Sparely Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2 September 2026

Sparely does not collect your data. There is no Sparely server, no account to create, no analytics, no advertising and no third-party tracking of any kind. Everything you record stays on your device and in your own private iCloud.

What Sparely stores, and where

Sparely is a personal-finance ledger. The entries, amounts, accounts, labels, templates and preferences you create are written to a database on your device. If you are signed in to iCloud and iCloud Drive is enabled, that database is also synced to the private CloudKit database of your own Apple Account, so it is backed up and available on your other devices.

That iCloud copy belongs to you. It sits in your Apple Account, under Apple's terms and Apple's encryption, in transit and at rest. The developer of Sparely has no access to it and no way to read it. Apple does not give the developer your ledger, your identity or your usage.

Data the developer collects: none

Sparely has no back-end. There is no server operated by the developer that your data is sent to, and no place where it could be stored, sold or shared. Concretely, Sparely contains:

This is why Sparely's App Store privacy label is Data Not Collected, with Tracking: No. No financial information, identifiers, contacts, usage data or diagnostics are collected, and none are linked to you.

The one network request Sparely makes

When you use more than one currency, Sparely fetches a table of daily exchange rates so it can convert between them. It asks ExchangeRate-API (open.er-api.com) and, if that is unavailable, Frankfurter (api.frankfurter.dev), which republishes the European Central Bank's daily reference rates.

These requests carry no personal data: they ask for the public rate table for a base currency and nothing else. No entry, amount, account name, identifier or device identifier is sent. As with any request to any website, the provider necessarily sees the network address it came from; neither provider is used for tracking, and neither receives anything that identifies you or your ledger. The rates are cached on device, so the request happens at most once a day.

Sharing with other people

Sparely can let you share an account with someone else using Apple's CloudKit sharing — for example, a household budget shared with a partner. Sharing only ever happens because you started it, by sending an invitation from inside the app.

When you share, the person who accepts the invitation can see the shared account and the entries in it, including their amounts, dates, categories, labels and notes, and — depending on the permission you grant — can add, edit or delete entries in it. They cannot see anything you have not shared: your other accounts, your other entries and your preferences remain private to you.

The share is carried by Apple's CloudKit. The developer is not a participant and cannot read it. If you stop sharing, or remove a participant, CloudKit withdraws their access and the shared records are removed from their devices; copies they made outside Sparely, such as an export, are of course beyond the app's reach. If someone shares an account with you, that data belongs to them, and they can revoke your access at any time in the same way.

Deleting everything

You can delete all of your data from inside the app: Settings → Manage Data → Delete all data. It permanently deletes the entries, accounts, labels and templates you own, from this device and from your iCloud copy, and resets your preferences. It cannot be undone. Data owned by someone else and shared with you is not deleted by this — only its owner can delete it — but you can leave a share you were invited to.

Deleting the app itself removes the on-device copy. To remove the iCloud copy as well, use Delete all data before deleting the app, or remove Sparely's iCloud data in the Settings app under your Apple Account.

Children

Sparely is not directed at children and collects nothing from anyone, of any age.

Changes to this policy

If a future version of Sparely ever collects anything, this page, the App Store privacy label and the privacy text inside the app will be updated together, before that version ships. The date at the top of this page tells you when it last changed.

Contact

Questions about this policy: sparelysupport@icloud.com. See also the support page.