Privacy Policy

1. The short version

You are about to connect a bank account to an app made by a very small team. You should know exactly what happens to your money data. Here is the whole thing in seven lines. Everything below is the same seven lines with the detail attached.

• Pulse can look, Pulse cannot touch. The bank connection is read only. There is no feature in Pulse that moves money, and we never built one.
• We never see your bank login. You sign in with your bank through Plaid. Your username and password never pass through us.
• Your transactions never reach the AI. Pulsey sees a summary of your numbers, never a transaction, a merchant, or an account number. What you type into the chat box does reach the AI, because that is how it answers you. Section 6 covers both.
• We do not sell your data and we do not advertise. No ad network, no advertising identifier, no data broker, anywhere in this app.
• Nothing here decides anything about you. Your Pulse score is not a credit score. Nothing we calculate is ever used for a credit, lending, employment, or insurance decision.
• You can leave and take everything. Disconnect a bank, delete a conversation, or delete your account and everything in it.
• We say where the limits are. Where a protection comes from a vendor rather than from us, we say so. Where we can only ask for something rather than guarantee it, we say that too.

2. Who we are, and what Pulse is

This policy explains how Pulse ("Pulse," "we," "us") collects, uses, shares, and protects information when you use the Pulse mobile app. Read it alongside our Terms of Service.

Pulse is a personal finance app. It connects to your financial accounts on a read only basis, calculates a Pulse wellness score and spending insights, explains how economic news relates to your situation, and offers an educational money companion called Pulsey.

Pulse provides general financial education and tools so that you can make your own decisions. Pulse is not a financial advisor and does not provide investment, legal, or tax advice. Your Pulse score is a wellness score, not a credit score.

Pulse is for people who are 18 or over and located in the United States. We have no affiliates.

3. Information you give us

4. Information we collect automatically

Very little, on purpose.

• Anonymous product events. We count things like the app being opened, a screen being viewed, or a lesson being read. Only a fixed, named list of events can be sent, and only a fixed list of non-financial properties can travel with them. Anything else is dropped in code before it leaves your phone. We never send the text of a Pulsey message to analytics. We never link an event to your name, your email, or your account. This is handled by PostHog.
• We do not record your screen. Session recording is turned off.
• We do not capture your taps automatically. Autocapture is turned off, so only the named events above are ever sent.
• We do not derive your location. Geolocation lookup is turned off in our analytics. Like any service on the internet, our vendors receive the IP address your request arrives from, but we do not use it to work out where you are, and we do not store it.
• We do not collect a device identifier or an advertising identifier, and we do not show you the App Tracking Transparency prompt, because we have nothing to track you with.
• We do not collect a phone number, and we do not send push notifications.
• Crash reports. When the app crashes, it sends us a report so that we can fix it. That report contains your device model, your operating system version, and a technical trace of where the code failed. It does not contain any balance, transaction, score, or dollar figure, and it does not contain anything you typed to Pulsey. This is handled by Sentry.
• Our servers keep an ordinary record of how many AI requests were made and what they cost. Those records contain no message text and no financial figures.
• One screen in the app loads a graphics library from a public code CDN. That request contains nothing about you.

5. Your bank connection, through Plaid

When you link a financial account, you do it through Plaid, the connection layer used by a large share of the finance apps already on your phone. You enter your bank credentials with Plaid or with your bank directly. Pulse never receives them.

What we receive

We ask your bank only for the access we actually use. We do not request your interest rates or loan terms, because we do not read them.

Your control over it

• Disconnecting. You can unlink any bank at any time in the app. That revokes the connection at Plaid and deletes the transactions we pulled from it.
• Reconfirming. Banks sometimes require a connection to be re-approved. We will prompt you when that happens.
• Plaid's own policy. Plaid's handling of your data is governed by Plaid's end user privacy policy, at plaid.com/legal.

