Polaris Budget Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 13, 2026

Polaris Budget (“Polaris,” “we,” “us,” or “the App”) is a personal budgeting and financial-planning app for iPhone. This policy describes what information is handled when you use the App or this website, where it lives, and the choices you have. Questions: use the support form.

Our privacy principles

• Local-first. Your financial books live on your device and, if you use iCloud, in your Apple iCloud — not in a Polaris cloud account database.
• No Polaris login. There is no Polaris user account, password, or profile we host. Identity for linking partners is an anonymous identifier on your devices.
• No sale of personal information. We do not sell your data or use it for third-party advertising.
• No third-party ad or tracking SDKs in the App, and no advertising pixels on this website.
• On-device intelligence. Optional insights use Apple Intelligence on your iPhone. We do not operate a Polaris cloud AI that stores your receipts or transactions.

Information the App handles

Depending on how you use Polaris, the App may process:

• Linked financial data (when you connect an institution via our bank-linking partner): account names and types, balances, transactions (amounts, dates, merchants, categories), investment holdings, and liability details where available.
• Data you enter: budgets, categories, notes, manual accounts or assets, planning assumptions (for example retirement age, income segments), card-wallet mappings, and similar preferences.
• On-device content you choose to process: for example receipt images for split expenses, or text used by optional on-device intelligence features. That processing is designed to run on your device.
• Technical identifiers needed to run the App: a stable anonymous install/user id (stored in the device / iCloud Keychain) used for bank-link sessions and for the anonymous usage counters described below; connection tokens for linked institutions (Keychain); and ordinary iOS diagnostics if you use Apple’s system features.

We do not collect your bank login credentials. You enter those only with the linking partner and your financial institution.

Bank linking

Institution connections are provided by Quiltt, which may use subprocessors such as Plaid or Finicity. Those companies process connection and financial data under their own privacy policies and terms. Polaris receives account and transaction data through that pipeline to show in the App; access tokens for your links are stored in the iOS Keychain on your devices (and may sync via iCloud Keychain across devices you own).

Where your financial data is stored

• Your iPhone (and your iCloud, if enabled). Accounts, transactions, budgets, holdings, preferences, and related books are stored in the App’s local database and, when iCloud is on, in your private iCloud storage (file-level Documents sync). Polaris does not keep a separate copy of your financial books on our servers.
• Keychain. Linking tokens and the anonymous id live in the Keychain, not in a Polaris server database.
• Our server is a relay, not your books. A small backend holds API secrets (so they are not shipped inside the App binary) and proxies bank-link and market-data calls. It is not a system of record for your accounts, transactions, balances, or tokens.

What our server may retain (non-financial)

To operate the App and this website we may keep limited non-financial operational data on our infrastructure, for example:

• Anonymous usage counters — hashed app install id, high-level API family volume (for example market vs linking), and coarse product labels such as which budget-persona template is selected or whether planning inputs look retired vs still working. These are not tied to your name, email, or account numbers and do not include balances or transactions.
• Market-data cache — public market symbols and price history used to power charts and quotes (not your portfolio holdings list).
• Operational logs — technical logs needed to run and secure the service (for example error rates), without storing your financial books.
• Support-form messages — if you use the support form, we receive the topic, message, optional reply email, and a coarse rate-limit key derived from your IP. The note is emailed to our support mailbox so we can reply. It is not attached to a financial book and is not used for advertising.
• App Store waitlist email — if you join the launch waitlist on this site, we store your email (and when you joined) so we can notify you when the app is available. We do not use it for advertising or sell it. You can ask us to remove it via the support form.
• In-app issue reports you send — a redacted diagnostic you choose to submit from Settings → Report an Issue (counts and structure, not balances or credentials), stored for a limited retention window so we can investigate, then deleted.

If you email the legal contact address below, we will receive whatever you send in that message. Support mail is handled only to respond to your request.

This website

The marketing and help pages are static content served from the same host as the relay. The envelope-budgeting video is hosted on our origin — we do not embed a third-party player that would set extra cookies. We do not run advertising or analytics SDKs on these pages. Ordinary web-server logs (timestamp, path, status, coarse user-agent) may be retained briefly to keep the site reliable.

Market data

Quotes and historical prices may be fetched through our server from market-data providers (for example Marketstack and fallback sources such as Yahoo Finance or Finnhub, depending on configuration). Those requests typically include ticker symbols and date ranges — not your name, accounts, or holdings list as a portfolio snapshot to the vendor.

How we use information

To provide App features you choose to use, including balances and net worth, transactions and categorization, budgets and cash flow, portfolio and performance views, card-rewards context, planning tools (for example retirement scenarios), data-health checks, and optional on-device insights. We also use anonymous operational metrics to keep the service reliable, and support-form contents to answer you. We do not sell personal information or use your financial data for third-party advertising.

Sharing

• Service providers you invoke by using the App (Quiltt / linking networks, market-data providers, Apple iCloud) under their terms.
• Email delivery for support notifications (the provider sees the support-form or report-notification content we send — not your financial books).
• Legal if required by law or to protect rights, safety, and security of users or the service.
• With your direction — for example if you export a diagnostic package and send it, or use iOS share sheets.

We do not sell your personal information.

Your choices and control

• Unlink institutions in the App to stop syncing and remove that institution’s stored data and tokens from the device store/Keychain as implemented in the product.
• Delete the App to remove local data on that device; manage iCloud data in Apple’s iCloud / Files settings for content that resides in your iCloud Drive container.
• Revoke bank-link access via the linking partner’s consumer tools when available (for example Plaid Portal for connections that use Plaid).
• Optional features (linking, camera/receipts, on-device intelligence, planning inputs) are under your control; you can limit what you connect or enter.
• On-device intelligence can be turned off in Settings → Intelligence.
• A support report you submitted can be deleted with the ticket code shown before you sent it.

There is no Polaris account to close. Deleting the app and the iCloud folder removes the book we never hosted. See Delete my data.

Security

Traffic to our server and linking partners uses HTTPS. Secret provider keys stay on the server as environment variables and are not shipped in the App for those secrets. On-device data benefits from iOS data protection; tokens use the Keychain. No security measure is perfect; please protect your device passcode and Apple ID.

Children

Polaris Budget is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

International users

The App is designed primarily for use in the United States with U.S. financial institutions and USD-oriented features. If you use the App from another region, your information may be processed in the United States by us or our providers.

Changes

We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be reflected by the “Last updated” date above. Continued use of the App after an update means you accept the revised policy.

Contact

Privacy questions or requests: the support form is the preferred path (it avoids a public inbox). The legal contact address is support@polarisbudget.com. Website: polarisbudget.com.