Privacy Policy

Last updated 20 September 2026

Kharcha is an expense tracker for your own money. This policy describes exactly what it does with your information. Every claim below is a description of how the app is built, and each one can be checked against the source code, which is public.

The short version

• Kharcha collects no analytics, and contains no tracking or advertising SDKs of any kind.
• There is no advertising in Kharcha, and there never will be. The app does not read your advertising ID.
• Your data is never sold, rented, brokered or shared with anyone. Not with lenders, not with data brokers, not with advertisers, not with "partners".
• Kharcha does not ask for your contacts, your location, your camera, your photos or your call log.
• Bank messages are read and interpreted on your phone. Their contents are never uploaded anywhere for processing.
• You can use Kharcha without an account at all, in which case nothing whatsoever leaves your phone.

What Kharcha stores, and where

On your phone. Everything. Your spends, categories, occasions, cards, and the people you have lent to are stored in a database on the device. This is the primary copy — Kharcha is built to work fully offline, and the phone is the source of truth.

In the cloud — only if you sign in. If you create an account, a copy of that same data is saved to a private area of Google Firebase that only your account can read. This exists so you do not lose your records if you lose your phone. If you never sign in, no copy is made and no data leaves the device.

Bank SMS

Kharcha's distinctive feature is turning bank and UPI messages into expense entries. How that works matters, so it is spelled out:

• Messages are read from your phone's inbox and parsed on the device, by code running inside the app.
• No message is uploaded to Kharcha, to any server, or to any third party for parsing, classification or any other purpose.
• Kharcha reads messages only to find amounts, merchants and card digits in transaction alerts. It does not read, index or transmit personal conversations.
• There is no background service. Scanning happens only while you have the app open in the foreground.
• SMS scanning is optional. You can decline the permission or switch it off in Settings, and the rest of the app works normally.
• Automatically adding detected spends is off by default. Detected spends wait in a review queue until you approve them.

If you sign in, the *expense* created from a message is backed up like any other expense — the amount, date, merchant name and category. The raw message text is not.

Optional encryption of the cloud copy

You can set a password of your own choosing — letters, numbers, a phrase, whatever you like — and Kharcha will then encrypt the identifying parts of each spend, the merchant name and your note, on the phone before they are uploaded. The backup is unreadable without that password, including to whoever operates the storage. It is not your account password and is never sent anywhere.

• The password is never uploaded and never stored. Only a check value derived from it is kept on the device, so a wrong password can be rejected without the password itself being on hand anywhere.
• Because of that, nobody can reset or recover it — not the author, not support, not a court order served on the storage provider. There is nothing to hand over.
• The amount, date and category of a spend stay readable in the cloud. They are what the server-side rules check to reject malformed writes, and a number on its own does not identify anyone.
• Your records on the phone stay readable whatever happens. Forgetting the password costs you the backup, not your data.
• Length is what protects you. The minimum is eight characters, and a phrase you can remember is stronger than a short clever one. The strength of this feature is the secret you choose: anyone who obtained the encrypted backup can guess offline as fast as their hardware allows, and no amount of work done on your phone can make a short secret safe.

This is off unless you switch it on, and nothing changes for anyone who never opens the setting.

What Kharcha does not do

• No analytics, telemetry, crash reporting or usage tracking.
• No advertising, ad networks, ad identifiers or ad profiling.
• No selling, sharing or disclosing your data for anyone else's commercial purposes.
• No credit scoring, lending referrals, or passing your details to financial institutions.
• No contacts, location, microphone, camera or call log access.
• No profiling of you for any purpose other than showing you your own spending.

If Kharcha is ever acquired, this policy travels with your data: a buyer would be bound by it, and any change would be announced in the app before it took effect.

Permissions, and why each is needed

Kharcha requests no other permissions.

Third parties

Kharcha uses Google Firebase (Authentication and Cloud Firestore) for accounts and cloud backup, and only when you have signed in. Firebase is a data processor here: it stores your data on Kharcha's behalf and is not permitted to use it for its own purposes. Google's handling of that data is covered by its own terms.

Kharcha uses Expo to deliver app updates. Update delivery involves your device requesting a bundle; it does not carry your financial data.

There are no other third parties. No advertising networks, no analytics providers, no data brokers.

Your control

• Export or inspect. Your data is in a standard SQLite database on your device and in your own Firebase area.
• Delete your account. Settings → Delete account removes your account and every record of it, from the phone and from the cloud. It is immediate and cannot be undone.
• Sign out. Your local copy stays on the phone; the cloud copy remains until you delete the account.
• Use it without an account. No sign-up, no cloud copy, no email address.
• Switch off SMS scanning at any time in Settings.

Children

Kharcha is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect their information.

Security

Cloud data is protected by per-account rules that permit each account to read and write only its own records, and is transmitted over TLS. Local data is held in the app's private storage, which other apps cannot read on a non-rooted device, and device backup of the app's data is disabled.

For the cloud copy you can go further and encrypt the identifying fields with a password of your own, described above.

No system is perfect. If you find a security issue, please report it (see below) rather than disclosing it publicly, and it will be addressed.

Cost

Kharcha is free. There is no paid tier today. Were one ever introduced, the existing free functionality would not be taken away and made paid, and no part of the app would ever be funded by advertising or by selling data.

Changes

Material changes to this policy will be shown in the app before they take effect, not quietly published. The date at the top reflects the current version.

Contact

Questions, data requests or security reports: contact@shubhamjangid.in