LEGAL
Privacy Policy
Stewart handles your bank transactions, your home, and your car. That is about as personal as software gets, so this page is written to be read rather than skimmed past.
The short version: we collect what Stewart needs to tell you something useful, we never sell it, we never use it for advertising, your bank credentials never reach our servers, and you can delete all of it yourself at any time without asking us.
Who we are
Stewart is a product of Illumination Labs LLC. When this policy says “we” or “us”, it means Illumination Labs LLC. Questions about anything here go to contact@getstewart.app.
What we collect
Information you give us
- Your account. Name, email address, and — only if you turn on text notifications — your mobile number and time zone.
- What you tell Stewart about your life. Your properties, appliances and their ages, vehicles and mileage, maintenance tasks, budgets, and savings goals.
Information from your connected accounts
- Financial data, through Plaid. When you link a bank, card, brokerage, or loan account, we receive account names and types, balances, transaction history including merchant names and dates, and — where the account has them — investment holdings and credit or loan terms such as APR, statement balance, and due date.
- Vehicle data, through Smartcar. If you connect a car, we request two things and nothing else: its odometer reading, and its make, model, and year. We do not request location, and we cannot lock, unlock, or start your vehicle.
Information we collect automatically
Server logs, containing the requests your browser makes and any errors they produce. These are used to keep the service working and to investigate security events. We strip credentials and access tokens from them, and we mask phone numbers and email addresses.
We do not use analytics or advertising trackers. There is no Google Analytics on this site, no advertising pixel, and no third-party session recording. The fonts are served from our own domain rather than a font network, so loading a page here does not tell anyone else that you did.
What we deliberately do not collect
- Your bank username and password. Linking runs inside Plaid, in your own browser. Those credentials go from you to Plaid and are never sent to, seen by, or stored on our servers.
- Your account and routing numbers. Plaid offers a product that returns them. We do not request it, because Stewart never moves money and has no feature that would need them. They are not in our database.
- Payment card details. Subscriptions are paid through Stripe’s checkout. Your card number goes to Stripe and never reaches our servers.
Why we use it
- To show you your accounts, spending, budgets, and net worth.
- To categorise transactions and apply the rules you set, so your spending is grouped in a way that means something to you.
- To work out when something is due — a maintenance task, a service interval, a bill — and to send you the reminder by text, email, or in the app, according to the notification settings you choose.
- To keep the service running, secure, and free of abuse.
- To answer you when you contact us.
We do not sell your personal information, and we never have. We do not share it for advertising, we do not build profiles for anyone else, and we do not sell aggregated or “anonymised” versions of your financial data. There is no version of Stewart’s business model that involves this.
Who we share it with
Only the companies that make the product work, each for one purpose. This is the whole list.
| Who | What for | What they receive |
|---|---|---|
| Plaid | Connecting your financial accounts | Your bank credentials, entered directly into Plaid, plus an anonymous identifier we generate for you |
| WorkOS | Sign-in and account security | Your name, email address, and sign-in activity |
| Twilio | Sending and receiving text messages | Your mobile number and the content of the texts, which can include amounts, merchant names, and account nicknames |
| Resend | Sending email | Your email address and the content of the emails, which can include the same financial detail |
| Stripe | Taking subscription payments | Your name, email address and payment card, entered directly into Stripe’s checkout |
| Expo | Delivering push notifications to the iPhone app, through Apple | Your device’s push token and the content of each notification, which can include amounts and merchant names |
| Smartcar | Reading your vehicle’s odometer | The authorisation you grant it. We send it no personal details about you |
| Google Cloud | Running the service and storing the data, and running Stewart’s AI features (see below) | Everything described above, as our hosting and database provider |
| Vercel | Serving this website | Your requests to the site, and the pages rendered for you, which contain your financial data |
Two notes worth making plainly. First, your reminders contain real numbers. A text saying you spent a specific amount at a named merchant passes through Twilio and your mobile carrier, and an email passes through Resend. If you would rather that detail did not travel that way, turn off text and email notifications in Settings and read them in the app instead. Second, we may disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect our rights or someone’s safety — and if we are ever part of a merger or acquisition, we will tell you before your data moves.
Stewart’s own AI features
Some of Stewart’s features use a language model: the chat that helps you set up categories, rules and a budget, the suggestions for which category a merchant belongs in, and turning an automation you describe in your own words into a rule. For these, we send the model the parts of your data the feature needs — category names, merchant names, transaction descriptions and amounts, and what you typed.
The model is Anthropic’s Claude, run inside our own Google Cloud project through Google’s Vertex AI. Your data is not sent to Anthropic’s own services, and under Google Cloud’s terms it is not used to train models. Stewart only ever suggests: nothing a model proposes changes your data until you accept it.
AI assistants you connect yourself
Stewart can be connected to an AI assistant that you authorise, so you can ask it about your finances in a chat window. If you do that, that assistant can read and change your Stewart data on your behalf — and once your data is in someone else’s assistant, their privacy policy governs what happens to it, not ours.
This only ever happens because you explicitly authorised it, the access is limited to your own household, and you can revoke it at any time. We never connect Stewart to someone else’s AI assistant on your behalf.
Text messages
Text notifications are off until you turn them on and verify your number. Message frequency depends on the reminders you enable. Message and data rates may apply.
Reply STOP to any message to stop all of them, immediately and without conditions. Reply START to turn them back on. We honour STOP regardless of what your in-app settings say. Mobile carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.
How we protect it
- Encrypted in transit, and encrypted at rest in our database.
- The keys that let us read your connected accounts get a second layer of encryption on top of that, using a key management service, so they are not readable even to someone holding a copy of the database.
- Our database is not reachable from the public internet. Access to production is limited to the company’s two owners, both with multi-factor authentication.
- Every connection Stewart makes to your accounts is read-only. There is no code path in the product that moves money.
No system is perfectly secure, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. If you find a vulnerability, please tell us at contact@getstewart.app — we will not pursue you for reporting something in good faith.
How long we keep it
While your account is open, we keep your data so Stewart can show you history and spot trends. Server logs are kept for a limited period for security and debugging.
You are in control of the rest, from inside the app:
- Disconnecting a bank asks Plaid to revoke our access to it immediately and destroys our stored key for it. Your past transactions stay, so your budget history stays intact.
- Deleting your account revokes every connection to your banks and your car first, then permanently erases your data, then deletes your sign-in record. It is a real deletion, not a hidden flag on a row we keep. We may retain a minimal record where the law requires it.
Your choices
- See it. Everything Stewart holds about you is visible in the app.
- Correct it. Edit your details, categories, and rules directly.
- Delete it. From Settings, at any time, without contacting us.
- Choose how we reach you. Notification settings are per alert type and per channel.
Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights — including to know what we collect, to request deletion, and not to be discriminated against for exercising them. California residents: we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined under the CCPA, and we do not use it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Email contact@getstewart.app and we will respond within the timeframe the law requires.
Children
Stewart is not intended for anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has given us information, email us and we will delete it.
Changes
If we change this policy we will update the effective date above, and for anything that meaningfully affects how we handle your data we will tell you directly rather than relying on you to notice.
Contact
Illumination Labs LLC
contact@getstewart.app — for privacy questions, security reports, and anything else.