6. How Pulsey uses AI

Pulsey runs on Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. This is the part of the app people are right to be suspicious about, so we are going to be exact. Two separate things reach Anthropic, and they are not the same.

One. Your numbers, summarized

Before anything is sent, our servers do the math and reduce your accounts to a short summary: figures such as your monthly take home, your total debt, your net worth, your savings rate, how many months of cushion you have, and the names of your top spending categories. Whole numbers, no cents.

What is not in that summary: any transaction, any merchant name, any account identifier, your bank connection key, your email, or your name. None of it is ever placed in a prompt. This is enforced by the structure of our code, not by a rule we try to remember. Every AI request in Pulse passes through a single point in the codebase, and only the summary fits through it.

These figures are rounded to the nearest dollar. They are aggregates and never transactions, but they are precise, so we will not pretend otherwise. An aggregate like your net worth is a real figure about you, and it is sent.

Two. What you type

When you ask Pulsey a question, your message and the recent conversation are sent to Anthropic as you wrote them, so that they can be answered. This is how any AI chat works. It means that if you type a dollar amount, a merchant, or a name into the chat box, you have sent it to Anthropic yourself.

We are telling you this because most apps do not. Our promise is not that nothing reaches the AI. Our promise is that we never hand it your bank data behind your back.

What Pulsey remembers

Pulsey keeps a short written impression of what matters to you, so that you do not have to explain yourself twice. It is written in words, not numbers. It is instructed never to record a dollar amount or a score, and we review it, but it is produced by a model and we will not claim a guarantee we cannot enforce. You can delete it by deleting your account.

On Anthropic

• No training. Anthropic does not use data submitted through its business API to train its models. Your money does not become part of a model.
• Retention. Anthropic retains what is sent to its API for a limited period, on its own terms, for safety and abuse monitoring. We have not negotiated a zero retention arrangement, and we are not going to imply that we have.
• Your conversations are yours. They are stored in your account so you can come back to them, and you can delete any of them at any time.

7. What Pulse works out about you

Pulse does not only store what you give it. It calculates things. You should know what those are.

• Your Pulse score and its five parts. Calculated live from your accounts, never stored as a permanent record.
• Your Safe to Spend and your spending pace. Calculated from your transactions.
• Insights, lessons, and market stories written for you. Generated from your summarized figures.
• An impression of what matters to you, kept by Pulsey. Described in Section 6.

None of this is ever used to make a decision about you that carries a legal or significant effect. Pulse makes no credit decision, no lending decision, and no eligibility, employment, or insurance decision, and we do not send any of it to anyone who does. There is no code in Pulse that could. If that ever changes, this policy changes first, and you will be told before it does.

8. Sharing a moment

When you reach a goal, Pulse lets you share an image of it. That image contains your point gain and nothing else. No dollar amount, no total score, no name, no photo. Nothing is shared unless you tap to share it, and once you send it to another app, that app's rules apply, not ours.

9. Payments

Pulse is free today and there is no payment processor connected to it. Nothing in the app can charge you. When we introduce a paid plan, payments will be handled by Apple, we will never see your card details, and we will update this policy before it happens.

10. Who else touches your data

This is the complete list of companies involved in running Pulse. There is nobody else. We do not sell your personal information, we do not disclose it to anyone for their own purposes, and we do not disclose it to anyone for their direct marketing.

Every one of these companies is a service provider working on our behalf, under contract, and none of them may use your information for their own purposes. That is why no opt out is offered here. There is nothing to opt out of.

We may also disclose information if the law or legal process requires it, or where we believe in good faith that it is necessary to protect someone's safety or to investigate fraud. If Pulse is ever acquired or merged, your information may transfer as part of that, and we will tell you before it does.

