Privacy

PennyPincher watches prices for you, which means it has to hold on to a few things: who you are, what you are watching, and what those things have cost. That is the whole shape of it. Below is the specific version — no boilerplate, no pages of definitions.

What we collect

• Your account. An email address and a password. The password is stored hashed, so it is not readable by us or by anyone who ever got hold of the database.
• The products you share. The link, plus the title, image, price and variant we read from that page. This is your watch list — without it there is nothing to watch.
• Price observations. Every time we check one of your products we store the price and the time we saw it. That is the price history you see in the app.
• Push tokens. If you allow notifications, Apple gives us a device token so an alert can reach your phone. It identifies a device, not a person, and it disappears when you turn notifications off.
• Diagnostics. Crash reports and server error logs, so that the thing that broke can be fixed. These can include a product URL, because that is usually what broke.

What we do with it

Run the service. That is the entire list. Your email signs you in and carries the occasional message about the beta; your watch list tells our workers what to check; your push token is how a price drop reaches your lock screen.

We look at aggregate numbers — how many products are being watched, which sites fail to parse, how long a check takes — to keep PennyPincher working. That is counting, not profiling.

What we don't do

• We don't sell your data. Not to retailers, not to brokers, not to anyone.
• We don't carry advertising SDKs or third-party trackers inside the app.
• We don't hand your watch list to the stores in it. When a price gets checked, the request comes from our servers, not from your phone — the shop sees us, not you.
• We don't email you things you didn't ask for. Price alerts you chose, and rare beta notes. That's it.

Who else touches it

A hosting and database provider runs the servers. Apple delivers the push notifications. The retail sites themselves see our requests when we fetch a product page. Those are tools we use to run PennyPincher, not audiences we sell to, and each one only sees the slice it needs.

Deleting your account

Delete your account in the app and what is attached to it goes with it: your watch list, your alerts, your push tokens, the account itself. There is no shadow copy waiting in case you come back.

One honest exception: a product's price history is stored against the product, not against you, so a chart of what a rice cooker cost last spring can outlive your account. Nothing in it points back to a person.

Your data, on request

Want a copy of what we hold, or a correction, or a deletion you can't do from the app? Email us and we'll do it — no form to fill in, no verification theatre beyond proving you own the address.

This is a beta

PennyPincher is early software and this page will change as it grows. When it does, we'll change the date at the top and say so in the app rather than quietly editing the fine print.

Ask us

Questions, deletions, or a bug that made us store something we shouldn't have: contact@pennypincher.com.