Is Savly Safe? Security, Privacy & Data Protection Explained

Your financial data is some of the most personal information you have. You are right to ask how it is being handled before trusting any app with it.

When you start using a budgeting app, you are handing over detailed information about your income, spending habits, and financial goals. That is a significant amount of trust. This page explains exactly how Savly handles your data, what security measures are in place, and why the app was designed from the ground up with privacy as a core principle rather than an afterthought.

Why Security Matters for a Budget App

Budget apps sit at a unique intersection of sensitivity and frequency. Unlike a social media account or a streaming service, a budgeting tool sees the full picture of your financial life — what you earn, where you spend, how much you save, and what debts you carry. That data, if mishandled, could be used for identity theft, targeted scams, or invasive profiling.

Many popular budgeting apps require you to connect your bank account directly, sharing your login credentials or granting ongoing read access through third-party aggregators. This is convenient, but it also creates a large attack surface. If the app, its data aggregator, or any intermediary is compromised, your bank connection could be exposed.

Savly takes a fundamentally different approach. Rather than building convenience on top of risk, Savly was designed to give you full control over your data from the start. The result is a budgeting experience that is private by architecture, not just by policy.

No Bank Connections — By Design

Savly does not connect to your bank. There is no Plaid integration, no Open Banking link, and no screen-scraping of your online banking portal. Instead, you download a CSV or Excel file from your bank — something virtually every bank in the world supports — and upload it to Savly yourself.

This approach is intentionally more private than the alternative. When you import a CSV file, you are making a deliberate, one-time transfer of data that you control. You can review the file before uploading it. You can remove sensitive transactions if you choose. And crucially, Savly never has ongoing access to your bank account, cannot see your balance, and cannot initiate any transactions on your behalf.

The CSV import approach also means there is no third-party data aggregator sitting between you and Savly. Services like Plaid and Yodlee, while widely used, store your bank credentials or tokens on their own servers, creating additional points of vulnerability. With Savly, that entire layer of risk simply does not exist.

How Your Data Is Stored

Once your transaction data is in Savly, it is stored in a PostgreSQL database hosted on Supabase with encryption at rest. This means your data is encrypted on the server's disk, so even if someone gained physical access to the storage hardware, they would not be able to read your financial information without the encryption keys.

All communication between your browser and Savly's servers happens over HTTPS with TLS encryption. This protects your data in transit, ensuring that no one can intercept your transactions, budgets, or account details as they travel between your device and the server.

Savly also uses Row Level Security (RLS) at the database level. This is a PostgreSQL feature that enforces access rules directly in the database engine itself, not just in the application code. Each user can only query their own data. Even if there were a bug in the application layer, the database would still refuse to return another user's records. RLS acts as a second line of defence that operates independently of the application.

What Data Savly Collects

Savly collects only the data you actively provide. This includes:

• Transaction data: The transactions you import via CSV or Excel, including dates, amounts, descriptions, and any categories you assign.
• Budgets and categories: The budget categories you create and the spending limits you set.
• Recurring rules: Any recurring transaction rules you configure for forecasting.
• Account information: Your email address and display name, used for authentication and personalisation.
• Household data: If you use the household feature, shared budgets and transactions within your household group.

Savly does not collect device fingerprints, browsing history, location data, or contact lists. There are no hidden tracking pixels, no behavioural analytics packages, and no advertising SDKs embedded in the application. The app does not monitor which pages you visit outside of Savly or build a profile of your interests for marketing purposes.

What Savly Does NOT Do

It is just as important to be clear about what Savly does not do with your data:

• Does not sell your data: Your financial information is never sold to data brokers, advertisers, credit agencies, or any other third party. Savly's revenue comes from subscriptions, not from monetising user data.
• Does not serve ads: There are no advertisements in Savly. This means there is no incentive to collect behavioural data or build advertising profiles.
• Does not use third-party analytics that track you: Savly does not embed Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Mixpanel, or similar tracking tools in the application.
• Does not store bank credentials: Since Savly uses CSV imports instead of bank connections, your bank username, password, and authentication tokens are never collected or stored.
• Does not share data with partners: Your transaction data, spending patterns, and financial goals are not shared with insurance companies, lenders, or any other business.

Your Data, Your Control

Savly is built on the principle that your data belongs to you. This is not just a statement — it is backed by concrete features:

• Full data export: You can export all of your transactions at any time as a CSV or Excel file. This means you are never locked in. If you decide to leave Savly, you take your data with you.
• Account deletion: You can delete your account and all associated data permanently. When you delete your account, everything is removed — transactions, budgets, categories, recurring rules, and your profile. Savly does not retain shadow copies or anonymised versions of your data after deletion.
• No data hostage: Some apps make it difficult to leave by not offering data export or by exporting in proprietary formats. Savly exports in standard CSV and Excel formats that you can open in any spreadsheet application or import into another tool.

GDPR and Compliance

Savly is fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union's comprehensive data protection framework. Here is what that means in practice:

• Data stored in the EU: Savly's database infrastructure is hosted on EU-based servers, ensuring your data is subject to European data protection laws.
• Right to access: You can request a complete copy of all data Savly holds about you at any time.
• Right to erasure: You can request that all your data be permanently deleted, and Savly will comply promptly.
• Data minimisation: Savly only collects information that is necessary to provide the budgeting service. There is no excess data collection for future or speculative purposes.
• Lawful basis: Savly processes your data based on legitimate contractual necessity (providing the service you signed up for) and your explicit consent where applicable.

For users outside the EU, Savly applies the same privacy standards globally. Regardless of where you are located, your data receives the same level of protection.

How Savly Compares on Privacy

Privacy practices vary significantly across budgeting apps. Here is how Savly's approach compares to some well-known alternatives:

• YNAB (You Need A Budget): YNAB offers direct bank connections through Plaid, which means sharing bank credentials or tokens with a third-party aggregator. While YNAB also supports manual entry, the default experience encourages bank linking. Savly avoids this entirely by using CSV imports only.
• Mint (now discontinued): Mint was a free, ad-supported budgeting app that monetised user data through targeted financial product recommendations. Savly has no ads, no financial product partnerships, and charges a subscription instead of selling user attention.
• Emma: Emma connects to bank accounts via Open Banking and Plaid, providing automatic transaction syncing. While convenient, this requires granting ongoing read access to your bank data through a third party. Savly's CSV approach gives you the same transaction data without the persistent bank connection.

The trade-off with Savly's approach is that importing transactions requires a manual step — downloading a file from your bank and uploading it. For many users, this small amount of effort is a worthwhile exchange for significantly stronger privacy and the peace of mind that comes with knowing no third party has access to their bank account.