Privacy Policy
Alder helps you split bills with friends and, if you choose to connect a bank account, shows you a picture of your financial health. This policy describes what we actually collect, why, how long we keep it, and what we never do. It is written to match how the product works — not the other way around.
Text messages, consent, and your mobile information
Mobile information and messaging consent will not be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. We use Twilio, our SMS delivery provider, acting solely on our behalf, to send the messages described in this policy. Mobile information is never sold.
- What we send: one-time sign-in codes to your own verified number, and — when someone splits a bill with you — that bill and up to three reminders if it stays open.
- Message frequency varies with how often you sign in and how often friends split bills with you: typically at most 4 messages per bill, and never more than 8 messages per day or 25 per week to any number.
- Message and data rates may apply.
- Reply STOP to opt out of all Alder messages, START to opt back in, and HELP for help.
The short version
- We never hold, move, or touch your money. Payments happen in the apps you already use (like Venmo) or however you and your friends settle up.
- We never sell your data.
- Mobile information and messaging consent will not be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes.
- Bank access can be disconnected in the app at any time, and deleting your account deletes your data.
What we collect, and why
Your account. Your phone number (verified by a one-time code) and the name you choose. Your phone number is how friends' requests reach you and how your account is secured.
Receipts you scan. When you photograph a receipt, the image is sent to an AI service to read the line items, and the extracted items are shown to you for correction. We do not store the receipt image on our servers.
People you tag. When you pick someone from your contacts, we store only that person's name and phone number — never your full address book. Tagged numbers are used to route bill requests and reminders to that person, and for nothing else.
Splits. The bills you create: merchant, amounts, items, who owes what, and payment status. People you include in a split can see the split's roster — names and amounts, never phone numbers. A person's payment link shows their own share and items to anyone who has that link, so treat links like the receipts they are.
Your reviews and corrections. When you look over transactions, we store which ones you've reviewed, any category you corrected, and marks like “not typical spending,” along with corrections to inferred budget facts (like your payday cycle). These adjust how Alder displays your money — never your score.
Bank data, only if you link a bank. Bank linking is optional and is never required to split bills. If you link an account, we receive balances and transactions through Plaid; we never see your bank username or password. This data is used to compute your financial health score and the insights around it. Bank access credentials are stored encrypted with keys our database cannot read, and you can disconnect any linked bank in the app, which also deletes its data from our systems and revokes our access at Plaid.
Text messages
When you send a split, people you tagged receive an SMS with their share and a payment link, and up to three reminders if the bill stays open — typically at most 4 messages per bill. We additionally cap messages to any number at 8 per day and 25 per week, across all senders. After the final reminder for a bill, we don't text about it again.
- Reply STOP at any time to opt out of all Alder messages, and START to opt back in. Reply HELP for help.
- Message and data rates may apply. Message frequency varies with how often friends split bills with you.
- Mobile information and messaging consent will not be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Message delivery is handled by Twilio, our SMS provider, acting solely on our behalf. Mobile information is never sold.
Our delivery logs store recipient numbers only as keyed cryptographic hashes — enough to enforce the caps above, without keeping a readable directory of who was texted.
If you set up a recurring split (like rent you front for roommates), Alder stores the template — the schedule, the shares, and the people you named — and which repayments you have confirmed. Naming someone here stores the name and phone number you typed, the same way tagging a contact does. Those people are not contacted, are not sent messages, get no account, and cannot see the template or anything else — it exists only on your side, to label whose share is whose. This is used only to compute your own net costs and what you're owed. Alder does not send automatic messages for recurring splits; any reminder is one you send yourself.
How long we keep things
| Data | Kept |
|---|---|
| Receipt images | Not stored |
| Unsent draft splits | 14 days |
| SMS delivery logs (hashed numbers) | 90 days |
| Transaction reviews & category corrections | with their transactions (~180 days) |
| Budget fact corrections (e.g. payday cycle) | while your account exists |
| Bank transactions (if a bank is linked) | 180 days |
| Score history | 400 days |
| Sent splits and your account | Until you delete them or your account |
| Recurring split templates & repayment records | Until you delete them or your account |
Deleting your account deletes your data — account, contacts, splits, bank data, and scores — from our production systems.
Who we share data with
Only service providers that operate the product, only for the purposes described here: Plaid (bank connectivity), Twilio (SMS delivery), Supabase (application hosting and database), Anthropic (receipt reading), and Cloudflare (website hosting). We never sell personal data, and we never share it for third-party marketing or advertising.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit. Every database record is protected by row-level access rules so users can only ever read their own data. Bank access credentials are additionally encrypted at the application layer with keys held outside the database. We designed these controls before inviting users, and this policy claims nothing we haven't built.
What Alder is not
Alder never holds or transmits money, is not a bank or money transmitter, and the financial health score is informational — it is not financial advice, and no lender or third party receives it.
Contact
Questions or privacy requests: support@alderfinance.app.
If we change this policy, we'll change this page and its effective date. Material changes will be announced in the app.