Privacy Policy

Effective 31 August 2026

Owey is a small, independent app for tracking what you spend and what you owe. This policy explains, in plain language, exactly what it stores and who else ever sees it. Owey is built and run by José Silva, in Portugal, who is the data controller for the purposes of the GDPR.

What Owey stores

• Your account — your name, your email address and a password, which is hashed and never stored in a readable form. If you sign in with Google or Apple instead, we receive your name and email from them and no password at all.
• What you record — the expenses, amounts, categories, notes and dates you enter, the people you split with, and the debts and settlements that result.
• People you add — the name, and the phone number or email if you attach one so you can send an invite.
• Receipt photos — the images you choose to scan, kept on our own server so the receipt stays attached to the expense.
• Your conversation with the assistant — the messages you send and the replies you get, so the chat is still there when you come back.
• Push notification tokens — an anonymous device token, if you turn notifications on.
• Ordinary server logs — request times, paths and response codes, kept only as long as they are useful for fixing faults. They are never used to profile you.

Your contacts are never bulk-imported

Owey does not read your address book in the background, at launch, or during onboarding, and there is no bulk import anywhere in the app. You add people one at a time. On iPhone the contact picker runs outside the app, so Owey never gets access to your address book at all — only to the single person you tapped. On Android you can decline the contacts permission and simply type the name instead; if you decline, the app does not ask again.

The AI assistant

To answer you, Owey sends your chat messages — and the receipt images you scan — to Anthropic’s Claude API, along with the small amount of context the assistant needs, such as the names of the people you split with. Anthropic processes them on our behalf to produce the reply. Under Anthropic’s commercial terms, data sent through their API is not used to train their models.

If you would rather nothing at all went to a model, you can still use Owey: adding expenses, splitting them and settling up all work without the assistant.

Voice input

Owey never records, stores or uploads audio. When you tap the microphone, the transcription is done by your phone’s own speech recognition — Apple’s on iOS, Google’s on Android. Depending on your device and its settings, that service may send the audio to Apple or Google to transcribe it, which is governed by their privacy policies rather than this one. Owey only ever receives the finished text, and it lands in the message box for you to read and edit before anything is sent.

What other people see

When you split an expense with somebody who also uses Owey, they see your name and the expense you shared with them — that is the point of sharing it. They never see your other expenses, your balances with other people, or your chat.

Who else is involved

• Anthropic — the Claude models behind the assistant and receipt reading.
• Railway — hosting for the server, the database and receipt images. Servers are in the United States.
• Expo — delivery of push notifications, if you enable them.
• Apple and Google — sign-in if you use it, and speech recognition as described above.

That is the entire list. There is no analytics provider, no advertising network, no attribution or crash-reporting SDK, and no data broker. Nothing about you is ever sold or rented.

Payments

Owey takes no payments today — everyone is on the free plan or the 14-day Plus trial. When subscriptions launch they will be billed by the App Store or Google Play and managed through RevenueCat, which tells our server only whether your subscription is active. We never see your card details.

Your rights

You can see, correct, export and delete your data at any time. Owey has a built-in export (Settings → Your data → Export CSV) that hands you everything you have recorded as a file, and you can edit or delete any individual expense from inside the app. Under the GDPR you also have the right to object to or restrict processing, and to complain to a supervisory authority — in Portugal, the CNPD.

We process your data because it is necessary to provide the app you signed up for, and, where it applies, because you gave consent (notifications, contacts, the microphone) — consent you can withdraw at any time in your device settings.

Deleting everything

Open Settings → Delete account in the app and it happens immediately, or email us and it is done within 30 days of verifying the request. Encrypted backups are rotated out within the same window. The full detail of what is deleted and what necessarily stays — shared records that are also somebody else’s history, with your name removed — is on the account deletion page.

Otherwise, we keep your data for as long as your account exists. We do not hold onto abandoned accounts for their data’s sake.

Children

Owey is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the effective date above changes with it and the app will tell you. Questions, or anything here that does not match what you see in the app, go to jose.silva.priv@gmail.com — we answer.