Privacy Policy

The short version

• We use your data only to run Julian for you. We don’t sell it, rent it, or use it for advertising.
• A few service providers handle parts of the work (hosting, the database, email, reading your transactions with AI, connecting to your bank). Each is listed below with what it sees.
• You can delete everything you’ve added to Julian at any time from Settings.

What we collect

Your account. Your email address and, if you give one, your name. We send you a sign-in code by email; the code is stored only as a hash and expires in five minutes. When you sign in we record your IP address and browser type with your session, and we count sign-in attempts by IP address to stop abuse.

Your account’s activity. A short log of what happened on your account and when: signing in (with the browser it was on), signing out other devices, adding or removing someone from your household, downloading or deleting your data, agreeing to how we use it, applying or undoing a change Claude suggested, and locking in a year’s budget. It holds no amounts, names or addresses. In Settings, everyone in your household sees what was done in it and by whom (someone who has left is shown only as that), and what’s only yours, like signing in, only you see.

Your financial data. The transactions you bring in (date, merchant, the bank’s description, amount, category, account name, and any notes, tags or owner), the accounts and balances you enter or connect, your income and paychecks, and your budget and its assumptions.

Your household. Where you live (your street address is stored encrypted), whether you own or rent, your homes, everyone’s birth year and, if you give them, their names and the state someone works in when it isn’t the one you live in. You may include children in your household; we don’t collect anything from children themselves.

The people you share it with. A household can include more than one person, each signing in with their own email: anyone in it can add someone by email, and everyone in it sees and changes all of its data, including its documents and conversations with Claude. Each person agrees for themselves to how we use the data before they add any or talk to Claude. We keep an invited person’s email address until they join or the invitation is cancelled, and email them once each time they’re invited.

Documents you upload, such as a pay stub, offer letter, W-2 or lease. We keep the file, privately, so you can open it again and Claude can read it when you ask about it, along with what Claude read from it. You can delete a document at any time.

Your conversations with Claude in the app: what you write, Claude’s answers, and the changes it suggests and which ones you applied, so you can go back to them and undo a change.

The waitlist. If you join it, your email address, so we can tell you when there’s room.

Connecting your bank with Plaid

When you connect a bank, we use Plaid Inc. to gather your data from your financial institution. You sign in to your bank through Plaid; we never see or store your bank username or password. Plaid gives us your account names, types, the last digits of your account numbers, balances and transactions, and a token that lets us fetch updates. We keep the accounts’ names, types and last digits, and each transaction with Plaid’s category for it (which we use only to suggest which of your categories it belongs in); we keep each linked account’s balance as the bank reports it (it’s the figure on your balance sheet, updated with each sync) and, for a loan or card where the bank gives them, its rate and payoff date. We store the token encrypted, and use it to fetch new transactions when Plaid tells us there are some, when you press Sync now, and once a night.

By connecting, you grant Julian and Plaid the right, power and authority to act on your behalf to access and transmit your personal and financial information from your financial institution. You agree to your personal and financial information being transferred, stored and processed by Plaid in accordance with the Plaid End User Privacy Policy.

You can disconnect a bank at any time (Accounts). We then stop fetching from it, ask Plaid to revoke our access and delete the token; the transactions it brought in stay in your budget until you delete them. Delete all my data (Settings) does the same for every bank you connected, then deletes everything else.

How we use it

• To build and keep your budget and forecast: reading your spending and income, estimating taxes, and projecting the years ahead.
• To sign you in and keep your account secure.
• To email you sign-in codes and, if you joined the waitlist, to tell you when there’s room. We don’t send marketing email.
• To fix problems with the app.

We don’t sell your personal information, share it for targeted advertising, or use it to decide anything about you such as credit.

Reading your data with AI

Julian uses Claude, made by Anthropic, to build your budget. When you set up, Claude reads your transactions: each merchant with the bank’s category and a few of the bank’s descriptions for it, how many times it came up, its total and its dates, and, where it needs a closer look, the transactions themselves (their dates, amounts, descriptions and accounts). From them it lays out your budget’s groups and lines and files every merchant into one. Claude also reads any document you upload.

