Privacy Policy
Payday Runway keeps everything on your phone. There is no account, no server, and the app has no permission to use the internet at all. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere unless you deliberately export it and share it yourself.
The short version
- We do not collect, receive, transmit, sell or share your personal or financial information.
- Everything you enter — balances, income, bills, notes, categories — is stored in an encrypted database on your device and nowhere else.
- Payday Runway does not request the internet permission. It cannot send data even if it wanted to.
- There are no adverts, no analytics SDKs, no advertising identifier, no crash-reporting service and no third-party trackers.
What the app stores on your device
- Amounts you enter: available cash, balance readings, expected and received income, bill amounts, payments, reserves and any spending you record.
- Descriptions you type: bill names, income names, categories and optional notes.
- Dates and schedules: paydays, due dates, recurrence rules and reminder settings.
- App settings: currency, locale, first day of the week, theme, motion and haptic preferences, and whether app lock is enabled.
- A local activity log recording that a record was created, changed or removed. It stores the type of change and a record identifier — never amounts and never text you typed.
How it is protected
- The local database is encrypted with SQLCipher using a 256-bit key generated on your device.
- That key is itself encrypted with a hardware-backed key held in the Android Keystore, which cannot be exported from the device.
- Because the key is bound to your device, a copy of the database file taken from elsewhere is unreadable — including by us.
- Android's automatic cloud backup is switched off for this app, so your financial data is not copied to Google Drive or transferred to a new device automatically.
- You can optionally require your device screen lock or fingerprint to open the app.
What we do not do
- We never ask for your bank credentials, card numbers, account numbers or government identifiers, and there is nowhere in the app to enter them.
- We do not connect to your bank and we do not use Plaid, open banking or any aggregation service.
- We do not create an account for you, and we do not know who you are.
- We do not profile you, build an audience segment from you, or sell anything about you.
- We do not use your data to train any model.
When data leaves your device
- Only when you choose to export or back it up. In both cases the app writes a file to its own private cache area and hands it to Android's share sheet so you can pick where it goes.
- A CSV export is not encrypted. Treat it as sensitive — it contains your financial information in plain form.
- A backup file is encrypted with a passphrase you choose, using AES-256-GCM with a key stretched from that passphrase. The passphrase is never stored anywhere and is not sent to us. If you lose it, nobody can open the file — including us.
- Once you share either file, it is governed by whatever app or service you sent it to, not by this policy.
- The app deletes previous export and backup files each time you make a new one.
Notifications
- Reminders are generated on your device by Android's own scheduler. Nothing is sent through a push service and no notification content leaves your phone.
- Notification permission is requested only after you switch a reminder on, never on first launch. Declining it does not limit any other feature.
Purchases
- Purchases are processed by Google Play. We receive an entitlement — whether this installation has paid — and nothing else.
- We never see your payment details. Google's own privacy policy governs the transaction.
- The app includes Google Play's billing library, which talks to the Play Store app already on your phone rather than over the internet. The analytics component that library normally bundles has been removed from this app, which is why Payday Runway still has no internet permission at all.
- Cancelling or refunding removes access to paid features. It never deletes, locks or hides anything you have entered.
Children
- Payday Runway is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Since we collect nothing from anyone, there is nothing for us to delete on request — but see the next section for erasing local data.
Your control over your data
- Everything is in your hands because everything is on your device.
- Export: Settings has a full CSV export of everything you have entered.
- Erase: "Delete all local data" in Settings removes every record and setting and rotates the encryption key, so the previous data cannot be recovered.
- Uninstalling the app removes the encrypted database along with it.
- Because we hold nothing about you, there is no account to close and no request to make of us in order to exercise access, correction, portability or erasure rights under laws such as the GDPR or the CCPA/CPRA. We do not sell or share personal information as those laws define it.
This is a planning tool
- Payday Runway is not a bank, a money transmitter, a lender, a broker or a financial adviser. It does not give personalised financial, investment, tax, debt or credit advice.
- It shows an estimate built entirely from figures you enter. It cannot see your accounts and cannot guarantee that money will be available or that a bill will be paid. Always check your accounts before spending.
Changes to this policy
- If this policy changes, the updated version ships with an app update and the date at the top changes. Because no data has ever been collected under a previous version, a change here cannot alter how information already gathered is used.
Contact
- Questions, corrections or concerns: arcanesystemsinc@gmail.com
- Arcane Systems Inc.