Privacy Policy

This is the privacy policy for the iPhone app Aurabill: Subscription Tracker and for the website aurabill.app. If we ever make a material change to it, we will say so in the app’s release notes for the version that ships the change, and we will update the dates above. Old versions are not quietly overwritten with a new date and no explanation.

The short version

Who this policy is from

For every question about this policy, and for any request about your data, write to hello@aurabill.app. A person reads it.

About features that are not in the app yet

Two things described below, in-app purchases and in-app feedback, are not in the first release of Aurabill. They are documented here so that this policy is already complete and accurate on the day they arrive. Until then, those sections describe nothing that happens, because the code that would do it is not in the app.

What the app stores, and where

Aurabill stores what you tell it about your subscriptions. That is:

• For each subscription: the name, an optional note you wrote, the price and currency, the billing cycle, the next renewal date, whether it is a trial and when the trial ends, its category, whether it is active or cancelled, and, if you cancelled it, a snapshot of what it was costing you per year at that moment.
• Your categories: their names, icons and colors.
• A handful of settings: your display currency, the default reminder hour, and a few flags that remember, for example, whether the app has already asked you about notifications.

That is the complete list. There is no identifier of you anywhere in it. No name, no email address, no phone number, no device identifier, no advertising identifier, no account, no user ID. The most personal thing Aurabill holds is a sentence like “you pay $17.99 a month for a streaming service.”

All of it lives in a database file in the app’s own App Group container on your iPhone (group.app.aurabill.app). It is not copied to a server, because there is no server. iOS encrypts app container files at rest along with the rest of your phone. Aurabill does not add encryption of its own, and it declares exactly that to Apple in its build settings. We would rather tell you that than claim “bank-level encryption” we did not write.

The prices Aurabill suggests when you pick a service from its built-in catalog, and the exchange rates it uses to convert totals, are files shipped inside the app. Nothing is looked up online. Rates change only when a new version of the app is installed.

Deleting your data. Delete the app and iOS deletes its container, including the database. There is no copy anywhere else for us to delete, because we never had one.

Backups are yours, not ours

If you use iCloud Backup or back your iPhone up to a computer, Aurabill’s data is included in that backup, in exactly the way every other app’s data is. We want to be precise about this, because “nothing ever leaves your iPhone” is the kind of sentence that is easy to write and slightly untrue.

Aurabill never uploads your data. It has nowhere to upload it to. But your device backup is a copy of your device, made by Apple’s software, held under your own Apple Account, governed by Apple’s privacy policy and controlled by you in your iPhone’s settings. We have no access to it, cannot request it, and cannot tell whether you have backups switched on. If you delete Aurabill, a copy of its data may still exist in older backups until those backups are replaced or deleted.

No account, no sign-in

There is no registration, no login, no password, no email verification, no “continue with Apple,” no profile. The app has no concept of a user. This is not a setting you turn on. There is no authentication code in the app at all.

No analytics, no advertising, no tracking, no third-party code

Aurabill contains:

• no analytics SDK,
• no crash-reporting SDK,
• no advertising or attribution SDK,
• no A/B testing or feature-flag service,
• no third-party dependencies whatsoever. The app’s package manifest declares zero external packages. Every line in the binary was written for this app or ships inside iOS.

We do not track you across apps or websites and there is no App Tracking Transparency prompt, because there is nothing to ask you for. Aurabill does not fetch service logos, either. Every service is drawn as a plain monogram. A logo would mean a request to some server per service, and that request would reveal what you subscribe to.

The app makes no network connections, and you can check

The strongest thing we can say about Aurabill’s privacy is not a promise about our intentions. It is a fact about the code: there is no networking code in the app. No HTTP client, no sockets, no web view. There is nothing to misconfigure and nothing that could be quietly switched on in a later build without someone noticing the diff.

You do not have to take our word for it. Install a proxy such as mitmproxy, Charles or Proxyman, point your iPhone at it, and use every screen in Aurabill. You will see no connections from the app. Every feature works with the phone in airplane mode.

Two things are deliberately not covered by that claim, and we would rather name them than let you find them:

1. When you tap a link, you leave the app. Opening your Apple subscriptions hands off to the App Store app. Opening a service’s cancel page opens a Safari view. Those are real connections, made by Apple’s software or by Safari, at your explicit tap. See Links that leave the app below.
2. iOS itself talks to Apple about many things, on every iPhone, whether or not Aurabill is installed. That is between you and Apple.