To work out your income and property taxes, Claude also reads your address, whether you own or rent, everyone’s birth year (and the state an adult works in, when it’s another state), your paychecks (employer and take-home amounts) and your budget categories. When the agent looks something up on the web for your budget (a state’s tax rules, a town’s tax calendar), Julian runs the search with your permission; a search names a town or state at most, never your names, street address, accounts or balances.

When you talk to Claude in the app, it sees your whole budget with each message: every line and its amounts, your paychecks, taxes and deductions, your household, your balance sheet and what was read from your documents. To answer, it can look up your individual transactions and open your documents. Depending on your setting, the changes it makes to your budget apply at once (each one shown, and each can be undone) or wait for you to apply them; while you set up, they apply at once. There’s a monthly limit on how much each household can use it.

Where Julian runs Claude as an agent on Anthropic’s side, your conversation with it is kept there as a session for as long as you use it (and removed when you delete your data), with a token that lets it read and change only your household’s budget. Anthropic processes all of this for us under its commercial terms, which don’t allow it to train its models on it.

Apps you connect

You can connect an AI assistant, such as Grok Bot, ChatGPT or Claude, to your budget. It asks you to sign in to Julian and shows what the app will be able to do before you allow it. Once you allow it, the app can read your whole budget, your transactions and your household’s details, and change your budget for you. Each change is recorded: you can see and undo it in Julian, and it appears in your recent activity.

An app that has its own connection to your bank (Grok Bot through Plaid, for example) can also bring your transactions into Julian. They’re kept and used like the ones you upload, the app can take out the ones it brought in, and your recent activity shows each time it does. That connection is the app’s, under its terms, not ours.

What a connected app reads goes to the company that runs it and is handled under that company’s terms and privacy policy, not ours. It isn’t one of our service providers: you choose to share with it. You can disconnect an app in Settings at any time, and it loses access at once. Deleting all your data disconnects every app.

Who else sees your data

Only these service providers, each for its part of running Julian, and each bound to protect the data and use it only for us:

• Vercel hosts the app and runs a bot check on sign-in.
• Neon hosts our database, where your data is stored, encrypted at rest.
• Anthropic reads your transactions, budget and documents when you set up and when you talk to Claude, and looks things up, as described above.
• Plaid connects your bank, when you choose to.
• Cloudflare stores the documents you upload (R2 storage), privately, where only Julian’s server can reach them.
• Google suggests addresses as you type yours. The lookup goes through our server, so Google sees what you type but not who you are or your IP address.
• Resend sends our emails, so it sees your email address.
• Sentry receives a report when something goes wrong in the app: the error and where in our code it happened, never your transactions, your budget or what you sent.
• Inngest schedules background work, such as fetching new transactions. It handles account identifiers, not your financial details.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect someone’s safety. If Julian is ever sold or merged, your data would pass to the new owner under this policy, and we’d tell you first.

Cookies

We use one cookie, to keep you signed in. Your browser also remembers a few display choices, such as which view of the budget you last opened. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

How we protect it

• Everything travels encrypted (HTTPS), and the database is encrypted at rest.
• Bank tokens and your street address are also encrypted by the app itself (AES-256), with a key kept apart from the database.
• Every request checks that you’re signed in and only ever reads or changes your own data.
• There are no passwords to leak: you sign in with a one-time code sent to your email.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever affects your data, we’ll tell you promptly.

Keeping and deleting your data

We keep your data while you have an account. The person who started your household can delete all of it, whenever they like, from Settings: your transactions, accounts, budget, household details, documents (the files too), conversations with Claude and everything worked out from them are removed straight away, for everyone in your household. Anyone else in a household can leave it at any time. Copies in the database provider’s backups expire on their own within a few weeks. Your sign-in and its activity log stay, so you can see that you did it; the log is kept until your account is closed. To close your account entirely, including your sign-in, ask us (see Contact below).

Your choices and rights

You can see and correct almost everything in the app, and download a copy of all your data from Settings as one file whenever you like. You can also ask us to correct or delete it, or to stop using it (see Contact below). We’ll answer within 30 days. Depending on where you live (California, for example), the law may give you these rights, and we extend them to everyone. We won’t treat you differently for using them.

Julian is for adults. Don’t create an account if you’re under 18.

Changes

If we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top. If a change affects how your financial data is used or shared, we’ll tell you and ask you to agree again before it applies to you.

Contact

Questions about your data or this policy, and any of the requests above: email us at privacy@julian.finance.