Privacy policy

The controller for this website and the Verena app is Served.ch GmbH, Chemin du Pélard 13 1197 Prangins Switzerland. You can reach us at hello@verena.finance for anything about your data.

This policy follows the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) and, where it applies to you, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It describes the processing of personal data when you visit the website and when you use the app.

• You enter your household's finances; we store them to show you your plan. Nothing else is done with them.
• The assistant is optional and off until you turn it on; only then are your questions and the names and figures an answer needs sent to an AI provider in the USA.
• Payments go through Paddle, which sells the subscription; your card or bank details never reach us.
• We use no advertising, no analytics and no tracking cookies, and we do not sell data.
• You can download everything we hold about you and delete your account yourself, in the app, at any time.

Where we rely on legitimate interests we have weighed them against your interests; you can object to that processing (see Your rights).

Almost all data comes from you: what you enter or import. Your sign-in details come from Clerk when you create your account or sign in. If you sign in with Google, Google passes your name, email address and profile picture to Clerk. When you first sign in we create a sample household with fictional data for you; it is not data about a real person. If you are invited to a household, we receive your email address from the person who invited you.

A household is closed: only the people who belong to it can reach its data, and a household you do not belong to does not exist as far as the app can tell. Nobody at other households sees yours.

A plan usually mentions other people: family members, an employer, a landlord, a school. Enter information about others only as far as you are entitled to for your own household planning. The service is meant for adults. Parents may enter their children's names and birth dates so that the plan can follow their ages (for example from school age); we use this only for the plan.

When you import a statement (a bank file or CSV), it is read in memory to prepare suggestions and is never stored. Only the rules, balances and budgets you choose to add to your plan are saved. We do not connect to your bank and do not receive any data from it.

The assistant is off until you turn it on in the app. After you agree, each question is sent to an AI provider (OpenAI, USA) so it can write the answer. With each question we send:

• the conversation so far and the page and date you are looking at;
• the names of people, accounts, projects, goals, scenarios and payment days of your household;
• the titles, categories, dates and amounts of the events and balances that an answer needs.

We do not send your sign-in details, your email address, your birth dates as such, or imported statement files. OpenAI processes the data to produce the answer. Under its terms for business customers it does not use the data to train its models, and it keeps it for up to 30 days to detect misuse, then deletes it unless the law requires it to keep it longer. We do not store conversations on our servers, and your browser keeps the conversation only until you close the tab.

Your consent is the legal basis. You can withdraw it at any time in the app under Privacy & data; nothing further is sent afterwards. Withdrawing does not affect what was sent before. The assistant can make mistakes and never changes your plan by itself: changes are saved only after you confirm them.

When you subscribe, the checkout is run by Paddle (Paddle.com Market Ltd, London, United Kingdom; for buyers in the USA Paddle.com Inc.). Paddle sells you the subscription as merchant of record: it collects your name, email address, country, payment details and, where relevant, a tax number, takes the payment, handles VAT, sends the invoice and processes refunds. For this Paddle is itself responsible for your data, as described in its privacy notice at paddle.com/legal/privacy.

We give Paddle only an internal account number and a check value, so that the payment is linked to the right account. From Paddle we receive the state and dates of your subscription and Paddle's customer and subscription numbers, never your card or bank details. Paddle's checkout is loaded from Paddle only when you start a purchase, manage your subscription or open a link from one of Paddle's emails.

We make no automated decisions that have legal effect on you or similarly affect you, and we do not profile you. Projections are calculated from the rules and assumptions in your own plan; the assistant only suggests, and you decide.

Our hosting providers record technical data of every request to the website and to the app's server, such as your IP address, the address requested (which can contain identifiers and dates), the time, your browser type and the response status. We use it to deliver the service, find faults and defend against abuse, and keep it for a limited time.

We use these providers to run the service. They process data on our behalf under data processing agreements and may not use it for their own purposes:

• Scalingo (France): hosting of the application server and database.
• Vercel (USA): delivery of the website and of the app's files.
• Clerk (USA): sign-in and account management. Clerk has Cloudflare (USA) check at sign-up whether a person or a bot is signing up.
• Mailgun (USA, sending from its EU region): service emails and invitations.
• OpenAI (USA): the assistant, only if you turned it on.

