Privacy Policy

Last updated 7 September 2026. Effective from first public release.

Zeroly is a shared record of who paid for what. This policy explains what we collect, why we need it, who else touches it, and how to get rid of it.

1. Who we are

Zeroly is made by Clanelite LLC, a limited liability company registered in Pennsylvania, United States. In this policy "we" and "us" mean Clanelite LLC, and "Zeroly" means the Zeroly iOS app and the pages on zeroly.app.

For privacy questions, write to support@zeroly.app.

2. What we collect

Information you give us when you sign in

Zeroly only offers Sign in with Apple and Sign in with Google. We never create or store a password. From your chosen provider we receive your name, your email address, and an identifier that lets us recognise you next time.

If you use Hide My Email with Sign in with Apple, we receive a relay address rather than your real one, and that is all we ever have. Zeroly works exactly the same either way.

A profile photo is optional. If you add one, we store it. This is not in the current release — the app links the storage service but does not yet upload anything to it.

What you create in the app

This is the substance of the product. It is stored so that you and the people you share a group with can see the same numbers.

Technical information

• Device token for notifications — if you turn on push notifications, one record per device so a second phone also rings. Deleted when you sign out or turn notifications off.
• App installation identifier — assigned by Firebase, used to deliver notifications and to separate one install from another.

Two more are planned and are not collected by the current release. Neither library is even included in the app today. We list them now so this policy does not have to change underneath you when they arrive:

• Crash and performance data — stack traces, device model, OS version, when the app crashes or is slow.
• Product interaction — which screens are opened and which features are used, so we know what to fix. Never linked to advertising, never used to build a profile of you, and collection stays switched off until you have been told about it. This stays true now that the free tier carries adverts: what we measure about your use of Zeroly is not passed to any advertiser.

3. What we deliberately do not collect

Stating this positively, because for a money app the absences matter as much as the presences:

• No card numbers, bank accounts, or payment credentials. Zeroly records who owes whom. It never moves money, and there is nothing to charge.
• No location. The app never asks.
• No selling of your expense data to advertisers, ever. The free tier of Zeroly shows advertisements, supplied by Google AdMob. What an advertiser learns is that an advert was shown in Zeroly — never what you spent, who you owe, what your groups are called, or anything you typed. Your ledger is not an input to ad targeting and never will be. Zeroly Plus removes advertisements entirely.
• No selling or renting of personal information, to anyone, for any purpose.
• No reading of your contacts unless you explicitly use a feature that adds someone from Contacts, and then only at that moment and only the entry you pick.
• No reading of your receipts by us or by anyone else. Recognising a receipt happens on your iPhone, not on our servers — we never run text recognition over your photographs. Zeroly Plus can attach the receipt to an expense so the people sharing it can see what was bought; that image is shrunk on your phone before it is sent, is stored for the members of that group, and is never used for advertising, never sold, and never looked at by us.

4. How we use it

• To show you and your group members the same balances.
• To send notifications you have asked for — someone added an expense, someone paid you back.
• To let people invite each other to a group.
• To keep the service running: diagnosing crashes, finding slow screens, preventing abuse.
• To answer you when you write to support.
• To operate subscriptions. Purchases are handled by Apple; we receive whether your subscription is active, not your payment details.

Where the law requires a legal basis, ours is performance of our contract with you for everything needed to run the app, and our legitimate interest in a working, non-abusive service for crash and usage diagnostics. Where consent is required — notifications, camera, contacts — we ask at the moment the feature is used, and refusing leaves the rest of the app working.

5. Who else sees it

People you share a group with

This is the point of the product, and the most important line in this policy. When you add an expense to a group, every member of that group can see it — the amount, the description, the date, who paid, how it was split, any note, the line items a receipt scan produced, and the receipt image itself where one was attached. They can also see your display name and profile photo. Do not put anything in a group that you would not want everyone in it to read.

Service providers

Zeroly runs on Google Firebase and Google Cloud, which process data on our behalf under Google's terms as a data processor. Specifically: Firebase Authentication (sign-in), Cloud Firestore (expenses, groups, balances), Cloud Storage (profile photos and receipt images), Cloud Functions (server logic), Firebase Cloud Messaging (notifications). Crashlytics and Google Analytics for Firebase are planned and are not part of the current release; when they arrive, ad personalisation stays switched off.

