Terms of Service, Bufin

Last updated 2026-08-18

Welcome. These Terms of Service form a binding agreement between you and Bufin. Bufin is a personal-budgeting application sold as a subscription, where your private data lives in your own cloud (Google Drive). By creating an account or using the Service, you confirm that you have read, understood, and accepted these Terms.

1. What Bufin is

Bufin lets you record financial transactions, define monthly budget goals, manage recurring entries, share household budgets with people you trust, and view summary statistics. It uses Google sign-in for authentication and stores your personal data in a hidden "Application Data" folder in your Google Drive: invisible in your normal Drive view.

Bufin does not connect to your bank, brokerage, or any payment processor. It does not move money, send payments, place trades, or file taxes.

2. What Bufin is not

Bufin is not a bank, broker, payment institution, accounting firm, tax preparer, law firm, or financial advisor. It is a small independent project run primarily by a student.

3. No financial, tax, legal, or investment advice

Nothing displayed by the Service: budgets, charts, savings rates, category breakdowns, happiness ratings, suggested limits, or any text we publish, constitutes financial, investment, tax, accounting, or legal advice. The numbers you see are simply arithmetic on the data you entered. If you need actual advice, please consult a licensed professional.

This applies especially to the Investments tab. Bufin's investment tracking exists purely so you can FOLLOW investments you already own: you type in what you hold, and Bufin displays it back to you. Bufin never connects to your brokerage or investment accounts and cannot buy, sell, or move anything. Market prices, dividend figures, performance numbers, and any other market data shown are provided for general information only; they come from third-party sources, may be delayed, incomplete, or simply wrong, and are NOT a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or asset. Bufin must never be your primary, let alone only, source of investment information: always verify numbers against your broker or an official source, and do your own research before any decision. If you make an investment decision based on what Bufin shows you, that decision, and any loss that follows, is entirely your own responsibility: not ours.

4. You are responsible for your own decisions

Any financial, budgeting, spending, saving, or investment decision you make is your own. To the maximum extent permitted by law, the maintainer of Bufin is not responsible for: (a) financial losses, missed gains, overdrafts, late fees, taxes owed, or penalties resulting from your use of the Service; (b) errors in the data you enter or in calculations derived from that data; (c) decisions you take based on what Bufin shows you; (d) investment losses of any kind, the market data in the Investments tab is informational only and not verified by us, and no outcome of your investments, good or bad, is our responsibility.

Bufin is a notebook with maths, not an oracle. Please double-check important numbers against your bank and, for anything serious: a real professional.

5. Licence, cost, and donations

Bufin is provided free of charge. Every feature is available to every user: there are no plans, no paid tiers, no trial period that expires, no usage limits and no feature held back for payment. We do not ask for a card, we do not bill you, and there is no purchase or subscription of any kind. Subject to these Terms, you get a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Service for your own budgeting (including a household you belong to).

Donations are voluntary and buy nothing. You may donate toward running costs through an external donation platform; a donation is a gift, not a purchase, confers no additional features, status or priority, and is not a payment for any service. Donation refunds are handled by that platform and may not be possible: see the Donations & Refunds page, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference.

Previously purchased licences: Bufin was formerly sold as a one-time purchase, and for a period offered a monthly plan. Those are no longer sold and no longer billed. Because the entire app is now free, a previously purchased licence grants nothing that a free account does not; nothing anyone paid for has been withdrawn, restricted or moved behind a new charge. Purchases made inside the Bufin Android app were sold by Google Play, which remains the seller of record for them.

Free does not mean unsupported or guaranteed: the Service is provided as-is (see sections 9 and 10), and free provision does not create an obligation to keep any particular feature available forever. If Bufin ever had to change how it is funded, we would say so plainly and in advance, and your data would remain yours and exportable regardless, because it is stored in your own cloud or your own browser, not held by us.

6. Account, eligibility, and authentication

You must be at least 14 years old, or have verifiable parental consent, to create an account. You can sign in with Google, or with an email address and password. You are responsible for the security of whichever account you use to access Bufin, keep your password (or your Google account) safe, because if it is compromised, your Bufin data may be too. We recommend turning on two-factor authentication in Settings.

You may delete your account from Settings at any time. Doing so deletes all linked records from our shared database (Cloudflare D1) within thirty (30) days. Your personal data in your Google Drive can be deleted by you directly via Google's revocation page or Drive trash.

7. Your data: where it lives

Where your private financial data lives depends on how you sign in, and this is the most important privacy choice you make:

• Google sign-in (most private): your data (transactions, budgets, recurring items, sinks, preferences) is stored as JSON files in a hidden "Application Data" folder inside YOUR own Google Drive. Bufin does not host a copy on our servers. We literally cannot read it. If you revoke Bufin's access from your Google account, we lose all ability to read or write it. This option also gives you far more storage room, since it's your own cloud.

