Privacy Policy

Effective date: October 17, 2026 · Last updated: October 17, 2026

Fort Mill Ventures LLC ("Krateo", "we", "us") operates Krateo, a private household budgeting and money-tracking tool, as a mobile app for iOS and Android and as a web app at krateomoney.com (together, the "App"). This policy covers every version of the App and our website at krateomoney.com. It explains what personal data we process, why, who receives it, and the choices and rights you have.

1. Who is responsible for your data

The data controller is Fort Mill Ventures LLC, Fort Mill, South Carolina, USA. For any privacy question, or to use your rights, write to contact@krateomoney.com.

2. What we collect

You give us:

• Account data: your name, email address and password. Passwords are handled by Firebase Authentication; we never see them in plaintext. If you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive the identifier and email (or Apple relay email) that provider shares.
• Financial data you enter: transactions, bills, budgets, accounts, credit-card balances, properties, vehicles, holdings, goals, trips, notes, and household membership. This is the core of the service. It stays within your household, subject to the privacy settings you choose.
• Photos and receipts: only when you choose to take or import one. Text on a receipt is read on your device by default. Images you upload are stored with the transaction they belong to and are automatically checked by Google Cloud Vision SafeSearch as a child-safety and content screen (see section 4). This check runs on every uploaded image, whether or not you use any AI feature. An optional cloud setting can send the receipt image to Google Cloud Vision to read its text.
• Voice: if you use voice entry, your device's speech recognition turns your speech into text. On iOS and Android, the operating system's speech service (Apple or Google) can process the audio under its own terms. Krateo receives and uses only the resulting text.
• Messages to Krateo's AI assistant: the words you type or dictate. See section 5.
• Messages to us: what you write through Contact us or Settings → Talk to us, and the email address you give.

Bank and investment connections (optional, only if you connect):

• Sophtron: bank connection through Sophtron's hosted widget. You enter your bank login with Sophtron; Krateo never sees or stores it. If your bank asks for a one-time code, in some cases that code passes through our server on its way to Sophtron and is never stored or logged. We receive account, balance and transaction data, and a credit score if your bank reports one through the connection.
• SimpleFIN (bring your own): you pay SimpleFIN Bridge directly and paste a setup token that SimpleFIN gives you. Krateo exchanges the token for an access URL, stores that URL encrypted on our servers only (never on a phone and never in a log), and uses it to read the accounts you choose: account names, balances and transactions. You can disconnect at any time, which deletes the stored credential. History already imported stays in your household and its accounts are marked as no longer syncing. Only adult household members (owner or adult role) can use SimpleFIN.
• SnapTrade: read-only investment account, balance and holdings data. Krateo never places trades or moves money.
• Plaid: a further bank-connection option. It is not enabled in the App today. This policy will be updated before it is turned on.

Optional identity-based credit-score check: not enabled today. If we turn it on, we will ask for your first and last name, date of birth and postal address, name the partner in-app, and update this policy first. We never ask for or store your Social Security Number in the App.

We collect automatically:

• Device and app data: your language, time zone, app version and platform, and a push-notification token if you enable notifications.
• Security and abuse-prevention signals: Firebase App Check attests that requests come from a genuine copy of the App, and our servers keep short-lived rate-limit counters.
• Crash and error reports: when the App hits an error, it can send the error message, a technical stack trace, the app version and the platform to our servers. These reports are not meant to contain your financial entries.
• Consent records: the version and time of the terms, age and disclaimer acceptance you give, and your analytics choice, kept as a compliance record.
• Product analytics: see section 6.

We do not collect: Social Security Numbers; precise geolocation; biometric data (Face ID and fingerprint unlock happen on your device, and the result never leaves it); advertising identifiers; or any data for advertising or for tracking you across other companies' apps and websites.

3. Why we process it, and our legal bases (GDPR / UK GDPR / LGPD)

You can withdraw consent at any time: turn off notifications, analytics or AI, disconnect a bank, or delete your account. Withdrawal does not affect processing that already happened.

4. Who receives your data (service providers)

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We use the following service providers. Each processes data on our behalf under its own terms and, where required, a data-processing agreement. Providers marked "only if you connect" or "only if you use" receive nothing unless you use that feature.

We may also disclose data if the law requires it, to protect rights and safety, or in connection with a business transfer, with notice where required.

5. How the AI assistant uses your data

Krateo's assistant and AI features send content to Google's Gemini model from our servers. We tell you what is sent so you can decide.

• Chat. We send the words of your message and recent turns of the conversation, together with the minimum household context needed to answer. That context is a summary built from your household: totals and category amounts, bill names and due dates, account and card labels and balances, goals, and member display names. It is not your full transaction history, and not your bank credentials or login details.
• Add by typing or voice. The text you type or dictate is sent so it can be turned into a draft entry.
• Receipts and bills. By default the text is read on your device, and only the resulting text is sent to Gemini to tidy it into fields. If the cloud reading setting is on, the image goes to Google Cloud Vision first.
• Budget suggestions. When you ask for a budget proposal, we send merchant names grouped from your transactions, with a count and an average amount for each (for example "Walmart x4 avg $118"), plus category totals. No account numbers or member names are included.
• Other AI tools (debt payoff, travel budgets, tax-flag review, card advice, spending insights, period comparisons, budget proposals, affordability checks): the figures and labels for that tool, built on our servers or sent from the App for that single request.
• Children and teens. AI is off by default for child members until a parent or guardian turns it on. It is on by default for teens, and a parent can turn it off at any time. For members without full family-ledger access (the default for every child and teen), the context is rebuilt on our servers rather than taken from the device, identifying text is removed, and grown-up AI tools and data-heavy requests are refused. A parent can grant a teen full ledger access, in which case that teen's requests are handled like an adult's.

