Privacy policy

01What Countbean is

Countbean gives you a cloud book — a private, git-versioned Beancount ledger with the Fava web UI, hosted for you on Fly.io. An AI agent (Claude) can read and write that ledger when you ask it to. This policy covers what we store, why, and how you stay in control.

02What we store

To run your book, we hold:

• Your ledger itself — plain-text .beancount files and their full Git history (every entry, commit, and revert).
• Account basics — the email address you sign up with and the settings needed to run and bill your book.
• Your email preference — whether you asked for product updates, when you told us, and where you told us from. We keep that record so we can show we only sent what you agreed to.
• Operational logs — ordinary server and request logs used to keep the service up and debug problems.

We do not sell your data, and we do not use the contents of your ledger to advertise to you.

The email we send you. Some of it you cannot turn off, because your account depends on it — password resets, receipts, security notices, and anything about a book you own. Product updates are separate and opt-in. We only send those if you asked for them, every one carries a one-click unsubscribe, and you can change your mind at any time from your profile. Turning them off never affects the first kind.

03Your financial data is text, in Git

A cloud book is just files. Your transactions live in plain .beancount text, versioned in a private Git repository we host for you. That is the whole design: nothing proprietary, nothing to decode, and a full, auditable history of every change — human or AI.

Because it is plain text there is nothing proprietary to decode, and you can read your whole book in the browser. The one-click export that hands you a copy is not built yet — it is on the roadmap, and until it ships the way to get a copy is to ask us. Your book is private to your account; it is not shared with other users.

04The AI features

When you use the AI features — asking Claude to log transactions, categorize an import, or answer a question about your books — the relevant parts of your ledger are sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, so the model can read the context and propose the double-entry to write back. If you never invoke the AI, your ledger is not sent to it.

Anthropic processes that content under its own terms; it does not use business/API inputs to train its models by default. Every AI-written change lands as a reviewable Git commit, so you can see exactly what changed and revert it.

05Security & where it runs

Your book runs on Fly.io and is served only over HTTPS. Credentials are stored hashed, not in the clear. During early access we host on third-party infrastructure (Fly.io for compute and storage, Anthropic for the AI); those providers process data on our behalf under their own agreements. We keep the footprint small and the moving parts few — but this is a beta run by one person, so please don't treat it as a compliance-audited system yet.

06Your control

• No lock-in. Your book is plain text plus Git — there is no proprietary format to escape. The one-click export is not built yet (roadmap); until it ships, ask us and we will get you a copy.
• Delete it. Ask us to delete your book and account and we'll remove them, subject to short-lived backups aging out.
• Reach a human. Email support@countbean.com to access, correct, export, or delete your data, or with any privacy question.

07Contact

Countbean is operated by an independent maker. For anything in this policy, or any question about your data, email support@countbean.com.