Google AdMob serves the advertisements on the free tier. To do that it receives technical information about the device and the advert — an advertising identifier where you have allowed one, an approximate location derived from the network, an IP address, device type and the fact that a particular advert was displayed or tapped. It does not receive your expenses, your groups, your balances, your notes or your contacts, because Zeroly never sends them.

We do not send Google anything about what you do in Zeroly. Not your expenses, your groups, your balances, your notes or your contacts. Zeroly requests non-personalised advertisements, and intends to keep doing so; how Google selects and serves an advert is Google's to describe, not ours to guarantee on their behalf.

Tracking, and your choice about it. On first use of a screen that shows an advert, iOS will ask whether Zeroly may track you across other companies' apps and websites. We ask even though we request non-personalised adverts, and it is fair to say why: Google's advertising SDK is capable of reading the device's advertising identifier — to count how often an advert has been shown, and to detect fraudulent traffic — and we would rather ask for something we may never use than use something we never asked about.

Your answer changes nothing inside Zeroly. The app does not read it and nothing in it behaves differently either way. Saying no costs you no feature, is never asked twice, and can be changed at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking. If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area you will also be asked for consent under GDPR before any advert is served at all, and you can withdraw it from inside the app.

Data is stored in the United States. Apple processes subscription purchases and tells us only whether a subscription is active.

Legal

We will disclose information if we are legally required to, and we will tell you unless we are prohibited from doing so. If the business is ever sold or merged, your information may transfer with it, and this policy travels with it until you are given notice of a replacement.

6. How long we keep it, and deletion

You can delete your account from inside the app: Account → Delete account. It takes two taps and is not hidden behind an email request. There is a page explaining exactly what happens.

When you delete your account:

• Your profile, photo, email, notification tokens and any receipt images you uploaded are deleted within 30 days. Encrypted backups age out on their own schedule shortly after.
• Entries you added to shared groups remain, attributed to "Deleted user." We cannot remove them without silently changing what other people are owed. Removing a $200 hotel bill from a trip would rewrite four other people's balances without their knowledge. Those records stay, detached from your identity.
• Groups where you were the only member are deleted entirely.

We never block deletion because you owe money or are owed it. We warn you, then proceed.

While your account is open, your data is kept for as long as you keep using Zeroly. Crash and usage diagnostics are retained on Google's default schedules, which are considerably shorter.

7. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or export your personal information, to object to certain processing, and to complain to a regulator.

In practice, most of these you can exercise yourself without asking us: your data is visible in the app, editable in the app, exportable as CSV or JSON, and deletable in the app. For anything you cannot do yourself, write to support@zeroly.app and we will respond within 30 days.

We never sell personal information. Since Zeroly's free tier began showing advertisements, California's definition of sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising can apply to personalised adverts, so you are given a real choice rather than a claim:

• If you decline Apple's tracking request, or never answer it, no advertising identifier is shared with Google — iOS withholds it, so this does not rest on our word.
• You can change that answer at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, and in the UK and European Economic Area you can withdraw consent from inside the app.
• Subscribing to Zeroly Plus removes advertisements altogether.

Whatever you choose, your expenses, balances, groups, notes and contacts are never shared with any advertiser. The only thing that can be shared is device-level advertising information, and only if you have allowed it.

How long receipts are kept

The Plus feature is reading a receipt, not keeping one. You point the camera at it and Zeroly fills in the amounts so you do not have to type them. Keeping the photograph afterwards is a convenience so the group can glance at it — Zeroly is not a document store, and you should keep your own copy of anything you rely on.

A receipt is kept for as long as the expense it is attached to. Delete the expense and the receipt goes with it once Recently Deleted clears; delete your account and every receipt you uploaded is deleted. Ending a Plus subscription deletes nothing — it only stops you adding new ones.

Nothing else goes with them: the expense, the amount, who paid, how it was split and any line items read from the receipt all remain, because those are the record.

Everything else you create is kept until you delete it or delete your account.

8. Security

Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit, with no exceptions configured. Who may read or write a record is enforced on the server, not in the app, so a modified client cannot reach another person's data. Sign-in tokens and identifiers are held in the iOS Keychain and are not synced to iCloud. Profile photos and receipts are private by default and readable only by members of the relevant group.

No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach affects you, we will tell you.

9. Children

Zeroly is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has given us information, write to us and we will delete it.

10. Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. For a change that materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

11. Contact

support@zeroly.app
Clanelite LLC, Pennsylvania, United States