Screenshot import

Aurabill can read your Apple subscriptions list from screenshots you take. It works like this, exactly:

• The app opens your Apple subscriptions (App Store) so you can screenshot the list yourself.
• When you come back, it offers Apple’s system photo picker, limited to ten images.
• The app never asks for photo library access, and could not use it if you granted it. There is no photo library permission request in Aurabill, and no photo library usage description in its Info.plist, which iOS requires an app to declare before it is even allowed to ask. The picker runs out of process, as a separate part of iOS. Aurabill cannot browse, search or count your library. It receives only the specific images you tap.
• Each image you hand over is decoded in memory and read by Vision, Apple’s on-device text recognition. That happens on your iPhone. The image is not sent anywhere, because the app cannot send anything anywhere.
• The recognized text is parsed into rows you review and edit before anything is saved.
• The images themselves are never written to disk, never copied into the database, and never transmitted. They are released as soon as the text has been read. Nothing is retained from them except the subscription details you confirm.

You can delete the screenshots from Photos as soon as the import is done. The app has no further use for them.

Notifications

Renewal and trial reminders are local notifications. iOS schedules them on your device from a date and a piece of text the app composes on the device. There is no push server, no Apple Push Notification token, no remote notification capability in the app, and no way for us to send you anything. If your phone is offline, your reminders still arrive.

One practical note: a reminder names the service, the amount and the date, so it will show that text on your lock screen unless you change how previews are shown in iOS notification settings. That is your choice to make, and it is worth making deliberately if other people can see your screen.

Notification permission is requested only after you have saved your first subscription, never on launch. If you say no, every other feature keeps working.

Purchases

Aurabill Plus is not yet available to buy. This section describes what will happen when it is.

Purchases are handled entirely by Apple, through the App Store. We never see and never receive your payment details, your card, your billing address, your Apple Account email or your name. There is no payment form in the app and no payment processor of ours involved.

What the app can see is whether a valid purchase exists, checked with Apple’s own on-device StoreKit APIs. That check happens on your iPhone. The app can tell that an entitlement is valid and whether it arrived through Family Sharing. It cannot see who bought it, or anything about the other people in your family group.

What we can see, separately from the app, is what every developer sees in App Store Connect: Apple’s sales and payment reports. Those tell us how many units sold in which countries. They do not identify buyers to us.

Family Sharing is enabled for Aurabill Plus, so one purchase covers your family group. That sharing is arranged by Apple between your family’s Apple Accounts. We are not part of it and receive no information about it.

Feedback, and email you send us

The in-app feedback composer is not in the first release. This section covers both it and ordinary email to us.

The app has no way to send us anything by itself. The design has exactly one outbound path, and it is not automatic: the app prepares a mail draft, opens it in your own mail app, and you decide whether to send it. You see the full contents before you send. Nothing is transmitted unless you press send yourself, and if you delete the draft, nothing happens.

If you do send it, or if you simply email hello@aurabill.app from the website, then we have your email address, because your mail client puts it there, and we have whatever you chose to write.

What we do with it: we read it and we answer it. That is all. We do not add it to a mailing list, we do not use it for marketing, we do not build a profile from it, and we do not share it with anyone. It is not connected to anything else, because there is nothing else to connect it to.

How long we keep it: we delete support correspondence twelve months after the conversation ends, unless the matter is still open or we are required to keep it for a legal reason such as a tax or dispute record.

Links that leave the app

Aurabill points you at the exit rather than pretending to be it.

• “Open my Apple subscriptions” opens your Apple subscriptions in the App Store app. The link carries no parameters and no identifier. The app cannot cancel anything for you. One tap to your Apple subscriptions list, and you tap the service there to cancel.
• “Open the cancel page” opens that company’s own cancellation page in a Safari view. This is a genuine connection to a third party, made by Safari, not by Aurabill. The app cannot read that page, see what you type, or observe the traffic. Your saved passwords stay in Safari, isolated from the app. Only https links are allowed.
• If any other link takes you out of the app, including to Apple’s own refund page at reportaproblem.apple.com, the same holds. The app hands the address to iOS and stops there. It sends nothing with it.

Once you are on someone else’s site, you are an ordinary web visitor to them. They see what any website sees, they set their own cookies, and their privacy policy applies, not this one. We have no relationship with those companies, no affiliate arrangement, and no way of knowing that you went there.

What Apple knows, independently of us

Some things are true of every iPhone app and you should hear them from us rather than discover them.

• Apple knows you downloaded Aurabill, the same way it knows about every app on your phone.
• If you turned on Share iPhone Analytics in iOS settings, Apple may receive crash and usage data from apps. Aurabill adds no crash or analytics SDK of its own, does not receive that data as an identifiable stream, and cannot switch that setting on or off. Aggregate crash information visible to us in App Store Connect does not identify anyone.
• If you buy Aurabill Plus, Apple processes the payment and knows it happened.
• If you use iCloud Backup, Apple holds an encrypted backup of your device under your Apple Account.

All of that is between you and Apple, under Apple’s privacy policy. We never see it.