• No account at all (simplest): you can use Bufin without signing in. The budget is written to your browser's local storage and never leaves the device, so we receive nothing whatsoever. The trade-off is entirely yours to carry: nothing syncs to another device, nothing is backed up, and clearing your browser's data for this site deletes the budget permanently. We cannot restore it, because we never had it. Export a copy from Settings, or sign in to move it to a cloud you own.

Shared community data (public roadmap proposals, votes, notices, household budgets that you opt into) is stored in Cloudflare D1, a database we operate. Only the data necessary for those community features lives there.

If you forget your Google account credentials, we cannot recover your data. Google holds it, not us.

8. Data accuracy and backups

You are responsible for the accuracy of the data you enter. Bufin will faithfully add up the numbers you give it but won't catch typos, miscategorisations, or duplicates. We strongly recommend periodically using the Export feature in Settings to keep a JSON backup of your data. Google's terms apply to data stored in your Drive, and Google can suspend accounts or lose files for reasons outside our control.

9. Service availability: "as-is, as-available"

The Service is provided "AS IS" and "AS AVAILABLE", with all faults and without warranty of any kind, express, implied, statutory, or otherwise. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all implied warranties, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, reliability, availability, non-infringement, quiet enjoyment, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or usage of trade. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, virus-free, error-free, that defects will be corrected, that any data, calculations, projections, recommendations, charts, or content will be accurate or up-to-date, or that data will not be lost, corrupted, or made permanently inaccessible. You use Bufin at your sole risk.

Without limiting the above, we are not responsible for: (i) outages, data loss, account suspensions, or changes in pricing or terms by third-party providers (including Google, Cloudflare, and your internet, banking, or device provider); (ii) errors in projections, debt payoff timelines, savings rates, runway, or any other computed value, all of which are best-effort estimates based on data YOU enter; (iii) any inability of the app to function while you are offline or with revoked Drive permissions; (iv) loss caused by your own actions, including but not limited to deleting accounts, revoking OAuth scopes, losing your encryption passphrase (Ghost Mode is irrecoverable by design), or sharing household / shareable-view URLs with the wrong person.

10. Acceptable use

You agree not to: (a) use the Service for unlawful purposes; (b) attempt to circumvent security, capacity, or rate-limit mechanisms; (c) reverse engineer or scrape the Service; (d) upload malicious code; (e) impersonate others; (f) harass other users or the maintainer; (g) submit roadmap proposals containing URLs, images, or other prohibited content; (h) abuse household sharing to harass others. Bufin's anti-spam filters reject proposals with URLs, images, or markdown attempts.

11. Third-party services

Bufin depends on the following third parties: (a) Google LLC, for Google sign-in and Drive storage; (b) Cloudflare Inc. For hosting, our shared database, and abuse/DDoS protection (Workers, D1, Pages, Turnstile); (c) Microsoft: for OneDrive sign-in and OneDrive storage, if you choose it. There is no payment provider: Bufin is free, so nothing is sold and no payment is processed for us by anyone. Your use of the above is governed by their own terms.

12. Roadmap and community content

Anyone can submit roadmap proposals. Submissions are reviewed by an admin before going public. Proposals containing links, images, base64 data, profanity, or spam are auto-rejected. We may decline, merge, or delete proposals for any reason. You may have up to 3 active proposals at a time. Declined proposals are deleted after 7 days.

13. Households and shared data

When you create or join a household, the transactions and budgets logged in that household are visible to every member of the household. This is intentional. Don't put anything in a shared household budget that you don't want the other members to see. Owners can invite, remove, or change member roles. Members can leave at any time.

14. Shareable view links

When you generate a shareable view link (e.g., a budget card), Bufin creates a read-only snapshot in our shared database. Anyone with the URL can view it until it expires or you revoke it. Don't share URLs publicly if the data is sensitive.

15. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, IN NO EVENT shall the maintainer of Bufin, contributors, or third-party providers be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages: including but not limited to lost profits, lost revenue, lost savings, missed gains, lost opportunities, overdraft fees, bank fees, NSF fees, late fees, interest charges, tax penalties, fines, damage to credit score, business interruption, loss of data, loss of goodwill, emotional distress, or cost of substitute services, arising out of or in connection with these Terms or the Service, even if we were advised of the possibility of such damages, and regardless of the legal theory (contract, tort, negligence, strict liability, statute, or otherwise) on which the claim is based.

Notwithstanding anything else in these Terms, our total cumulative liability arising out of or related to the Service for all claims combined is capped at the greater of: (a) the total amount you personally paid us in donations or tier purchases in the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to the claim; or (b) ten Canadian dollars (CA$10). These limits form an essential basis of the bargain between you and the maintainer; without them, Bufin would not be offered free of charge. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions or limits, in which case the above limits apply to the maximum extent permitted in your jurisdiction and nothing in this section limits liability for fraud, gross negligence, or any liability that cannot be excluded by law.

