Cake Budget Privacy Policy

Effective Date: October 25, 2026

Company: Cake Budget, LLC

Your privacy matters. This Privacy Policy describes how Cake Budget, LLC (“Cake Budget,” “we,” “our,” or “us”) collects, uses, and protects your information when you use our service.

1. What We Collect

We collect the following types of information:

Email address — used for billing, support, and notifications.
Transaction history — synced from your bank via Plaid, or via SimpleFIN when you choose that option (including banks in the UK, EU, and Canada), and stored to power your budgeting tools.
Session data — stored via cookies for login and authentication only.
Anonymous usage data — via PostHog and Sentry for improving the product and fixing bugs.

We do not store your bank login information.

2. How We Use Your Data

We use your data to:

Provide and maintain the Cake Budget platform
Generate personalized budgeting insights and answer chat questions (via Anthropic’s Claude Haiku model, served through OpenRouter)
Recognize income and spending patterns during setup, such as telling a paycheck from gig income (via TypeSafe AI’s Jev model, served through OpenRouter)
Notify you about subscription changes or important product updates
Improve the product through anonymous analytics

We anonymize transaction data before it’s shared with any AI provider. For pattern recognition, that means a transaction’s description, merchant name, amount, date, and account type are sent, never your name, email, account numbers, or balances.

3. Third-Party Services

We work with the following service providers:

Plaid — secure bank data integration
SimpleFIN — an alternative bank connection you can choose, paid for by you directly; some banks reach SimpleFIN through a compatible bridge such as Lunch Flow
OpenRouter — serves our AI models: Anthropic’s Claude Haiku for budgeting insights and chat, and TypeSafe AI’s Jev for recognizing income and spending patterns (data anonymized)
Anthropic — provides the Claude Haiku model behind insights and chat, reached through OpenRouter and hosted only by Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, or Google Cloud Vertex AI, none of which use your data to train models
TypeSafe AI — provides the Jev model that classifies transaction patterns, reached through OpenRouter
Stripe — payment processing
Resend — sends our transactional email
Google — optional sign-in with your Google account
PostHog — usage analytics and feature flags
Sentry — error and crash reporting
Render — cloud hosting

These providers have access to only the minimum necessary data to perform their roles.

3a. Where Your Data Is Stored and International Transfers

Cake Budget is operated from the United States and our servers, including backups, are located in the United States (Render, Oregon). If you use Cake Budget from the UK, the EU, or elsewhere, your data is transferred to and processed in the United States.

For users in the UK and the European Economic Area, we rely on our providers’ Standard Contractual Clauses (and, for UK users, the UK International Data Transfer Addendum) to protect these transfers, and on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where a provider is certified under it.

3b. Legal Bases for Processing (UK and EU Users)

If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, we process your personal data on these legal bases:

Performance of a contract — providing the Cake Budget service you signed up for, including syncing your transactions, running your budget, and billing you.
Legitimate interests — keeping the service secure, fixing bugs, understanding how the product is used through anonymous analytics, and sending you service emails about your account. You can object to this processing at any time.
Consent — optional features you turn on, such as push notifications and marketing emails. You can withdraw consent at any time in Settings or by contacting us.
Legal obligation — keeping billing records for as long as tax and accounting law requires.

We do not make decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects solely by automated means. Our AI features suggest and categorize; you confirm before anything changes in your budget.

4. Cookies

We use cookies solely for:

Authentication (e.g., keeping you logged in)
Session management

We do not use cookies for tracking, advertising, or behavioral analytics.

5. Data Retention and Deletion

We keep your account and budgeting data for as long as you have an account.
If your subscription or trial lapses and you do not resubscribe, we delete your transaction and budgeting data 90 days after it lapsed. We email you 14 days and 7 days before that happens.
If you delete your account in Settings, all associated data is permanently deleted from our live systems right away, and from backups on their normal rotation.
Billing records are retained for as long as tax and accounting law requires.

You may request a full export of your data or request deletion at any time by contacting contact@trycakebudget.com.

6. Your Privacy Rights

Everyone

You can delete your account at any time from Settings, and you can ask us for a copy of your data or ask us to correct it by emailing contact@trycakebudget.com. We do not sell your personal data.

UK and EU users

If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, you have the following rights under the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR:

Access — ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you
Rectification — ask us to correct inaccurate data
Erasure — ask us to delete your data
Restriction — ask us to limit how we use your data while a concern is resolved
Portability — receive your data in a machine-readable format
Objection — object to processing based on our legitimate interests, including any direct marketing
Withdraw consent — for anything you consented to, at any time, without affecting earlier processing

To exercise any of these, email contact@trycakebudget.com. We respond within one month. You also have the right to complain to your supervisory authority: in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk); in the EU, the data protection authority of the country where you live.

Cake Budget, LLC is the data controller for your personal data.

California residents

You have rights under the CCPA, including:

The right to know what personal information we collect and use
The right to delete your personal data
The right to opt out of data sales (we do not sell your data)

6a. Children

Cake Budget is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 13, or under 16 in the UK or EU where that is the applicable age. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.

7. Security

We encrypt all stored data using AES-256 encryption. We follow industry best practices and are pursuing SOC 2 compliance.

8. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we’ll revise the Effective Date above. Continued use of Cake Budget means you agree to the updated terms.

9. Contact Us

If you have questions or privacy concerns, contact us at:

📧 contact@trycakebudget.com 📍 Cake Budget, LLC