Imagine someone offers to help you manage your household budget - and asks to go through all your bank statements, receipts and credit card bills in return. No reasonable person would agree to that. Yet millions do exactly this when they grant a finance app access to their bank account.

Bank access is a power of attorney

When an app reads your account automatically, you no longer control who sees which transaction and when. Account balance, recipient, time and amount of every purchase - all of it lands on someone else's servers. That sounds convenient, but has a price: you give up control over one of the most private data areas there is.

A data breach at such a provider reveals more than numbers. It exposes your spending patterns, your habits, your life circumstances - patterns you may not even be consciously aware of yourself. And unlike a compromised password, a leaked spending profile cannot simply be reset.

CostCrafter does not need bank access. You enter what you want to see - nothing more, nothing less.

External AI means your data trains someone else's models

Many 'smart' budget apps send your receipts and spending categories to external AI services - often from US providers. What looks like a convenience feature means in practice: your purchases, amounts and categories become part of a training dataset you have no control over.

CostCrafter's OCR reads your receipts without transmitting any data to external services. Everything is processed on our own infrastructure within the European Union.

US cloud means US law

Services that host their data with US providers like AWS, Azure or Google Cloud are subject to the CLOUD Act and Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA 702). This means: under certain circumstances, US authorities can access data of EU users - without a German court order.

CostCrafter hosts exclusively on servers within the European Union. German and European data protection law applies without restriction to all your data.

Free usually means you're the product

Those who don't pay fees often pay with their data - either directly through the sale of user profiles, or indirectly through behavioral targeting, partner offers, or recommendation marketing based on your spending behavior.

CostCrafter is a paid service. That is not a disadvantage - it is the business model. We earn money with the software, not with your spending habits. You know exactly what you are paying for.

Invoice payment — no payment data on our servers

Most SaaS services require a credit card or connect to US payment providers like Stripe or PayPal. That means your payment data — card number, bank details, billing address — is processed and stored on third-party servers, often outside the EU.

CostCrafter takes a different approach: you receive a proper invoice by email and pay by bank transfer (SEPA/GiroCode) or PayPal.me link. We never see your credit card number, never store bank details, and never integrate a payment API that could leak your data.

This is not a workaround — it is a deliberate design decision. Invoice-based payment keeps your financial data where it belongs: with your bank.

What this means in practice

  • No bank connection — you decide what data you enter
  • No data sharing with external AI services
  • Hosting exclusively on servers within the European Union
  • No advertising, no data sharing with third parties
  • GDPR-compliant — your data belongs to you
  • Paid service — no cross-subsidisation through data monetisation
  • Payment by invoice — no payment data stored on our servers