If you choose to sign in with Google, Google (USA) learns that you use Verena and passes your name, email address and profile picture to Clerk; Google is responsible for this itself under its own privacy policy.

Paddle (United Kingdom) sells the subscription to you as merchant of record and is itself responsible for the data it collects for the payment (see Payments).

We also disclose data where the law requires it or to defend legal claims. We do not sell your data and do not use it for advertising.

Some providers are located in, or may access data from, countries outside Switzerland and the EU/EEA: Vercel, Clerk, Cloudflare, Mailgun's operating company and OpenAI in the USA, and Paddle in the United Kingdom. Switzerland and the EU recognise that the United Kingdom protects personal data adequately, and the USA for companies certified under the Data Privacy Framework (for transfers from Switzerland, the Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework). Where a provider is not certified, we rely on the standard contractual clauses of the European Commission, which the FDPIC recognises, with the additions Swiss law requires.

For the assistant we additionally ask for your explicit consent, because the data then goes to the USA, where authorities may be able to access it with fewer safeguards than in Switzerland or the EU. You can request a copy of the safeguards at hello@verena.finance.

We use only what is needed to run the service, so no consent banner is required.

• Sign-in cookies set by Clerk keep you signed in to the app.
• Your browser's local storage keeps settings: language, selected household and scenario, the chart range, whether the timeline and the assistant panel are open, and hints you dismissed. It also briefly keeps an invitation link until you answer it (at most 7 days) and a question you typed on the website until you are signed in (at most one hour).
• Your browser's session storage keeps the assistant conversation until you close the tab.
• When you install the app, your browser stores the app's files (not your data) so it can start quickly.
• When you start a purchase, Paddle's checkout opens and may set the cookies it needs for the payment.

The website sets no cookies. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, and no fonts are loaded from third parties. The only scripts from outside are Clerk's sign-in (with Cloudflare's bot check) in the app and, when you buy, Paddle's checkout.

Providing the data in the first table is necessary to create an account and use the service; without it we cannot provide it. Using the assistant, and with it the transfer of data to the AI provider, is entirely voluntary.

• Account and household data: while your account exists. When you delete your account in the app, your sign-in account is removed and every household that nobody else belongs to is deleted with everything in it.
• Trial and subscription details and the assistant's question counts: while your account exists. Deleting the account first cancels a running subscription at Paddle. Paddle keeps payment and invoice records as long as tax and accounting law requires.
• Backups: overwritten on a rolling basis, so deleted data disappears from them after the backup period.
• Server and delivery logs: for a limited time, then deleted.
• Assistant: we do not store conversations; OpenAI keeps the data for up to 30 days (see The assistant).
• Your consent to the assistant: until you withdraw it or delete your account.
• Messages to us: as long as needed to handle your request.

You have the right to:

• access your data and receive a copy;
• have inaccurate data corrected;
• have your data deleted;
• restrict processing;
• object to processing based on our legitimate interests;
• receive the data you provided in a portable format (the download is a JSON file);
• withdraw consent at any time, with effect for the future.

In the app, under Privacy & data, you can download everything we hold about you and delete your account yourself. For anything else write to hello@verena.finance. We answer within one month; we may need to verify that the request comes from you. It is free of charge unless requests are manifestly excessive.

• Connections to the website and the app are encrypted in transit.
• Access to a household requires being signed in and being a member of it; other households' identifiers are not even confirmed to exist.
• We do not copy your email address or name into our own database.
• Statement files are not stored, and conversations with the assistant are not stored on our servers.
• Providers are bound by contract to protect the data and to process it only on our instructions.

You can complain to a data protection authority: in Switzerland the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), or the supervisory authority of your country of residence or workplace in the EU. We would appreciate the chance to resolve your concern first.

We update this policy when the service or the law changes. The date at the top shows when it last changed; for changes that matter we will tell you in the app.