16. Indemnification

To the fullest extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless the maintainer of Bufin, contributors, and affiliates, from and against any and all claims, demands, actions, liabilities, losses, damages, judgments, settlements, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to: (a) your access to or use of the Service; (b) your breach of these Terms; (c) data, content, or proposals you submit; (d) your violation of any law, regulation, or third-party right (including any other user's right of privacy); (e) any reliance you place on figures, projections, or content displayed by the Service. We reserve the right, at our own expense, to assume the exclusive defence and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you, in which case you agree to cooperate.

17. Termination

You may delete your account anytime from Settings. The maintainer may suspend, throttle, or terminate access, with or without notice: if you breach these Terms, if continued provision would expose us to legal risk or excessive cost, if a third-party provider revokes service, or if the project is discontinued. Upon termination, your right to use the Service ceases immediately; data already stored in your own Google Drive remains yours and untouched. Sections that by their nature survive termination: including the warranty disclaimer, limitation of liability, indemnification, governing law, and dispute provisions, remain in effect.

18. Force majeure

We are not liable for any failure or delay in performance caused by circumstances beyond our reasonable control, including but not limited to: acts of God, natural disasters, war, terrorism, civil unrest, government action, labour disputes, pandemics, internet or telecom outages, failures or changes by upstream providers (Google, Cloudflare, Buy Me a Coffee, certificate authorities, DNS operators, hosting providers), cyber-attacks, denial-of-service events, or any other event that could not reasonably be foreseen or avoided.

19. Beta and experimental features

From time to time we may release features marked "beta", "preview", "experimental", or similar. These are offered AS IS for evaluation, may change or be removed without notice, are not subject to any service-level expectation, and are excluded from any commitment, express or implied. Data computed by experimental features (including any AI-assisted suggestions, forecasts, or insights) may be wrong; do not rely on it for any decision.

20. User-submitted content (roadmap, household, reviews)

By submitting content to public surfaces of Bufin: roadmap proposals, votes, beta reviews, public bug reports, or any other content visible to other users. You grant the maintainer a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licensable, perpetual licence to host, display, reproduce, translate, adapt, and distribute that content in connection with operating, promoting, or improving the Service. You represent that you own or have the rights to the content you submit and that it does not infringe any third-party right. We may remove or moderate any user-submitted content at any time, for any reason, without notice.

21. Privacy, analytics, and no sale of data

Your private financial data lives in your Google Drive; we never receive a copy. We do not sell, rent, share, or trade personal information, run no advertising, and use no AdSense, marketing pixels, session-recording, heatmap or behavioural-profiling tools. We do use Google Analytics 4 for audience measurement, with advertising features disabled, and only for visitors who accept it in the cookie banner. The only product measurement is our own first-party page-view counter: it increments an aggregate daily count per page path and interface language, sets nothing on your device, and stores nothing that identifies you. It is never used for advertising, never monetised, never sold or shared, and never connected to your financial data. Full details, your rights under GDPR / PIPEDA / Quebec Law 25, retention periods, and sub-processors are in the Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference.

22. Governing law, jurisdiction, and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Quebec, Canada, and the federal laws of Canada applicable therein, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Subject to mandatory consumer-protection rights you may have under your local law, you and the maintainer agree to bring any dispute exclusively in the courts of Quebec, and consent to personal jurisdiction there. Nothing in this section limits any non-waivable right granted to you by the consumer-protection law of the jurisdiction in which you reside (in Quebec, the Consumer Protection Act and Law 25 take precedence to the extent they apply).

Before filing any formal claim, you agree to first attempt to resolve the dispute informally by emailing [email protected] with a clear description of the issue; we will respond in good faith within thirty (30) days. Any claim must be brought within one (1) year after the cause of action arises, or it is permanently barred, to the extent permitted by law.

23. General terms

Entire agreement: these Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and the maintainer concerning the Service, and supersede all prior agreements. Severability: if any provision is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force, and the unenforceable provision shall be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable while reflecting the parties' original intent. No waiver: failure to enforce any right or provision is not a waiver of that right or provision. Assignment: you may not assign these Terms; we may assign them to a successor in a merger, acquisition, or sale of substantially all assets, with reasonable notice. Notices: we may send notices via in-app banner or to the email associated with your Google account; you should contact us at [email protected]. Headings are for convenience only. The English version of these Terms governs in case of conflict with any translation, except where local law mandates otherwise.

24. Changes to these Terms

Sometimes we need to update these Terms. If it's an important change: one that really affects you, we'll show you a clear message inside the app at least 15 days before it starts (sooner only if the law or a security problem forces us to). If you keep using Bufin after that, it means you accept the updated Terms. If you don't agree, you can stop using Bufin at any time and delete your account if you like. In plain words: no surprises, and you always get a heads-up before anything important changes.

25. Contact

Questions about these Terms: [email protected]. Privacy questions: [email protected].