Manilo keeps your expenses on your iPhone, and they reach Manilo’s servers only when you turn on Manilo Cloud, the optional subscription.
What leaves your phone with Manilo Cloud
With Cloud on, two kinds of data leave your phone:
- Your ledger. An encrypted copy syncs in the background, which backs it up and keeps your other devices and the web dashboard current.
- Entries for AI parsing. The text of an entry, or the photo of a receipt you scan, goes to Manilo’s backend, where an AI model turns it into a transaction and files it.
Manilo never uses your data to train AI models, and the privacy policy names the AI providers that do this parsing along with their training terms.
Sharing a group lets its other members see the group’s entries without making them owners. Leave a shared group and your whole history stays with you.
Does Manilo record my voice?
Manilo keeps no recordings of your voice. When you dictate an expense in the iPhone app, which comes with Cloud, Apple’s on-device speech recognizer turns it into text, and that text is all Manilo receives. Voice entries from Apple Watch and the Telegram bot are covered in the privacy policy.
What ChatGPT or Claude can see
Connecting an assistant is part of Cloud, and it does not push your ledger to OpenAI or Anthropic. The assistant reads only the accounts, categories, budgets and transactions a question needs, so asking about groceries in July pulls your July grocery spending. When you tell it to, it also adds or edits expenses.
You approve the connection by signing in to Manilo, and the assistant never sees your password. Removing Manilo in the assistant’s settings cuts its access at once; Connect ChatGPT and Connect Claude and other MCP clients show where.
Manilo never connects to your bank, so there is no bank login to give. Past spending comes in as a CSV file in the app or as a statement you upload to ChatGPT or Claude yourself, which Import a statement by chat walks through.
Does Manilo sell my data or show ads?
Manilo never sells your data and shows no ads. The app carries no advertising code or data broker integrations, and the Cloud subscription is its one source of revenue, as Plans and pricing explains.
Data retention and deleting your account
Deleting your account in Settings > Account > Delete Account erases your data on Manilo’s servers at once, and backups expire within 30 days. Logging out wipes the copy on your iPhone. The privacy policy gives the retention period for every other kind of data.