How Renew Reminder protects your data

Connecting a bank is optional, and when you do it, we are not in the room. The sign-in screen belongs to Plaid, the service that connects thousands of financial apps to more than 12,000 institutions. You enter your credentials there, Plaid verifies them with your bank, and what comes back to us is a token — not a password.

• The token is read-only. We request one Plaid product: transactions. It lets us read accounts and transaction history. It cannot move money, pay a bill, or change anything at your bank.
• The token is encrypted at rest. We store it as AES-256-GCM ciphertext under a key that lives in the deployment environment, not in the database — a copy of the database alone cannot use it.
• The token never leaves our servers. It is stripped from every API response, from your data export, and from what our own admin tools display.
• Disconnecting revokes it. Remove a bank from the Accounts screen and we tell Plaid to invalidate the token. Delete your account and the same happens automatically.

Why Plaid and not our own connection? Because bank credentials are the one thing a small team should never hold. Plaid's entire business is holding them safely; ours is reminding you before you get charged.

Every connection between your device and Renew Reminder — the apps, the website, the browser extension and the API — is encrypted with TLS, the same standard your bank uses. Our servers do not accept unencrypted connections.

At rest, your data lives in MongoDB Atlas, which encrypts everything it stores with 256-bit AES. Passwords are never stored at all: we keep a bcrypt hash, a one-way transformation that lets us check a password without being able to read it. If our database were copied, your password would not be in it.

• Verified email at sign-up. An account is not active until you enter the code we send to your address, so no one can register with an email they do not control.
• Rate limits on every sensitive door. Sign-in, registration, verification codes and password resets are all throttled, which turns a guessing attack into a very slow one.
• Single-use, expiring reset links. A password reset link works once and only for a short window.
• Sessions that expire. Sign-in tokens are time-limited. “Remember me” extends the window; it does not make it permanent.
• An email when a new device signs in. A sign-in from a device or browser your account has not used before gets an email with the device, the time, the approximate location (worked out on our own server, not by a third party) and the IP address, plus a one-tap route to securing the account.
• Changing your password ends every other session. Sessions that were signed in before the change are refused from that moment, on every device. If someone is in your account, this is how you get them out.
• Every request checks ownership. Your subscriptions, transactions, alerts and conversations are looked up by your account, never by an ID someone could guess.

This is where we differ most from other finance apps, so we will be precise. Many free money apps pay for themselves by selling insight from your transactions, showing you ads, or steering you towards financial products they are paid to recommend. Renew Reminder does none of these. Your plan is our only revenue.

• We do not sell your personal or financial data. To anyone. Ever.
• We do not share it with advertisers, data brokers, marketing partners or “affiliates”. There are no ads in the app.
• We do not use it to recommend financial products, and we take no payment from any merchant for listing them.
• We do not use your data to train AI models, and we do not let anyone else.

What we do use is a small set of service providers to run the product — Plaid for bank connections, Stripe, Apple and Google for billing, and providers for email, SMS, push and AI replies. Each processes data only on our instructions, only for the job we hired it for, and each is named in our Privacy Policy. If that list ever grows, the policy changes first.

Trust is easier when leaving is easy. Everything below is a button in the app, not a request to support.

• Disconnect a bank from the Accounts screen. Our access at Plaid is revoked immediately.
• Export your data from Settings — every subscription, transaction and setting, as a file you keep.
• Delete conversations with Remi individually, at any time.
• Hide amounts across the app when you are somewhere you would rather not show your spending.
• Delete your account from Settings in the app or on the web, or via our account deletion page. It removes your data from our live systems and revokes your bank connection.

Security is mostly unglamorous habits. These are ours.

• Least privilege. We ask third parties for the narrowest access that does the job — one Plaid product, one calendar of your choosing, and nothing we would have to explain.
• Ownership enforced on the server. The apps never decide what you may see; the server does, on every request, and administrative access is verified the same way.
• Small blast radius. Bank connections are optional, so a Member who never links a bank has no bank data with us at all. A default that limits what we hold is worth more than any policy.

Plaid is the connection layer used by Venmo, Robinhood, Chime and thousands of other financial apps. It links to more than 12,000 banks and credit unions, and its model is the reason we can promise never to see your login: Plaid exchanges your credentials with your bank and hands the app a scoped token instead.

Plaid's own handling of your data is described in its End User Privacy Policy, and you can see and manage every app you have connected through it at my.plaid.com.

Security pages tend to be written by marketing. We would rather tell you where the edges are.

• We are a small team. We do not yet hold a SOC 2 report or a third-party certification. What we have instead is a product designed to hold as little as possible: no bank credentials, no card numbers, no ad profiles.
• No bug bounty yet — but we take reports seriously, answer them personally, and will not pursue anyone who reports in good faith. See below.
• Two-factor sign-in is on our list, not in the app today.
• No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever affects your personal data, we will tell you directly and promptly, and notify regulators where the law requires it.

Found something? Email support@renewreminder.com with “Security” in the subject line and as much detail as you can — steps to reproduce, the account or endpoint involved, and what you think the impact is. A person reads every report, and you will hear back within two working days.

Responsible disclosure

Please give us a reasonable time to fix an issue before publishing it, do not access or modify data that is not yours, and stop as soon as you have confirmed a problem. In return we will not pursue legal action against research conducted in good faith under these guidelines, and we will credit you when the fix ships if you would like us to.