Sift Privacy Policy

Sift is made and run by Iosvisual, which is one person — an independent developer. There are no investors and no marketing department. You can reach us at support@iosvisual.com and the same person who writes the app answers the email.

This policy covers the Sift iPhone app and this website. It is written in plain language on purpose — if anything here is unclear, that is a bug and we would like to hear about it.

Sift has no sign-up, no login, and no password. We do not know who you are, we cannot look up your data, and there is nothing on a server of ours with your name on it.

Because there is no account, most of the usual privacy questions have short answers: we hold no profile of you, we cannot sell one, and there is nothing to hand over if someone asks.

Every purchase you log, every category, budget, subscription, loan, split and person you add is stored in Sift’s own database on your device. It is not uploaded, backed up to us, or synced to any server we control.

The work Sift does on that data also happens on your iPhone: reading receipt photos and screenshots, cleaning up merchant names, choosing a category, spotting recurring charges, building the charts, and writing the one-line reading on the Simple screen.

If you delete Sift, that data goes with it. Your own iPhone or iCloud device backup may include it, exactly as it would for any other app; that backup belongs to you and Apple, not to us.

Sift counts a small number of plain events so we can see where people get stuck. This is the only thing the app sends about how you use it, and it is deliberately blunt.

Each event carries a random identifier generated on your device, a random session identifier, the app version, and the moment it happened. That random identifier is not your Apple Account, not your device identifier, not an advertising identifier, and not derived from anything about you. It cannot be linked back to a person, and we have no way to reverse it.

No event ever carries an amount, a merchant, a category, a budget, a note, a photo, a voice recording, a location, or anything you have typed.

The complete list of events is:

• which screen of the introduction you reached, and whether you finished it
• whether the subscription screen was shown, closed, or resulted in a purchase
• the app opening and closing, and how many seconds the session lasted

These are collected by an analytics endpoint we run ourselves at analytics-dashboard-alittoo.vercel.app. It is not Google Analytics, Firebase, Facebook, or any advertising network. Nothing is shared with anyone.

This is not used for tracking as Apple defines it: nothing is linked with data from other companies, and nothing is used for advertising or shared with a data broker.

Sift Pro is bought through Apple’s In-App Purchase. Apple takes the payment and Apple holds the card details. We never see your card number, billing address, or Apple Account.

Sift uses RevenueCat to read the purchase receipt Apple issues, so that we can see how many subscriptions are active and how many people cancel. RevenueCat receives subscription information — which product, when it started, whether it renewed — together with an anonymous identifier. It receives none of your spending data and nothing you have logged in the app.

RevenueCat acts as a processor on our behalf. You can read their privacy policy.

Most Coach questions are answered entirely on your iPhone, from your own numbers, and nothing leaves the device. On an iPhone that supports Apple Intelligence, straightforward questions are also answered on-device by Apple’s own model, which sends nothing anywhere.

Only a question that needs an opinion rather than a number — “why is this month worse?”, “how can I cut back?” — is sent to a cloud AI service. When that happens, what is sent is your typed question plus a short set of totals relevant to that question, such as how much you have spent this month and your budget.

What is never sent:

• Your list of transactions, or your merchants’ full history.
• Your notes or your photos.
• Your name, your email, or your location.
• Any identifier that points at you.

By default this uses DeepSeek, through a key we pay for, and that shared key is rate-limited. You can instead add your own key for DeepSeek, OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini) or Anthropic (Claude) in Settings. Whichever you use, that provider’s own privacy policy governs what they do with the request. Your key is stored in the iOS Keychain on your device, encrypted, and is never sent to us.

If you never use the Coach, nothing is ever sent to any AI service.

Sift asks for a permission only at the moment the feature needs it, and every one of them is optional. Declining any of them leaves the rest of the app working.

• Camera — to photograph a paper receipt. The photo is read on your device and is not uploaded.
• Photo library — only the screenshots or receipt images you pick yourself. Sift does not browse your library.
• Microphone and Speech Recognition — to add a purchase by saying it. Transcription uses Apple’s speech recognition; depending on your iPhone and language, Apple may process that audio on its own servers under Apple’s terms. Sift receives only the resulting text, and does not keep the audio.
• Location (while using the app) — to offer the shops near you as a name for a purchase. The coordinates are used on the device to look up nearby places and are not stored with the purchase or sent to us.
• Notifications — to warn you the day before a subscription renews.
• Apple Wallet transactions (FinanceKit) — if you connect it, Sift reads your Apple Card, Apple Cash and Apple Savings transactions so it can log them for you. That reading happens on your device.

• We do not sell your data, and there is nothing to sell.
• We do not show ads, and there are no advertising SDKs in the app.
• We do not use tracking as Apple defines it: nothing is combined with data from other companies for advertising, and no advertising identifier is read.
• We do not share your spending with anyone — not with RevenueCat, not with the analytics endpoint, not with any AI provider beyond the narrow question described above.
• We do not build a profile of you, and we could not, because there is no account.

Sift is not aimed at children and is rated 4+ only because it contains nothing unsuitable. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child, and since there is no account, there is nothing collected from anyone that identifies them.

Because your data lives on your iPhone, you already have complete control of it. Deleting a purchase deletes it. Deleting the app deletes everything.

Under the GDPR, the UK GDPR, and the CCPA you have rights to access, correct, delete and export personal data held about you. The honest answer in Sift’s case is that we hold none: the anonymous usage counts cannot be linked to you, so we cannot find, export, or delete “your” events even if you ask — there is no key to search by.

The one thing we can act on is a request about a purchase receipt held by RevenueCat. Email us at support@iosvisual.com with the date and store of the purchase and we will delete what is there.

Legal basis (GDPR). The lawful basis for the anonymous usage counts, where the GDPR applies, is legitimate interest in understanding whether the app works; the data is anonymous and the impact on you is negligible.

Anonymous usage events are kept for 24 months and then deleted. Subscription records at RevenueCat are kept for as long as the subscription is active and for a period afterwards as required for accounting. Data on your iPhone is kept until you delete it.

The analytics endpoint runs on Vercel. RevenueCat and the AI providers operate from the United States. If you are in the EEA or the UK, this means the limited data described above is transferred outside your region; the transfers rely on the providers’ standard contractual clauses.

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the change will be described here and the date at the top updated. Material changes will also be noted in the app’s release notes.

One person is the developer, the support desk, and the privacy contact. Write to any of them here: