Privacy Policy

Last updated September 24, 2026

1. Our Privacy Model, in One Paragraph

CostSorter has no account, no login, and no server of ours behind it. The application runs entirely in your browser: it parses the statement file you import, categorizes your transactions on-device, and saves your data to that browser's local storage. We designed it this way as an engineering choice — to avoid running, maintaining, and bringing under financial regulation a backend we didn't need — not as a promise about what CostSorter will or won't ever do with data. This policy describes what actually happens to information as you use CostSorter today, including the narrower set of technical and advertising information described below, and your rights over it.

This policy applies to CostSorter, consisting of a marketing site at costsorter.com and the application itself, embedded there and also reachable at its own address, operated by See Right Enterprises, LLC. ("we," "us"). The Service is offered to residents of the United States only. This policy does not apply to your bank, card issuer, advertiser, or any third-party site you reach through a link from ours, each of which has its own privacy practices.

2. What We Do Not Collect

We do not collect, receive, store, or process any of the following:

• your transaction records, including dates, amounts, merchant names, descriptions, and memo lines;
• the categories assigned to your transactions, or any budget, total, or report derived from them;
• your account numbers, routing numbers, card numbers, or account balances;
• your bank, brokerage, or card issuer credentials — the Service never asks for them and never connects to a financial institution;
• any file you import, in whole or in part.

This data stays in your browser. We have no server-side copy and no mechanism to retrieve it. The one exception is your own choice: if you paste transaction details into an email to our support address, that content reaches us because you sent it, not because the Service transmitted it. We recommend describing your issue without pasting sensitive details where you can.

Advertising is structurally separated from your data, not merely policy-separated. Advertising runs only on our marketing site; the application that holds your transaction data carries no advertising code at all and is embedded there behind a browser-enforced security boundary that keeps the two from reading each other's content. As a result, no advertiser, advertising partner, analytics provider, or other third party ever receives your transaction records, account numbers, or credentials — not through the ad code, because it never runs where your data lives.

3. What We Do Collect

The distinction that matters: advertising partners may learn about your device and your browsing, as any ad-supported website allows. They learn nothing about your finances. Your transaction records are never read by the ad stack, never sent to an ad server, and never used to target an advertisement to you.

4. How Local Storage Works, and What It Means for You

The Service stores your data in your browser's local storage ("localStorage") on your device. Local storage has a practical capacity limit of roughly 5 MB per browser profile, and a saved sheet can use several times its raw transaction size once everything associated with it is included. If you reach that limit, the Service will warn you and will not silently fail — you should export and start a fresh import when it does.

We also save one thing you create yourself: a record that you agreed to the Terms of Service. When you tick the consent box before your first upload, we save the date of the Terms you agreed to and when you agreed, so we don't ask again in this browser until the Terms actually change. It contains nothing else — no identifier, no copy of the document, nothing further about you — and like everything else described in this section, it lives only in your browser and disappears if you clear your storage; if that happens, you'll simply be asked to agree again next time.

Three further consequences follow from local storage, and you should understand all of them:

Anyone with access to your device profile may be able to read your data. Browser storage is bound to the browser profile, not to a password we control. If you use CostSorter on a shared, public, or work-managed computer, another user of that profile, or an administrator of that machine, may be able to view your imported transactions. We recommend using the Service only on a device and browser profile you control, and enabling full-disk encryption and a device passcode.

Your data can disappear without warning, and we cannot restore it. Clearing your browser history or site data, running private or incognito mode, uninstalling the app, a browser storage-eviction event, switching browsers or devices, or a hardware failure will remove your data permanently. A saved sheet that fails to load correctly — for instance because of storage corruption — may simply not appear, with no way for you to tell it apart from a sheet you deleted yourself. We hold no backup. Export your data regularly if it matters to you.

You may optionally encrypt your saved data with a password. This substantially strengthens protection against casual access to your device, but it has a known ceiling: it runs entirely in your browser, which limits how much computational cost we can impose without freezing the interface every time you edit a row. It is not a substitute for the security practices above, and we do not warrant its resistance to a determined, well-resourced attacker. If you forget your password, we cannot recover your data — we hold no copy of your password or your data.

5. Data Retention

Your transaction data: retained on your device for as long as you keep it there, and deleted when you delete it or clear your browser storage. We are not a party to this retention because we hold no copy.

