Effective date: 17 May 2026
Last updated: 17 May 2026
Who keeps what, for how long, and how you nuke it (politely)
Money apps sit on delicate history: snapshots, EMIs logged, timelines you actually opened. That’s useful—or creepy—depending on honesty and control.
This policy is the playbook for retention, deletion, access, fixes, exports, and why backups/logs refuse to evaporate instantly. Read it beside our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service—they’re sibling documents, not competing fan fiction.
Operator: Mihir — indie developer, India · Privacy / data requests: mihir@debtease.app.
1. Why this policy exists (beyond checkbox theatre)
DebtEase stores limited personal and financial material so the product can:
- remember who you are (account world)
- render analyses from your supplied ledger-ish inputs
- keep dashboards from re-asking the universe every refresh
- debug, secure, and not get bulldozed by abuse
Retention isn’t hoarding trophies—it’s the minimum viable memory to behave like software instead of fortune cookies.
2. Buckets of data we might hang onto
Concrete categories below may appear over time depending on features you toggle.
Account layer
Things like:
- name
- authentication handles / salted credential artifacts
- account metadata timestamps (created, last login-ish cues)
Financial layer you voluntarily parked
Often includes:
- income / expense scaffolding
- debt rows, EMI notes, timelines
- repayment history you keyed in
- savings buffers you declared
- financial snapshots (point-in-time “this is roughly my board state”)
Snapshots are structural state you offered—not hidden credit adjudications.
Behavioural / technical mulch
Operational residue such as:
- coarse session fingerprints
- analytics / crash breadcrumbs (ideally sanitised aggressively)
- security / abuse signal logs
We’d rather aggregated confusion than microscopic soul extraction.
3. Retention rationales (the “because” ledger)
Keeping bits around serves:
- Function: recompute deterministic outputs without gaslighting you with blank slates unfairly mid-refactor
- Security: detect brute-forcers, ghosts, rogue scripts
- Law / disputes: where regulators or seriousness knock
- Backups: because databases wear parachutes—even when you parachute yourself out
Minimalism still beats warehouse cosplay—we trim when safe.
4. How long-ish things stick around
Exact timers flex with infra contracts and roadmap chaos (alpha realism). Directionally:
While your account breathes
Core account + volunteered financial artefacts generally persist until you shrink or export them—or delete.
Post-delete glow (not instantaneous amnesia)
After a deletion pipeline fires:
- live query paths usually stop surfacing romance with your EMI poetry
- encrypted backups, immutable-ish logs, and audit residue may still echo for bounded windows dictated by infra + prudence
- merges / disasters may postpone perfect erasure—we communicate blockers plainly when they exist
Think “progressive disappearance,” not Thanos finger-snap meme accuracy.
Analytics & telemetry
Rolling windows shrink events when engineering remembers to cron-sweep—we aim for humane half-lives versus infinite archaeological strata.
5. Your rights toolbox
Subject to practicality and lawful constraints, you can usually:
- peek at coherent copies of core personal stash
- insist on corrections when obvious typos harm reality
- request account teardown plus financial artefacts destruction arcs
- request reasonable exports humans can lug elsewhere
Ping **mihir@debtease.app** with plain wording + the email tied to your account. Identity checks may precede nukes so randos can’t grief-delete you.
6. Right to access (copy pasta, but lawful)
Exports / summaries reasonably span:
- identity basics
- financial inputs we still index
- debt rows & timelines you entrusted
- snapshot pointers still mapped
Ultra-internal diagnostics engineered for firefighting—not souvenir packs—might stay backstage.
7. Right to correct
Fix typos harming arithmetic—often faster inside product edit surfaces where they exist—otherwise email timelines referencing what’s wrong + what ought to replace illusion.
Garbage accuracy → garbage empathy from dashboards; help us chase truth.
8. Right to delete
You may request removal of:
- the account mantle
- financial snapshot stacks
- debt / repayment artefacts you logged
- associated personal breadcrumbs
Kickoff inbox remains **mihir@debtease.app—subject lines like “Delete my DebtEase account”** accelerate triage serenity.
Self-serve closures may coexist later; email remains backbone today.
9. Deletion choreography (what actually unfolds)
Staging commonly resembles:
- Access halted quickly (sessions invalidated / login blocked).
- Primary application rows earmarked erased or anonymised depending on pipeline flavour.
- Derivative caches left to TTL or flushed eagerly when trivial.
- Backup generations lazily forget you on rotation—not always midnight the same timezone you celebrated in.
We log that deletion happened—for integrity—not to haunt you with dossiers.
10. Stubborn leftovers (still legal-ish)
Residual trails may cling when necessary for:
- fraud / abuse archaeology
- security incident reconstruction
- tax / regulatory tape
- contractual dispute arcs
- integrity of others’ unaffected data
Residual means narrow + bounded, not covert museum wings.
11. Patience horizons
Deletion pipelines queue human + automated steps; DNS doesn’t memorize feelings instantly across multi-region echoes.
Ask for ETA if anxious—we answer small-shop speed, not SLA theatre.
12. Dormant accounts
Long silence may trigger archival or retirement notices before sunset—preferably emailed if we still possess a sane address.
We won’t silently vaporise vibrant histories without signalling when feasible.
13. Snapshots & deterministic replay
Historical financial board states empower:
- timelines / regressions sanity
- recompute fidelity when policy math updates
Stored content is states you authored, recomputed mechanically—not narrative conclusions sold to lenders.
14. Exports aren’t mythical scrolls forever
Exports aim for readable structured bundles (CSV-ish / JSON-esque evolutions)—scope tightens around technical adolescence honesty.
Huge binary blobs or experimental scratch tables may politely decline vacation travel.
15. Securing leftovers
Residual segments still ride encryption-in-transit expectations, hashing hygiene, partitioned access doctrines, vendor seriousness reviews.
Perfect security belongs to marketing hallucinations—we still armour pragmatistically.
16. Vendors inhale infra oxygen too
Cloud hosts, observability sirens, auth brokers maintain their backup cadences—we inherit constraints like Russian nesting disclaimers.
We contract defensively where pocket depth allows.
17. When this playbook mutates
Features, laws, infra, paranoia refactor retention logic. Updated pages publish here; materially spicy deltas deserve clearer signalling (banner/email when registered).
18. Contact
Deletion dramas, existential CSV cravings, or questions about logs—clear subject lines help.
19. Product reality anchor
DebtEase is informational debt wellness scaffolding:
- snapshots power deterministic replay & visibility—not credit underwriting dossiers funnelled to unnamed banks
- retention supports features you asked for, not covert scoring markets
If a future pivot ever threatened that spirit, policy pages would be updated conspicuously—not smuggled in footnote dust.