Why: only to produce the answer or draft you asked for. Training: we do not use your content to train AI models, and we do not sell it. Google processes requests under its own Gemini API terms; those terms determine whether and how long Google keeps request content. Retention: we do not add your chat messages to your household records, and our server logs are built not to record request content.

Your choice. AI is optional. Everything else in Krateo works without it, including manual entry. A household owner controls which members can use the AI features. If you do not want your words sent to Google, do not use the assistant or the type-or-speak entry feature.

6. Product analytics (Amplitude)

We use Amplitude to learn how the App is used so we can fix problems and improve Krateo. This is product-usage data, not a record of your personal spending habits.

• What is collected: a pseudonymous user identifier (a one-way hash of your account identifier, not the identifier itself), your country, language, platform, a coarse household-size band (for example "3-4"), and event names such as which screen or feature was used, with sanitized properties.
• What is not collected: transaction amounts, merchant names, account balances, notes, chat messages, search text, receipt images, names, emails, bank credentials, advertising identifiers, device advertising or vendor IDs, IP address or carrier. Properties that look like they could carry such content are stripped before sending.
• Children and teens are excluded. For members with a child or teen role, analytics never starts: no events and no identifiers, hashed or otherwise, are sent to Amplitude.
• Anonymous counters. A few feedback taps (for example on in-app insight cards) are counted in aggregate under one shared label, with no user, device or household identifier.
• No selling, no cross-app tracking. Amplitude data is never sold and is not combined with other companies' data. The App does not use the Apple tracking prompt, because it does not track you.
• Control. Analytics is on by default and you can turn it off under Settings. When it is off, the App sends no analytics events.

7. International transfers

We are based in the United States. Our data is stored and processed on Google Cloud infrastructure, primarily in the United States, and our other providers operate largely in the United States. If you use Krateo from outside the United States, your data is transferred there. Where we transfer personal data out of the EEA, UK or Brazil, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the EU Standard Contractual Clauses (2021) and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, for example as incorporated in the Google Cloud Data Processing Addendum. The data locations and transfer terms of Sophtron, SimpleFIN, SnapTrade, Adapty, Amplitude, Migadu and Expo are being confirmed, and this section will be updated when that review is complete.

8. How long we keep it

• While your account is active: your profile, household, transactions, accounts and vaults. We do not delete your financial history on a timer, because it is the record you rely on.
• When you delete your account (Settings → Account → Delete account): a server-side process removes your profile, your sign-in, your private data and vaults, and the receipt images tied to your account, and removes you from your household. A household you were the only member of is erased. Data you contributed to a household that other members still use may remain for them.
• Short-lived operating data is deleted automatically: password-reset records after one hour, household invite codes after 24 hours, rate-limit counters after 7 days, and other operational records on schedules of 30 to 365 days.
• Records we keep for legal reasons: consent logs, billing and entitlement records, and support correspondence.
• Disconnecting a bank or investment link stops collection immediately and deletes the stored credential.

9. Your rights and choices

Depending on where you live (EEA/UK GDPR, California CCPA/CPRA, Brazil LGPD, and others), you may have the right to access, correct, delete, port, restrict or object to processing of your data, to withdraw consent, and, under CCPA/CPRA, to know, delete, correct, and opt out of sale or sharing. We do not sell your data or share it for advertising.

• Export your data: Settings → Download my data builds a JSON file of your own account data on the spot.
• Delete your account: Settings → Account → Delete account, inside the App.
• Turn off analytics: in Settings. AI: do not use the assistant; household owners can switch AI off for a member.
• Anything else: email contact@krateomoney.com. We respond within the time the law requires. You may also complain to your supervisory authority (for example your EU data protection authority, the UK ICO or Brazil's ANPD).

10. Children, teens and family members

To create an account and set up a household you must be 18 or older, or the age of majority where you live. The household owner confirms this when accepting the terms. The owner can invite family members of any age by private invite, and by inviting a minor the owner confirms they are that minor's parent or legal guardian, or authorized to act for them. Children cannot create standalone accounts.

• What we collect about a child or teen: the display name the parent or guardian sets, the money entries they or their parents create (allowance, chores, savings and spending), any photo or receipt they upload, and the usage needed to run kid features. Invited children get a restricted role by default and cannot see the family ledger unless the owner grants it.
• Why: only to run the household features they use. We do not use children's data for advertising.
• Analytics and advertising: children and teens are excluded from product analytics entirely, and no advertising is shown to any member.
• Parent controls: the owner decides what each member can see and do, can review a child member's entries in the shared household, can remove a member, and can delete the account. AI is off by default for children (section 5). Uploaded images from minors are screened for safety.
• Bank connections: SimpleFIN is adults only. Children with a restricted role are blocked from connecting a bank. A teen the owner has granted extra access to can connect a bank through Sophtron, and the parents are notified when a teen connects.

If you believe a child's data was provided improperly, contact contact@krateomoney.com and we will delete it.

11. Security

We use encryption in transit, Firebase Authentication, database rules that restrict household data to its members, and Firebase App Check. Bank and investment access credentials are encrypted and held only on our servers, never in the App. No method is completely secure. We will notify you and regulators of a qualifying breach as the law requires, for example the GDPR 72-hour rule.

12. Changes and contact

We will post changes here and update the "last updated" date. Material changes will be shown in the App and may ask you to accept again. Questions: contact@krateomoney.com.