What we collect
- The text and photos the bot receives. In a private chat that is what you send it yourself. In a group chat the bot receives every message in that group — otherwise it could not understand entries like “groceries 84.20” sent without a command
- Transactions extracted from them (amount, category, date, currency)
- Your Telegram user_id and chat_id (private chat or group)
- Category corrections (so the bot remembers your preferences)
- Manual net-worth entries (
/invest), if you use that feature - Named debt obligations (debt pockets) you set up via
/debt, if you use that feature - Per-category budget limits you set via
/budget, if you use that feature - Recurring-payment details (amount, category, frequency) you set up via
/recurring, if you use that feature - Location — only if you share it yourself for
/timezone, and only to work out the time zone: coordinates are never stored, only the resulting zone name
What happens to messages in a group
Every message the bot receives goes to Google Gemini to be classified — the model is what decides whether it is an expense, a question, or ordinary conversation. Telling those apart beforehand is not possible: “spent a thousand on groceries” and “what time are we meeting?” are separated by the model, not by a keyword.
Only what is recognised as a financial entry is stored, and only as structured fields: amount, category, type, description, currency, date. The description is produced by the model — it is not a copy of your message. Ordinary conversation creates no database record and is not written to any log.
If you would rather ordinary messages did not pass through that step, keep the budget in its own group instead of your main family chat.
Why
- To record and show your income and expenses
- To auto-detect category and currency via AI
- To build reports, charts, and history in the web dashboard
Who we share it with
- Google Gemini API — processes text/photos to recognize transactions, under Google's applicable terms for paid API use (currently this means prompts aren't used to train Google's models, though Google's terms can change — see Google's terms)
- Google Cloud (Firestore) — data storage
- No one else. We don't sell or share your data with advertisers.
Where and how long it's kept
- In Firestore (Google Cloud), with daily and weekly backups
- As long as you use the bot, or until you ask us to delete it — after deletion, a copy may still exist in automated backups for up to 90 days before it's purged
Deleting your data
The /deletemydata command permanently deletes all of this chat's financial data (transactions, categories, settings) yourself, any time — no need to contact support. Exception: this chat's first free-trial start date and the Telegram account that started it are kept separately as an anti-abuse measure against repeated free trials — this isn't financial or personal data, just a technical marker.
Exporting your data
The /exportmydata command downloads all of this chat's data as a single CSV file, free, any time — no subscription needed, and it doesn't delete anything. This is different from /report, which covers only the current month plus charts and remains a paid feature.
This website (smartbudget-bot.com)
Everything above is about the bot. The website is separate: it never sees your budget, and it uses two analytics tools to understand which pages people read and how they find the bot.
- Google Analytics 4 records the pages you open, where you came from (for example, a search engine), your approximate location derived from your IP address (country and city; Google Analytics 4 does not store the IP address itself), your device and browser type, and clicks on links to the bot. It sets this site's own cookies,
_gaand_ga_C5ZQTHD2Z8, holding a random identifier for up to 2 years. In our Analytics settings, event data is kept for 2 months and user data for 14 months, and Google signals is off, so visits are not linked to Google accounts. - Cloudflare Web Analytics counts page views and page load speed without cookies and without identifying you.
- Cloudflare also hosts the site and, like any web server, processes your IP address to deliver pages and protect the site from attacks.
When you open the bot from a link on this site, the link carries a short label of the page it came from (for example, blog_telegram-bot-safety_en_mid), so we can see which pages bring people to the bot. We don't use website analytics for advertising, don't sell it and don't pass it to the bot. To opt out of Google Analytics, block cookies for this site in your browser or install Google's opt-out browser add-on.
California and other U.S. state privacy rights
Depending on the volume and nature of data processed, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA/CPRA) or similar state laws (e.g. Texas, Virginia, Colorado) may apply to residents of those states. Where applicable, you may have the right to know what personal information is collected, to request deletion (see "Deleting your data" above), to request a portable copy of your data, and to non-discrimination for exercising these rights. We don't sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising. State privacy requests: hello@smartbudget-bot.com.
Payments (once available)
Subscriptions will be billed via Telegram Stars — payment details are handled by Telegram itself; we never see or store them.
Children
This bot is not intended for children under 13.
Questions: message /support — it goes straight to the developer. We may update this policy; we'll announce material changes in this chat.