Privacy Policy

Last updated September 25, 2026

The Silo (buildyoursilo.com and the companion iOS, iPadOS and macOS app) is built on one idea: your household's numbers belong to your household. This policy says what we collect, what we do with it, who else touches it, and — mostly — what we don't do.

The short version

• No bank account linking. The Silo never connects to your bank, card issuer, or broker, and never asks for their credentials — there is no place in the app to enter them. Every number in your Silo was typed in by you or a member of your household, or read from a document you chose to upload (a statement, a receipt).
• Never sold, no ads, no trackers once you're signed in. We will never sell or hand your data or your email address to a third party for their purposes, we show no ads, and no analytics or tracking script runs on any signed-in page or on any customer's invoice or estimate page. The public pages (this one, the home page, pricing) use Google Analytics with IP anonymization to count visits; it never sees your books or your customers.
• Your data is yours. Delete your account and your household's data — including uploaded statements and receipts — is deleted with it.

What we collect

Account information. Your name, email address, and a password (stored only as a cryptographic hash). If you enable two-factor authentication, its secret is stored encrypted.

The numbers you enter. Accounts, balances, transactions, debts, budgets, savings goals, property values, and — if you use the business tools — your customers, vendors, invoices and services. None of it comes from a financial institution.

Documents you upload. If you choose to, you can upload a bank, card or brokerage statement (PDF or photo) or a receipt (photo or PDF). We store the file so you can open it later and so it can ship in your year-end package. Contractor tax ids you enter for 1099s are stored encrypted, and only their last four digits are ever shown on screen.

Billing. Subscription payments are processed by Stripe. Your card details go directly to Stripe and never touch our servers; we keep only a reference to the Stripe customer record and your subscription status. App Store purchases are handled by Apple; we verify the receipt and keep the subscription status. If you delete your account, we keep a record of each payment you made to The Silo — amount, date, plan, card brand and last four digits, the Stripe or App Store reference, refund status, and the account's email address — along with the sign-in and plan-change history for paid periods, for seven years, for refunds, chargebacks and tax. It contains nothing from your books. The Silo's own accounting records also list you as a customer, by name and email, alongside the payments you made to us; those records stay for seven years after your last payment, then are removed. Your saved card stays with Stripe for 18 months after you delete your account, in case of a refund, then it is deleted; The Silo never holds your card number.

Operational records. Standard server logs and an audit trail of account-level events (sign-ins, invitations, subscription changes, deletions), kept for security.

What we use it for

Running The Silo — and nothing else. Your data powers your own dashboards, projections, and notifications. We keep email minimal: what your account needs (password resets, receipts, invoices you choose to send, notification digests you enable) plus the occasional note about something new, which the newsletter setting in your profile turns off. Your address is never sold or shared with a third party for its own purposes.

To improve the product we look at how closely households follow their payoff plans and what happens to their debt, using figures that carry no name, email or account id — a one-way key stands in for each household. Nothing in that view can be traced back to you.

Who can see it

Members of your household see your household's shared books — that's the point. Anything you mark private stays visible only to you (if you leave the household, your private rows stay with its books and become visible to the remaining members). Beyond that, these processors see only what they need to do one job for you:

• Amazon Web Services — hosting, the database, and email delivery. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest.
• Stripe — subscription billing (your email and the plan), and card payments on invoices you send if you turn that on (your customer's email, the amount and the invoice number). Stripe never receives your books.
• Apple — App Store billing, and push notifications if you enable them (the text of the notification passes through Apple's push service).
• Anthropic — the reading of documents you upload and the optional Advisor. When you upload a statement or a receipt, the file is sent to Anthropic's Claude model to read the lines, dates and amounts, and the result is shown to you to check before anything is saved. When you turn the Advisor on, a summary of your figures and the labels you gave your accounts and debts (never your name or email) is sent to write the brief. Under Anthropic's commercial API terms this data is not used to train its models; Anthropic may keep it briefly for abuse monitoring. Skip uploads and leave the Advisor off and nothing goes to Anthropic.
• Yahoo Finance — if you track investments, the ticker symbols you hold are looked up for prices. Symbols only; no quantities, no account details.
• Google Analytics — visit counts on the public pages only, with IP anonymization. It is never loaded on a signed-in page, nor on the invoice and estimate pages your customers open.
• A Smarter Bot — the help chat on the Support page. When you open that page, the chat receives your name, email and account id so a reply can reach you. It is not loaded anywhere else in the app.

We disclose data beyond that only if the law requires it.

The apps

The iOS, iPadOS and macOS app is a window onto the same service — it stores your session on the device, plus a small snapshot of your dashboard figures for the home-screen widget if you add one. Face ID / Touch ID unlocking happens entirely on your device through Apple's own mechanisms; biometric data never reaches us. The app contains no ads, no analytics, and no tracking.

Cookies

Signed in, two essential ones — a session cookie that keeps you signed in and a security token that protects forms — plus a third, only if you tick "trust this device" at two-factor sign-in, that remembers the device. The public pages carry Google Analytics' visit-counting cookies. No advertising or cross-site cookies of any kind.

If you arrive through a friend's invite link, we keep that invite code in a cookie on your device for up to 90 days, so your friend can earn their reward if you join. It holds only the code, nothing about you.

Retention and deletion

We keep your data while your account exists. Delete your account (or ask us to) and your household's books, uploaded statements and receipts, vendors and their tax ids, your business invoices and the payments on them, device tokens and API tokens are removed from the live system; encrypted backups age out on a short rolling window. A record of what you paid The Silo is kept for seven years (see Billing). The audit line recording the deletion itself is kept. Invoices you already emailed to your customers are, of course, theirs.

Things you delete inside the app while your account is open (an investment holding, for example) are kept in a support archive so we can put them back if you ask; that archive is erased with your account.

A note on statement reading

Statement reading is new. Every line it reads is shown to you before it is written, and an applied statement can be undone in one click from its page. If a result looks wrong, undo it and tell us from the Support page.

Children

The Silo is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their information.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll say so plainly on this page and, for significant changes, by email to account holders.

Contact

Questions? Members can reach us from the in-app Support page, or anyone can email support@buildyoursilo.com.