Information we hold: server and diagnostic logs are generated and retained by our hosting provider under its own retention schedule, which we do not control and which is described in its privacy policy — see our Service Providers page. We do not maintain a separate copy of them. Support correspondence is retained for twelve (12) months after your issue is resolved. Advertising partners retain data under their own policies and schedules, which we do not control; Section 11 identifies them.

6. Security

We serve the Service over HTTPS and maintain administrative and technical safeguards appropriate to the limited information we hold. Because your financial data never reaches us, the largest category of breach risk in this product class does not exist here.

Security on your device, however, is yours: keep your operating system and browser current, use a device passcode and disk encryption, and do not import data on a machine you do not trust. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

7. How We Use Information

We use the limited information described in Section 3 to operate, secure, and maintain the Service; to diagnose and fix defects; to respond to your questions; to serve and measure advertising; to detect and prevent fraud, invalid ad traffic, and abuse; and to comply with law and enforce our Terms.

We do not use your information for automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects, and we do not profile you.

8. Do Not Track and Other Browser Signals

Some browsers transmit a "Do Not Track" signal. No common industry standard exists for interpreting it, and we do not respond to Do Not Track signals.

Global Privacy Control has nothing to act on here. GPC is an opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information; under California's CPRA, "sharing" specifically means cross-context behavioral advertising. We sell nothing, share nothing, and run no cross-context behavioral advertising — our advertising is contextual, matched to the page you're viewing, not to you or your activity across other sites. There is accordingly no opt-out for a GPC signal to trigger. If we ever enable personalized advertising or anything that would constitute a sale or sharing, GPC recognition ships in that same change, not afterward.

9. Disclosure of Information

We disclose the limited information we hold only:

• to service providers who process it on our behalf under written contract and only on our instructions — hosting, content delivery, and email;
• to advertising partners, who receive the advertising data described in Section 3 to serve and measure contextual ads — see Section 10 and Section 11;
• to legal and safety recipients, when we reasonably believe disclosure is required by law, subpoena, or court order, or is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of any person, and where permitted we will notify you first;
• in a corporate transaction, to an acquirer in a merger, financing, reorganization, or sale of assets, subject to this policy and with notice to you; and
• with your direction or consent.

A subpoena for your transaction records will produce nothing from us, because we do not hold them.

10. Sale and Sharing of Personal Information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not sell or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. Our advertising is contextual: ads are matched to the content of the page you're on — not to your identity, your history on other sites, or a profile built about you. That distinction has legal weight: the opt-out and non-discrimination rules described below exist specifically for cross-context, behavior-based advertising, and contextual advertising falls outside them.

We never sell or share your transaction data, under any circumstance. What our advertising partners receive is described in Section 3: technical and advertising identifiers used to serve and measure ads on the page you're viewing. Your financial records stay on your device and reach no one.

Because our advertising doesn't rely on cross-context tracking, there is no sale or sharing opt-out mechanism to offer — there is nothing to opt out of. If that ever changes, we will add one here and give you notice, as described in Section 17.

We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16.

11. Cookies and Similar Technologies

We and our partners use cookies and similar technologies in two categories:

We identify our current advertising and hosting partners, with links to their own privacy policies, on our Service Providers page. We keep that list current, and we will update it when we change providers.

Our advertising partners, including Google, may use cookies or other local storage to serve ads based on your visits to this and other websites. Google may offer controls for managing how information is used for ad personalization; because our advertising is contextual rather than personalized, we do not rely on personalization or on your prior visits elsewhere to select an ad, but the underlying cookie and opt-out infrastructure exists at the platform level regardless. You can learn more or manage settings at Google's Ads Settings or www.aboutads.info.

You can refuse advertising cookies through your browser settings or through industry opt-out tools such as the NAI and DAA consumer choice pages. We don't currently operate an in-app cookie-consent banner, because none of our cookies require opt-in consent under applicable U.S. law as the Service is presently configured.

Blocking advertising cookies does not affect the core function of the Service, because categorization runs locally in your browser and depends on no third party.

12. Your Rights and Choices

Depending on where you live, you may have the rights below. Note the practical limit throughout: because your transaction data never reaches us, a request directed to us can only reach the limited information in Section 3. To delete your transaction data, delete it in the app or clear your browser storage — that action is immediate, complete, and requires no request to us.