Children

Aurabill is not directed at children and is not designed for them. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children, and to be exact about it, we do not collect personal information from anyone, of any age, through the app. There is no account to create, no profile, no messaging, no user-generated content and no advertising.

If a child writes to hello@aurabill.app, we will hold the email only as long as it takes to answer or delete it. If you believe a child has sent us personal information and you want it deleted, write to us and we will delete it.

This website

aurabill.app is a static site. There is no application server, no database and no login.

• No cookies. The site sets none and stores nothing in your browser.
• No analytics. No page-view counter, no tag manager, no pixels, no session recording, no heatmaps, no A/B testing. We would rather not know how many people scrolled to the bottom than run a tracker on a page that promises we do not.
• No forms. Nothing on this site collects or submits anything. The only contact route is a link that opens your own mail app addressed to hello@aurabill.app.
• No third-party requests. The pages load no scripts, stylesheets, images, embeds or fonts from anyone else’s servers. Typefaces are either the ones already on your device or font files served from the same host as the page itself. Nothing on this site causes your browser to contact another company.

What our host may see: like any web server, it receives your IP address, the file you requested, the time, and your browser’s user-agent string, and may keep standard access and security logs for a short period. That is a normal function of serving a page, we do not run analytics over those logs, we do not attempt to identify visitors from them, and we do not combine them with anything else.

Your rights under GDPR and UK GDPR

Because we hold no personal data about app users, most rights are satisfied by the fact that there is nothing to exercise them against. We cannot show you your data, correct it, export it or delete it, because we do not have it. What is on your iPhone is yours: you can view, edit and delete every part of it inside the app, and deleting the app removes all of it.

Legal bases for the little we do process:

Your rights are access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, objection, and data portability, plus the right to complain to your supervisory authority. In practice they apply to the email we hold. Write to hello@aurabill.app from the address you contacted us with and we will act on it, normally well inside one month.

We can only match a request to an email address. We will not ask you for identity documents, and the law does not require us to collect extra information about you purely to be able to answer a request (Article 11). If we cannot connect your request to anything we hold, we will tell you so plainly rather than asking for more data.

We do not rely on consent for anything, so there is no consent to withdraw. We do no profiling and no automated decision-making. We do not sell data, and we have no advertising partners, data brokers or analytics vendors to share it with.

Your rights under CCPA and CPRA (California)

We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We have not done so in the preceding twelve months, and we have no mechanism that could. There is nothing to opt out of, and no “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link, because there is no sale or sharing to stop.

• Categories collected through the app: none.
• Categories collected otherwise: if you email us, identifiers (your email address) and the contents of your message. Server logs for the website may contain internet activity information (IP address, request, user-agent).
• Purpose: answering you, and keeping the website up.
• Sources: you, directly.
• Disclosure for a business purpose: to our email and hosting providers, as service providers, and to no one else.
• Sensitive personal information: we do not collect it, so there is no right to limit its use to exercise.
• Retention: email for twelve months after the conversation ends; server logs per our host’s standard period.
• Minors: we have no actual knowledge of selling or sharing the personal information of anyone under 16, and we do not sell or share anyone’s.

You have the right to know, delete, correct, and opt out, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising any of them. Exercise any of them by writing to hello@aurabill.app. We will never charge you or degrade the app for asking.

Residents of other US states with comprehensive privacy laws have broadly equivalent rights, and the same address reaches us.

Why our App Store label says “Data Not Collected”

When Aurabill is published, its App Store privacy label will read Data Not Collected. Apple’s definition of collection is transmission off the device in a form the developer can access. Aurabill has no networking code, so there is no transmission of any kind, in any form, to us or to anyone. Data you type stays in the app’s container. Screenshots are read and dropped. Reminders are local. The only thing that could ever reach us is an email you compose and send yourself, which is you contacting us, not the app collecting from you.

That label is a claim we have to be able to defend to Apple against the actual binary. It is also the reason we will not add a “harmless” analytics SDK later. Doing so would require changing the label, which would require changing this page, which is exactly the kind of thing people notice.

Security

Your data is protected by your iPhone. It sits in the app’s own container, encrypted at rest by iOS along with everything else on the device, behind your passcode or Face ID. We do not add our own encryption layer and do not claim one.

There is no server of ours to breach, no database of users to leak, and no credentials of yours for anyone to steal from us, because we hold none of those things. That is the security model, and it is deliberate.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will say so in the release notes of the app version that ships the change, and update the effective date at the top of this page. If a change ever alters what leaves your device, it will be described plainly, in the same language as the rest of this page, and not buried in a redefinition.

Contact

hello@aurabill.app

Questions, privacy requests, corrections to this page, or a note telling us we got something wrong. We would rather hear it than not.

Also on this site: Terms of Use · Aurabill support and troubleshooting · what the subscription tracker does and what it costs.