Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-09-04

This policy explains what the Hello Budget Telegram bot (@hello_budget_bot) and its Mini App do with data.

The short version: there is no account and no password, because Telegram already knows who you are. What you write down is stored on one server so that it can be shown back to you, and it is used for nothing else. There is no analytics, no advertising, no profiling and no third party with a copy.

Who is responsible

Gabriele Proietti Mattia (https://gpm.name), reachable at apps@gpm.name, is the data controller. The server is in Germany.

What is stored

Everything below is stored because the bot cannot do its job without it, and nothing is stored that it can do its job without.

• Who you are on TelegramYour Telegram numeric id, first and last name, username and language code. The id is what ties your expenses to you; the name is what the bot greets you by; the username is how you can be found in the admin panel; the language sets which of the two translations you read.
• What you write downExpenses with their amount, category, description and date. Budgets, their size and their categories. Subscriptions, their amount and recurrence. Categories.
• Where you are in the conversationThe screen you are on and the message the bot last sent you, so a button pressed tomorrow still knows what it refers to.
• Whether you are a subscriberWhether Pro is active and until when, whether it renews, and the payment identifier Telegram gives the bot so that a refund is possible.

What is never stored

• No payment details. Pro is paid in Telegram Stars. Telegram tells the bot that a payment happened and gives it an identifier for it; a card number, a name on a card or a billing address never reach the bot, because Telegram never sends them.
• No location. The bot never asks for it and has nowhere to put it.
• No contacts, no files, no photos.
• No analytics and no advertising identifiers. There is no third-party SDK anywhere in this bot: nothing measures how you use it and nothing reports on it.
• No message history. The bot reads a message to act on it and keeps what that message was about — an expense, a budget — not the message.

Telegram’s part

You are talking to this bot through Telegram, and Telegram carries what you send. What Telegram does with that is covered by Telegram’s own privacy policy, not by this one.

Two consequences worth stating plainly:

• Telegram knows you use this bot, and when.
• A Telegram chat with a bot is not end-to-end encrypted. Telegram can read it, the same way it can read any cloud chat.

The Mini App

The Mini App is a page served from https://hello-budget-tg.gpm.name. It stores one thing in your browser: a note that you have seen the welcome screen. That note never leaves the device and is not readable by anyone else.

Every request it makes carries the session Telegram signs for it, which is what proves the request is yours. Without it the page shows a link back to the bot and nothing else: that is why it cannot be used from a browser.

The page loads its fonts from Google Fonts, which means Google sees the request for those files. Nothing about you is sent with it beyond what any browser sends when it fetches a file.

Retention

What you write down is kept until you delete it.

Settings → Delete all data, inside the bot, deletes your expenses, budgets, subscriptions and categories permanently and immediately. It is not a request that gets processed: the rows are gone when the confirmation comes back. Your profile and the conversation itself survive, so the bot still works afterwards; deleting those too is a request to the address above.

Backups of the server exist for disaster recovery and are retained for a limited period. Data deleted from the live database is not restored from them.

Legal basis (GDPR)

• Performance of a contract for everything you write down: an expense tracker that does not keep your expenses is not the thing you asked for.
• Legitimate interest for the operational logs the server keeps to stay working and to investigate abuse.
• Legal obligation for the records a payment leaves behind.

Your rights

You may ask for a copy of your data, its correction, or its deletion, and you may object to its processing. Two of those need nobody’s help: Settings → Export hands you your expenses as a CSV file, and Settings → Delete all data is the deletion. For anything else, write to apps@gpm.name.

You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority.

Children

Hello Budget is not directed at children and asks for nothing that would identify one.

Changes

This page carries the date it was last substantively changed. A change that affects what is collected will be said in the changelog as well, rather than only here.