Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 2026

Summary

Tap to Tick (the app, its Lock Screen and Home Screen widgets, and its Apple Watch companion) is a personal budgeting tool. There is no Tap to Tick account system, no analytics, and no advertising. Sign-in is your existing Apple ID / iCloud account at the system level. Tap to Tick does not operate a database that stores your budget.

One feature is an exception, and it is opt-in by use: the Ask assistant (part of the Advanced subscription) sends the parts of your budget needed to answer your question to an AI model provider. That is described in detail below.

Where your budget data lives

Every entry you log — income, expenses, cash withdrawals, categories, budgets, account balances, optional place pins, and who logged a purchase — is stored first on your device.

When you are signed into iCloud and sync is available, that same ledger is synchronized through Apple CloudKit into your own iCloud account (and, if you invite someone, into a shared iCloud zone both of you can access). Apple bills any storage to the record owner's iCloud quota.

Without iCloud sign-in, the app works fully offline on the device; sync is simply unavailable until you sign in via system Settings.
Widgets and Apple Watch still use Apple's app-group and Watch Connectivity mechanisms on your devices.
There is no Tap to Tick login screen on iPhone. Identity for sync is the system iCloud session.

Sharing with another person

With the Advanced subscription you may invite a second person to the same ledger using Apple's system share sheet (for example Messages). That person receives access through CloudKit sharing. Either of you can leave or stop sharing; when access ends, the participant's window onto the owner's records goes away. Export a CSV from Settings or History before leaving if you want a personal copy of the history.

Ask — the AI assistant

The Ask feature answers questions about your money using a large language model (Claude, from Anthropic). This is the one part of the app where budget information leaves your device, and it only happens when you send a message in Ask.

When you send a question, the following is transmitted:

the text of your question and the earlier messages in that conversation;
the budget figures needed to answer it, requested by the model and assembled on your device: spending, income and net totals for a period; expense totals per category with any monthly budget you set; up to fifty recent entries (date, amount, type, category, note text, account name); and your account balances.

Requests go over HTTPS to a small service operated by Tap to Tick on Cloudflare Workers, which forwards them to Anthropic's API. It does not log or store your questions or your budget figures — the only thing it keeps is a running count of requests per day, used to limit abuse. It does not receive your name, email address, Apple ID, device identifier, or location.

Anthropic processes the request to generate the reply under its commercial API terms, which do not permit using API inputs or outputs to train its models. Your Ask conversation itself is kept only in memory on your device while the app is open and is not saved to your ledger or your iCloud.

If you would rather nothing about your budget leave the device, do not use Ask. Every other feature in the app works without it.

Advanced subscription and payment

Advanced is a $4.99 per month auto-renewing subscription sold through Apple In-App Purchase. Apple handles the entire transaction and tells the app only whether an active subscription exists. Tap to Tick never receives your card number, billing address, or Apple ID password. Manage or cancel the subscription in your App Store account settings; if it ends, your budget data stays on your device and in your iCloud, and the Advanced features (sharing and Ask) simply switch off.

Optional location on purchases

If you allow Location While Using the App, Tap to Tick may take a one-shot location fix when you save a purchase on the phone and store a loose place (approximate coordinates and an optional short label) with that entry so you can review it later on Apple Maps inside the app.

Location is used only for this optional place-on-purchase feature.
Location is never sent to Anthropic or to the service that forwards Ask requests. When iCloud sync is on, place fields sync with the entry inside your iCloud budget like other entry fields.
If you deny location permission, or a fix is unavailable or slow, logging a purchase still works; the entry is simply saved without a place.
Lock Screen widget and Apple Watch log paths do not require location for success.

Third parties

Tap to Tick does not use third-party analytics SDKs, crash reporters, or ad networks. Sync uses Apple CloudKit. Maps shown for purchase places use Apple MapKit. Subscriptions are processed by Apple. The Ask feature uses Cloudflare Workers (which forwards the request) and Anthropic (the AI model), and only for the data described in the Ask section above.

Children's privacy

Tap to Tick does not knowingly collect data from children. Budget data is stored on device and, when sync is enabled, in the user's (or share owner's) Apple iCloud account under Apple's terms.

Changes to this policy

If how Tap to Tick handles ledger data changes further, this page will be updated and the date above will change.

Contact

Questions about this policy: thomas@kingdom-sites.com