11. How we protect your information

• Your bank connection key is encrypted. It is encrypted with AES-256-GCM, with a separate initialization vector for every record, before it is ever written to our database. If our database were taken, the bank connections inside it would be unreadable without a key we keep separately.
• Your sign in stays in the phone's keychain. Your session is stored in your device's secure enclave, not in ordinary app storage.
• Everything moves over an encrypted connection. Between the app, our servers, and our database.
• Every request is scoped to you. Every request that touches money data is checked against your identity first, and can only ever return your own rows.
• Analytics never sees a dollar. No balance, transaction, or score is ever sent to an analytics or crash-reporting tool, and screen recording is off.
• Where the protection is our vendor's, we say so. Encryption of the database itself is provided by Supabase. Transport security between the app and our servers is provided by our hosting platform.

No system is perfectly secure, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. If we ever have a breach that affects your information, we will tell you, and we will tell the regulators the law requires us to tell.

12. How long we keep it, and what we do not back up

Backups, stated plainly

We do not currently maintain automated backups of our database. If our data were lost, we could not restore it from a backup. This is a limitation of the plan we are on during the beta, we are telling you rather than leaving it out, and we will change it before Pulse leaves beta. When we do, this policy changes first.

13. Your choices and your rights

What you can do right now

• Disconnect a bank. In the app, at any time.
• Delete a conversation. In the app, at any time.
• Delete your account. In Settings. This removes your profile, transactions, chats, goals, and bank connections from our servers, and revokes the bank connections at Plaid. It cannot be undone.
• Get a copy of your data. Email us at privacy@yourpulsestory.com and we will send you what we hold about you.

Your legal rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to know what we hold about you, to correct it, to delete it, to receive a portable copy, to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, which we do not do, and to limit the use of sensitive personal information, which we use only to run the service. You will never be treated differently for exercising any of these rights.

To make a request, use the controls in the app or email privacy@yourpulsestory.com. We do not require you to create an account to make a request. We may need to confirm who you are first. You may use an authorized agent. We will respond within the time your state's law requires, generally 45 days. If we decline, you can appeal by replying to our decision, and we will respond to the appeal within the time the law requires. If we deny an appeal, your state attorney general may offer a way to complain.

California Shine the Light

California residents may ask whether we disclosed personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing. We do not, and we never have.

14. Children

Pulse is for people who are 18 or over. We ask you to confirm your age when you sign up, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have, we will delete it. If you believe a minor is using Pulse, email privacy@yourpulsestory.com.

15. Which privacy laws apply to us

We include this because over-claiming compliance is its own kind of dishonesty.

Under GLBA, we disclose your financial information only to the service providers in Section 10, who process it on our behalf under contract, which is a permitted disclosure that carries no opt out. We have no affiliates and we do not share your information with any. Your data is stored in the United States, in Ohio and in California.

16. Tracking, and Do Not Track

Pulse is a mobile app. It does not use advertising cookies, and it does not allow anyone to follow you across other apps or websites. Because we do not track you for advertising anywhere, and because there is no agreed industry standard for Do Not Track signals, the app does not respond to them. Where an opt out preference signal such as Global Privacy Control applies to us, we honor it.

17. Changes to this policy

We will update this policy as the app changes or the law requires. When a change is material, we will update the date at the top and tell you in the app or by email. Continuing to use Pulse after a change takes effect means you accept it. Earlier versions are available on request.

18. The Pulse website

Everything above is about the Pulse app. This website does almost nothing, and here is all of it.

• The waitlist. If you join it, you give us your email address and nothing else. We store it with Resend, our email provider, and use it only to tell you when access opens. There is no other form on this site.
• No cookies, no analytics, no tracking. This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, keeps nothing in your browser's storage, and carries no advertising. Nobody is following you here.
• Hosting. The site is hosted by Vercel, which receives the ordinary web request data any web host receives, including the IP address your request arrives from. We do not use it to identify you.
• Leaving the list. Email privacy@yourpulsestory.com and we will remove your address.

19. Contact

Pulse

privacy@yourpulsestory.com

If something in this policy does not match what the app actually does

That is a bug, and we want to know about it. Email us.