nothing is read until you grant notification access in your phone's own system settings. The app cannot grant this for you; it can only send you there.
• It reads text only from the packages you have linked, and keeps what it finds in a small, bounded buffer on your device.
• As with SMS, every match waits for you to approve, edit or ignore it.
• Unlike SMS, this one does listen in the background — a notification that is not seen as it is posted is gone. It is the only part of the app that does.
• Captured text is parsed on your device and not stored, so it is not among what Ask Me sends. The entry you approve from it is, like any other entry.

Reminders

The app can post two local reminders: one in the evening, and one on Sunday morning at the start of the budget week. Both are optional and are scheduled by your phone, on your phone. No reminder contains or transmits any of your figures, and nothing about them leaves the device.

Where your data is stored

Everything you enter — transactions, money sources, savings goals, spending limits, debts and family member tags — is stored in a single database file in the app's private storage on your device. It is never uploaded for storage and we hold no copy of it. The one time it is transmitted at all is when you ask Ask Me a question.

To be precise about what protects it: that file is not separately encrypted by the app. It is protected by Android's app sandbox, which keeps other apps out, and by your device's own encryption. If you want a lock on top of that, switch on the app lock described below.

Backups and exports

Any backup or export you create — a .bak backup file or an .xlsx workbook — is written to a location you choose, or handed to the app you choose through your phone's share sheet. Those files are entirely under your control. We never receive them, see them, or know they exist.

Ask Me

Ask Me answers questions about your own finances — how you are tracking against a savings target, where your spending is going. Answering one needs a server, so this is the only part of the app that is not offline.

• What is sent: the question you typed, and a copy of your ledger — transactions, money sources, savings goals and targets, spending limits, debts, family member tags, and your currency and language. This includes the notes on each transaction, which often contain names, phone numbers and partial card numbers copied in from bank messages. It also includes totals the app has worked out from those entries.
• When it is sent: only when you type a question and ask it. There is no background sending and no scheduled upload. The first time, the app shows what will be sent and asks you to accept; if you decline, nothing is sent.
• After you ask: the question keeps waiting for its answer if you leave the Ask Me screen or switch apps, and the app shows a notification when the answer arrives. Nothing new is sent for that.
• Where it goes: to the MeroPaisa API, which passes it to Claude, an AI service operated by Anthropic, to produce the answer, and returns the answer to your phone. We do not use your data to train any model, and we do not sell or share it.
• What is kept on your phone: your questions and Ask Me's answers, under the account you asked with, so the conversation is there when you come back. They are not in the backup file, and you can clear them from the Ask Me screen. Reading an answer aloud uses your phone's own text-to-speech voice; nothing is sent to do it.

How many messages, and what we keep. A free account can send Ask Me 3 messages a month and a Pro account 20. Every message counts, a greeting included. For each message our server keeps a usage record against your account: when it was sent, which AI model answered it, how much text went in and out (counted in tokens), and what that is estimated to have cost. We use these records to run the allowance and to see what Ask Me costs to provide, and we can see them, with the account's email address, on an admin page. They are all our server keeps about your messages — not the messages, the answers or your ledger — and they are deleted with your account.

What you can do. Not using Ask Me means none of this happens; the rest of the app works with no connection at all. If you would rather not send your notes, clear or edit them before asking — the app sends whatever an entry holds at the time you ask.

App lock and biometrics

If you turn on the app lock, authentication is handled entirely by your device's operating system. The app never sees, stores or transmits your fingerprint, face or PIN — it is only told whether the check passed.

Google Play in-app updates

The one place a Google service is involved. The app can ask whether a newer version is available and hand you over to the Play Store to install it. That check runs inside the Play Store app's own process, not ours — Mero Paisa opens no connection of its own for it. Nothing about you or your finances is part of it. If you installed the app some other way, you will never be offered an update this way at all.

Children's privacy

The app does not knowingly collect data from children. Nothing in it needs an account except Ask Me, and without one no data about you reaches us at all.

The web app is a different product from the Android app and gives you different guarantees. It has accounts, so it necessarily has a server, and what you enter is stored there rather than on your device. It is still being built: signing up and signing in work, but the ledger behind them is not finished.

What we collect

• The email address, first and last name and password you register with. These are held by the MeroPaisa API's identity system; the password is stored only as a hash, never in a form we could read back.
• Whether you have verified your email address. We email you a verification link when you sign up, and again only if you ask for a new one, through our email delivery provider; the account cannot log in until it is verified. We send no other email.
• The finance records you enter into the web app — amounts, dates, categories and notes.
• Ordinary web server request logs, kept by the hosting provider.

We do not collect anything else. There is no analytics code, no advertising, no third-party tracker and no third-party cookie on this site.

Cookies

Exactly two, both strictly necessary to keep you signed in, and both set when you log in:

• mp_session — your access token. httpOnly, so no script on the page can read it, and over HTTPS in production.
• mp_user — the email address of the signed-in account, so the app can show it to you. Also httpOnly.

Both use SameSite=Lax and are deleted when you log out. They last as long as the sign-in the API grants, and at most seven days, after which you are signed out and have to log in again. Your access token is never exposed to the browser: pages call this site, and this site calls the MeroPaisa API on your behalf.

Where your data is stored

On the MeroPaisa API, which runs on Microsoft Azure App Service with a managed SQL Server database. Microsoft acts as our hosting provider and processes the data on our instructions.

It does not sync with the Android app

Signing in here does not give you your phone's records, and entering something here does not put it on your phone, even though the same Mero Paisa account signs in to both. The Android app's only network feature is Ask Me, which sends your ledger to be answered and does not store or sync it. The two keep entirely separate records. To move data yourself, use the app's backup and export files.

Deleting your account

There is no self-service delete button yet. Email us at nepcoder.me@gmail.com from the address you registered with and we will delete the account and everything stored against it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version is posted on this page with a new “last updated” date.

Contact

Questions about any of this go to nepcoder.me@gmail.com.