• Know and access — what we collect about you, and a copy of it
• Correct — inaccurate personal information we hold
• Delete — personal information we hold, subject to legal exceptions
• Portability — a copy in a portable, machine-readable format
• Limit use of sensitive personal information — we collect none
• Non-discrimination — we will not deny service, charge a different price, or provide a lesser quality of service because you exercised a right. Opting out of personalized advertising does not restrict your access to any feature.
• Withdraw consent — where processing rests on consent
• Appeal — where state law provides it, you may appeal a denial by replying to our decision

To exercise a right, contact costsorter@gmail.com. We will verify your request by matching the information you provide against what we hold, and respond within the time the applicable law requires — generally 45 days under U.S. state law, extendable once. An authorized agent may submit a request on your behalf with written authorization.

13. California Residents

California residents have the rights listed in Section 12 under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA.

Categories we have collected in the preceding twelve months: identifiers (IP address, email address, cookie and device identifiers); internet or network activity (log and advertising interaction data); and approximate geolocation derived from IP address, used only to serve ads matched to a general region and to cap how often you see the same one. We collect these for the business purposes in Section 7, from the sources in Section 3, and disclose them to the recipients in Section 9.

Categories we sell or share: none. Our advertising is contextual rather than behavioral — see Section 10 — so no disclosure to our advertising partners meets the CCPA's definition of a sale or a share. Our analytics provider processes site-usage data on our instructions and under terms that forbid using it for its own purposes or combining it with its own cross-site advertising profiles, which makes it a service provider rather than a recipient of a sale or a share. We do not sell personal information for monetary consideration, and we do not sell or share your transaction data under any circumstance. We do not sell or share the personal information of consumers we know to be under 16.

Sensitive personal information: we do not collect it. We do not collect precise geolocation, government identifiers, account credentials, contents of your communications, or financial account information, and we therefore do not use or disclose sensitive personal information in any way that would trigger the right to limit.

Under California's "Shine the Light" law (Civil Code § 1798.83), you may request information about disclosures to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. We make none.

14. Other U.S. State Privacy Rights

Residents of states with comprehensive privacy laws — including Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana, and others — have substantially the rights in Section 12, including the right to appeal a denial. Most of those laws define "targeted advertising" as advertising selected based on your activity over time and across unaffiliated sites or apps, and specifically exclude advertising based only on the content of the page you're currently viewing. Our advertising is contextual in that sense, so it does not meet the definition of targeted advertising or a sale under these laws, and no opt-out mechanism is required for it. We do not profile you in a manner producing legal or similarly significant effects. Nevada residents may submit a request regarding the sale of covered information; we make none.

15. Users Outside the United States

The Service is intended for residents of the United States. We do not target, market, or direct it to any other country. Our advertising is contextual, not personalized, for every visitor regardless of location — no profile is built about you and no ad is selected based on your identity or history, anywhere.

We operate from the United States. If you access the Service from outside the United States on your own initiative, the limited information described in Section 3 will be processed in the United States, whose data protection laws may differ from those of your country. If you are outside the United States and believe we hold personal information about you, contact costsorter@gmail.com and we will handle your request as described in Section 12.

16. Children's Privacy

The Service is intended for adults, is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact costsorter@gmail.com; we will delete it and instruct our advertising partners to do the same.

The FTC's amended COPPA Rule has been in full effect since April 22, 2026. Among other things, it requires separate verifiable parental consent before a child's personal information is disclosed to a third party for targeted advertising. Because our advertising is contextual and not personalized to any user, this requirement is not implicated by our advertising — but we still configure our integrations to treat traffic from the Service as not child-directed. Where state law extends protections to minors under 16 or 18, we honor those protections.

17. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy. We will post the revised version with a new "Last updated" date, and for material changes — in particular any change to the local-processing commitment in Section 1 — we will provide prominent advance notice in the Service and, where we have your email address, by email. Material changes will not apply retroactively to information collected before the change without your consent where consent is required.

18. Contact Us

See Right Enterprises, LLC. c/o Legalinc Registered Agents, Inc., 500 N. Brand Blvd. Suite 890, Glendale, CA 91203 costsorter@gmail.com

We respond to privacy requests within the time required by applicable law.

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