Last updated 30 August 2026
Ellie keeps your money to yourself. There is no Ellie account, no Ellie server, and no analytics. Your financial records live on your device and — if you use iCloud — in your own private iCloud storage that only you can read. We never receive them.
Everything you put into the app stays on your iPhone, iPad or Mac: transactions, accounts and balances, budgets, investments, insurance policies, reimbursement claims, receipt photos and the PDF documents Ellie makes for you. Your app settings (country, language, base currency) are stored the same way.
If you type your own name, email or phone so they can be printed on your reimbursement documents, those are stored on the device too. If you choose to add an API key (see below), it is kept in the iOS Keychain, which is Apple's encrypted store for secrets.
Ellie syncs your records to your own private iCloud database so the app works across your devices. This is Apple's iCloud, under your Apple Account. The developer cannot see it, cannot query it, and receives nothing from it. If you sign out of iCloud, Ellie keeps working with your data stored only on the device.
Once a day, if you record money in more than one currency, Ellie fetches a public table of exchange rates from exchangerate-api.com. It is the same public request for every user and carries no information about you — no identifier, no amounts, not even which currencies you care about. Rates are filtered on your device after they arrive.
Ellie reads receipts on your device for free, using Apple's built-in text recognition and on-device intelligence. Nothing is sent anywhere for a normal scan.
If a receipt is difficult, and only if you have added your own Anthropic API key and tapped “Re-read with Claude”, Ellie sends that one receipt image — plus the names of your categories, accounts and companies, so the result can be matched to them — to Anthropic's API. No amounts, no balances, no transaction history, and no account numbers are ever sent. The request is billed to your own Anthropic account and handled under Anthropic's terms and privacy policy. The same applies if you upload a company's reimbursement form to have its layout analysed, which shows a consent screen first.
If you set up a price source for your investments, Ellie sends only the ticker symbol to a price provider to ask for its price — never an amount, never a holding, never anything about you. Most providers need a key you get from them yourself. One Vietnamese source, TCBS, needs no key and sits behind the others as a fallback for Vietnamese shares only, so a Vietnamese ticker may be sent there even though you did not add it. If you set up no price source at all, Ellie contacts no price provider — including that one.
Because none of your information is ever received by the developer, Ellie's App Store privacy label is “Data Not Collected”.
Every one is optional. Declining any of them leaves the rest of the app fully usable.
Ellie is a personal finance tool for adults. It is not directed at children and collects nothing from anyone.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it and the current version always lives at this address.