Subsidy privacy policy

Effective 6 August 2026

Subsidy has no account, no sign-in, and no server holding your data. What you type into the app stays on your phone. There is no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising and no tracking of any kind — not switched off by default, but absent from the app.

What the app stores, and where

Your subscriptions, funding sources, gift-card wallets, ledger entries, purchases, savings and settings live in a database inside Subsidy's own private storage on your device. We cannot read it, because it never comes to us. Deleting the app deletes it.

The one thing that crosses the network

Every few hours the app downloads a single file, /deals.json, from this host. It is a public list of gift-card deals posted on OzBargain, and it is byte-for-byte identical for everyone who downloads it. Nothing about you is sent to ask for it, and no version of it is built for you. Working out which deals match your subscriptions happens on your phone, from data that never leaves it.

This site is served by Cloudflare Pages. Like any web request, that download tells Cloudflare the IP address it came from, the time, and the app's user agent, and Cloudflare handles that under its own privacy terms. We do not analyse those logs, do not attempt to identify anyone in them, and could not connect one to a person if we tried — an IP address arriving to collect a public file is all there is to connect.

Backups are yours to move

Exporting a backup produces a .subsidy file encrypted with a passphrase you choose (Argon2id and AES-256-GCM). The file goes wherever you send it — Files, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, email — and from that point it is covered by whatever service you put it in. It never comes to us. If you lose the passphrase, nobody can open that file, including us.

Notifications

Renewal reminders, run-dry warnings and deal alerts are scheduled by the app on your own device. There is no push server, so nothing is sent anywhere to make one appear, and no notification token exists.

Purchases

If you buy Subsidy Plus, the purchase is handled entirely by the App Store or Google Play under their own terms. We never see your payment details. What the app learns is whether a purchase is active.

Children

Subsidy is not directed at children. It collects nothing from anyone, of any age.

Your data rights

Australian privacy law gives you the right to ask an organisation what personal information it holds about you, to correct it, and to have it deleted. You are welcome to ask, and the answer will be that we hold none — there is no record of you here to produce, correct or erase. Deleting the app removes everything the app kept, immediately and locally.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it and the change is described in the app's release notes. A change that made any of the claims above less true would have to ship alongside the code that made it less true — that is the order these things happen in here.