What Pocket Clear Stores — and What It Can't Read

"Privacy-first" is easy to put on a landing page. It's harder to explain exactly where your data goes — so most apps don't. This page does the opposite: it lays out, in plain language, precisely what Pocket Clear keeps, where it keeps it, and what we genuinely cannot see.

If you'd rather read the formal version, our Privacy Policy covers the same ground in legal terms. This is the human explanation.

1. Local-First by Default

When you install Pocket Clear and start logging expenses, every transaction, category, budget, and savings goal is written to a database on your phone. It sits inside the app's own sandbox, protected by the storage protection and passcode your operating system provides — and, because nothing is uploaded, it is never exposed to a server at all.

In this default state, there is no server copy of your finances. You can use the app in airplane mode indefinitely. Nothing about your spending ever touches the internet, because there's nothing to send and nowhere for it to go.

This is what we mean by local-first storage: the device is the source of truth, not a remote server you have to trust.

2. What Lives in Pocket Clear's Cloud

Here's the part most apps won't spell out. What we hold in Pocket Clear's cloud depends entirely on which tier you're on and whether you turned on sync.

So a free user leaves zero financial data with us. What we do hold is an account record — email, name, currency, app language — plus a short daily activity report from the app: counts and settings such as how many entries you have, your Power Score, which features you've tried and your reminder settings. It never contains an amount, a merchant, a note or a category name. The transactions stay on the phone. The full list is in our Privacy Policy.

Only Pro Cloud Sync puts your actual entries in Pocket Clear's cloud, and even then it is encrypted at rest under a key we hold. It is on by default when you have Pro, and you can turn it off at any time — your data simply stays local again.

3. What We Can and Cannot See

There's an important difference between "we promise not to look" and "we can't look." We are going to be precise about which one we are, because plenty of apps blur it.

On the free tier the answer is the strong one: your financial data is never sent to us, so there is nothing for us to look at. That is not a promise about our behaviour — it is an absence of data.

When you turn on Pro cloud sync, the honest answer changes. Your data travels to us over TLS 1.3 and is stored encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, which protects it from anyone who gets at the database or the backups. But Pocket Clear holds that at-rest key, so we are technically able to decrypt what we store. We are not going to tell you otherwise. What we will tell you is what we do with that ability: nothing. We have never sold a row of it, never run an ad against it, never trained a model on it, and we never ask for your bank login.

Our zero-knowledge finance and encryption comparison pages explain the difference between encryption at rest and true end-to-end encryption, where only the user holds the key. Pocket Clear's sync is the former, not the latter.

→ Deep dive: What AES-256 Encryption Actually Protects

4. What We Never Store or Do

Some things aren't "off by default" — they simply don't exist in the product:

• No bank credentials. Pocket Clear uses manual entry only. We never ask for your online-banking login, account numbers, or an aggregator connection (Plaid, Yodlee, MX). There's no bank link to breach.
• No selling of data. There is no data-broker pipeline. Our revenue comes from the optional $4.99/month Pro plan — not from you.
• No AI training on your finances. Your transactions are never used to train models, ours or anyone's.
• No analytics or advertising SDKs in the app. Nothing in the app harvests your behaviour for ad networks. (Crash reports go to Sentry, and our website — not the app — uses Google Analytics; both are listed in the Privacy Policy.)

→ Related: Which Budget Apps Sell Your Data

5. What Happens When You Turn On Pro Sync

If you upgrade to Pro and enable cloud sync — for example, to keep a phone and a tablet in step, or to have an encrypted backup — here's the exact sequence:

1. You add or edit a transaction on your device.
2. It is sent to Pocket Clear's cloud over a TLS 1.3 connection.
3. Pocket Clear's cloud encrypts it with AES-256-GCM and stores it in that form.
4. Your other signed-in device asks for the change and receives it over TLS 1.3.

If you change your mind, switching Cloud Sync off keeps everything working — your data just lives on your device again, the way it started. Within about a day our server deletes the synced copy: transactions, receipt photos, categories, payment types, payees, budgets, recurring rules, goals and trips. Transaction reminders and hand-added Wealth items aren't part of Cloud Sync, so they stay until you remove them. If your Pro plan ends instead, nothing is deleted: your synced copy waits for you in case you come back. Delete Account removes everything we hold.

One exception worth stating plainly: shared group expenses. Splitting a trip or a household bill with someone else means Pocket Clear's backend has to do the arithmetic — work out who owes whom, in which currency, on which date. So for those rows the amount, date, currency, split type and exchange rate sit in ordinary database columns rather than inside the encrypted blob. The words still get the AES-256-GCM treatment: group names, member names and expense notes. Receipt photos live in Google Cloud Storage, encrypted at rest under Google's managed keys rather than ours, in a private bucket reachable only through a five-minute signed link that checks you own the receipt first. Your own personal transactions are unaffected — those are encrypted whole, exactly as described above.

6. Deleting Everything (GDPR & CCPA)

You can erase everything, permanently, whenever you like:

• In the app: Settings → Delete Account. This wipes your account and any synced data from Pocket Clear's cloud in a single, irreversible action. The one thing that stays is what you added to a shared group, so the other members' balances still add up.
• On the free tier: because your financial data is only on your device, deleting the app removes it from your side too.
• By request: email [email protected] and we'll erase your data and confirm in writing, in line with GDPR Article 17 and CCPA §1798.105. Any residual copy in our database backups is gone within 7 days, when those backups expire.

→ Related: How to Permanently Delete Your Budget-App Data · GDPR and Your Finance App

Go Deeper: Related Guides

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