Bower Privacy Policy
Version 1, 28 September 2026.
Effective: 28 September 2026.
Who we are: Bower, an independent developer based in Sydney, Australia ("Bower", "we").
Contact: privacy@bower.money.
The short version
Bower is a household money tracker you fill in by hand. We never ask for your bank login and never connect to a bank. What you type is stored so the people in your household can see it on their phones. We do not sell it, show ads against it, or use it to profile you. You can export everything and delete your account from inside the app at any time.
What we collect
Only what the app needs to work.
| Data | Why | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Email address and password (hashed) | To sign you in | Supabase Auth, Sydney (ap-southeast-2) |
| Your display name and household name | So your household knows who added what | Supabase database, Sydney |
| Transactions you enter: amount, description, date, category, account, whether it is work-related | The point of the app | Supabase database, Sydney |
| Budgets, recurring rules, categories, accounts | The point of the app | Supabase database, Sydney |
| Receipt photos you choose to attach | To keep the receipt with the spend | Supabase Storage, Sydney, private bucket, only your household can open it |
| Bank statement files you import | Read on your phone to create transactions; the file itself is not uploaded | Your phone only |
| Two-step sign-in secret | If you turn two-step sign-in on | Supabase Auth |
| App settings (appearance, Face ID lock, notification choices) | Your preferences | Your phone only |
| Crash reports | To fix crashes. Only if error reporting is configured for the build; personal details are scrubbed before sending | Sentry (United States) |
We do not collect your location, contacts, calendar, advertising identifier, or anything from your bank.
What we do not do
- No bank connections, ever. Bower is manual by design.
- No advertising, no ad networks, no tracking across apps or websites.
- No selling or sharing of your data with data brokers.
- No analytics SDKs. We count nothing about you beyond what the database needs to run.
Who can see your data
- The members of your household, on their phones, through the app. When you join a household you are agreeing that the other members see the transactions, budgets and receipts of that household. Leaving or deleting your account removes your access; what you added stays with the household unless you were its only member.
- Our hosting providers, as processors: Supabase (database, authentication, file storage; Sydney, Australia) and, for crash reports only, Sentry. They act on our instructions and their own privacy terms apply.
- Nobody else, unless the law requires it.
How long we keep it
- Your account and household data: until you delete your account, or the household is deleted by its last member.
- Receipt photo originals: 12 months from upload, then removed automatically; a small thumbnail stays with the transaction until the transaction is deleted.
- Crash reports: 90 days at Sentry.
- Backups: Supabase keeps daily backups for 7 days; deleted data leaves the backups on that cycle.
Your rights and how to use them
- See and take your data: Settings > Money > Export gives you a CSV of every transaction and a JSON backup of your household.
- Correct it: edit anything in the app.
- Delete it: Settings > Account > Delete my account removes your account and, if you were the only member, the whole household including receipts. This is immediate and cannot be undone.
- Ask us: privacy@bower.money for anything else, including a complaint. We answer within 30 days. If you are in Australia and unhappy with our answer you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au). If you are in the EU or UK you have the rights in the GDPR, including to complain to your local authority.
Security
Data travels over HTTPS and is stored encrypted at rest by Supabase. Access to your household is enforced by row-level security in the database, so one household can never read another's rows, and the app has no server of its own that could be misconfigured. Two-step sign-in with an authenticator app is available in Settings and, when it is on, the database refuses every request until the code has been entered. Face ID lock is available on your phone.
Children
Bower is for adults managing household money. It is not directed at children under 16 and we do not knowingly collect their data.
Changes
We will put the date of any change at the top of this page and, for anything that changes what we collect or who sees it, tell you in the app before it takes effect.
Law
We handle personal information under the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles. For people in the EU and UK, the GDPR and UK GDPR apply to the extent they cover you.