Privacy Policy
Lento · Last updated: October 11, 2026
Lento is a budgeting app for households. You trust us with your financial life, so this policy says plainly what we collect, why, who else sees it, and how to get it deleted. The short version:
- We use your data only to run your budget. We never sell it, rent it, or use it for advertising.
- A few service providers help run the app (bank connections, hosting, AI categorizing, backups). Each one is listed below, with what it gets.
- You can disconnect a bank or delete your account at any time.
"We", "us" and "our" mean Christopher Schwemley, doing business as Lento, 2674 Duncan Ave., Clovis, CA 93611. "You" means the person using Lento, and your "household" is the shared budget you and anyone you invite use together.
1. What we collect
Information you give us
- Account details: your name, email address and password. We store only a scrambled one-way form of the password (a "hash"), never the password itself. If you turn on two-step sign-in, we also store the secret that pairs with your authenticator app, and your one-time recovery codes in hashed form.
- Household settings: your time zone and whether the budget is for one or two adults.
- Your budget: categories, budget amounts, savings goals, categorizing rules, notes on recurring bills, and accounts or assets you add by hand (for example a home's value).
- Planning details, only if you fill them in on the financial-independence page: birth years, expected Social Security, past earnings, expected returns and spending.
- Receipts: photos or PDFs of receipts you upload.
- Questions you ask the in-app assistant ("Ask AI").
- Messages you send us for support.
Information from your bank, through Plaid
When you connect a bank, we use Plaid to retrieve, for the accounts you choose: account names and types, balances, and transactions (date, amount, merchant and description). We don't receive your bank username or password; you give those to Plaid or your bank directly, never to us. We don't use Plaid to move money or check your credit.
Information collected automatically
- Cookies: two small cookies, both needed for the app to work: one keeps you signed in (up to 30 days), and one remembers whether you're viewing your Family or Business budget during a visit. We don't use advertising or analytics cookies, and we don't track you across other websites.
- Technical logs: our servers record basic request information (such as IP address, time and page requested) to keep the service running and secure, for example to block repeated wrong passwords.
We don't knowingly collect government ID numbers. Social Security benefit estimates are just numbers you may type in; we never ask for your Social Security number.
2. How we use it
We use your information only to:
- Run your budget: show your accounts and balances, sort transactions into categories, track spending against your budget, and project your progress toward financial independence.
- Keep it up to date: sync new transactions from your bank throughout the day.
- Suggest categories and read receipts with AI (see section 3).
- Answer your questions in Ask AI and in support.
- Keep the service secure: prevent unauthorized sign-ins, investigate problems and protect against abuse.
- Send service messages, such as sign-in or account emails. We don't send marketing emails unless you ask for them.
- Meet legal obligations.
We don't sell your personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We don't use your financial data to market other financial products to you.
3. Who else sees your data
We share data only with the service providers below, only what each needs, and only so they can provide their service to us. They aren't allowed to use it for their own purposes.
| Provider | What it gets | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Plaid | Your bank connection and the account data described above | Connecting your bank. Plaid's own handling is described in the Plaid End User Privacy Policy. |
| Anthropic (Claude AI) | Transaction descriptions and amounts; receipt images; your Ask AI questions together with the budget and transaction details needed to answer them | Suggesting categories, reading receipt totals, answering your questions. |
| DigitalOcean | Everything stored in the app (it hosts our servers and database) | Hosting |
| Resend | Your name and email address, the email address of anyone you invite, and the content of the account emails we send (email verification, password resets, invitations) | Sending account emails |
| Encrypted backup copies, stored in Google Drive (encrypted before they leave our servers, so Google can't read them); and the emails you send us at support@ or [email protected], which arrive in our Gmail inbox | Off-site backups; reading and answering your emails | |
| Cloudflare | Website visits and domain lookups; emails you send to our @meetlento.com addresses, which it passes on to our inbox | Running our website and domain; forwarding email |
We may also disclose information if the law requires it (for example a valid court order), to protect someone's safety, or as part of a sale or merger of our business. In a sale, the new owner must keep this policy's promises or ask for your consent.
Other members of your household can see the household's shared budget, accounts and transactions. Invite only people you want to share it with.
4. How long we keep it
- While your account is open, we keep your data so you can see your history.
- Disconnecting a bank stops new data from that bank and deletes its accounts and transactions from your budget. It also tells Plaid to end the connection.
- Deleting your account (Settings → Delete account) right away deletes your household and everything in it, including receipts, for every member of the household, and ends your bank connections at Plaid.
- Backups: our backups are encrypted and used only to recover from a failure. Nightly backups are replaced after about a month, so deleted data ages out of them. A few older backups (taken before maintenance work) are kept longer for now; we're putting a 90-day limit on those, after which deleted data will be gone from every backup within 90 days.
- Server logs are kept only briefly: they're size-limited and overwritten as they fill. They never contain passwords or bank connection keys.
5. Your choices and rights
- See and fix your data: almost everything is visible and editable in the app.
- Get a copy: email us and we'll send your data in a common format.
- Delete it: disconnect a bank in Accounts, delete your account, or email us.
- Plaid: you can also see and revoke the connections Plaid holds at my.plaid.com.
California residents. Depending on the size of our business, California law (the CCPA) may give you rights to know what we collect, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of its sale or sharing. We honor these requests for everyone, wherever you live. We don't sell or share personal information as the CCPA defines those terms, and we don't treat you differently for using your rights. To make a request, email [email protected]. We'll confirm it's you (usually by replying from your account's email) and answer within 45 days. Our site doesn't respond to "Do Not Track" signals because we don't track you across sites in the first place.
6. How we protect it
We protect your data with practices including: encryption in transit (HTTPS) everywhere; bank connection keys encrypted with AES-256; encrypted off-site backups; hashed passwords, limits on sign-in attempts and optional two-step sign-in; servers that only the founder can reach, with keys rather than passwords; walls between households that are tested automatically on every change; and a written incident plan. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information, we'll tell you without undue delay, as the law requires.
7. Children
Lento is for adults. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we'll delete it.
8. Where your data is stored
Your data is stored in the United States. Lento is offered to US residents.
9. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy, we'll update the date at the top. If a change is significant, for example a new kind of provider seeing your data, we'll tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect.
10. Contact us
Christopher Schwemley, doing business as Lento · 2674 Duncan Ave., Clovis, CA 93611 · [email protected]