What never leaves your device.
No marketing fog here — just the wiring. Where your numbers live, why the app is free, and the doors we chose never to build. The bank login we never ask for. The raw records that stay on your phone. Anything we'd need to sell — there isn't any.
Transparency is the whole pitch. Read it, then check it against the in-app "what leaves your device" panel.
Follow your data. Watch where it stops.
Three lanes. Two are how your business actually flows through Businessily. The third is the one every "free" finance app uses — and the one we never built.
On Apple, sensitive data simply has nowhere to go — it lives on the device. On web and Android it lands in a row only your account can unlock. And the bank → Plaid → us lane? Most apps connect here. We never built that door.
What stays with you — and what we never collect.
The fastest way to trust a privacy claim is to read the list of what's missing. Here's ours.
Stays on your device
- Your invoices, expenses and income records
- Mileage trips and the routes you drove
- Your tax figures and Schedule C numbers
- Client names, contacts and your business profile
What we never collect
- Your bank username or password
- Your browsing history or activity across the web
- Your contacts or address book
- Ad-grade location trails
- A full SSN or contractor Tax ID in our cloud
- Anything to package up and sell to data brokers
Free isn't the trial. Free is the plan.
The honest answer to the question everyone asks about a free finance app.
We don't make money from you. We just don't cost much to run.
- No ads. There are no ad slots anywhere in the app, and no ad SDK to fill them.
- No data to sell. On Apple your books never leave your device; on web they're locked to your account. There's simply nothing to package up.
- No investors. No venture capital to repay, so no pressure to flip the app into a subscription later.
- Cheap by design. Because data lives on your device or in a small isolated row — not on surveillance infrastructure — the app costs very little to keep running.
So what keeps the lights on? People who choose to help — see the card. That's the whole model, and it's optional.
Like Signal: no advertisers, no shareholders — supported by optional, pay-what-you-want donations from people who find it useful. Give nothing and the whole app is still yours.
The architecture, per device.
Same business, different wiring depending on what your device can do. Here's the honest version of each.
iPhone, iPad & Mac
Your records are stored on the device with SwiftData, Apple's on-device database. The app works fully offline. If you want your data on your other Apple devices, you can turn on optional CloudKit sync — that travels through your own iCloud account, encrypted, not through our servers.
Tap in invoices, expenses, mileage.
Stored locally, behind your device lock, offline-first.
Sync across your Apple devices via your iCloud — not ours.
If sensitive data never has to leave the device, it can't be breached on a server we run, sold, or subpoenaed from us. Privacy becomes the default, not a setting you have to find.
Android
On Android your data lives in a Room database that's encrypted at rest with SQLCipher. So even on the device itself, the local store is protected. Sync to your account is private and isolated, the same way the web app works.
Run your business on your phone.
Local database, encrypted at rest on the device.
Isolated, encrypted, locked to your account.
Phones get lost. Encrypting the local store with SQLCipher means a misplaced device doesn't hand someone your books.
Web
The web app is built with React and talks to a Supabase Postgres database. Every row you own is fenced off by Row-Level Security (RLS): the database itself refuses to return another account's data, even if a query tried. Your client app holds no master key.
Runs in your browser, signed in as you.
Your data sits in its own RLS-protected rows.
Only your account can read your rows. Full stop.
RLS pushes the access rule down into the database, so a bug in app code can't accidentally leak another user's data. The wall is in the right place.
The backend
Everything server-side runs on Postgres with Row-Level Security. The powerful service-role key that could bypass RLS never ships inside the app — it stays server-side only. Sensitive identifiers like a full SSN or Tax ID are never written to the cloud at all.
- RLS on by default — access is decided by the database, per account.
- No service-role key in any client — phones, browsers and the Mac app never carry the master key.
- No Plaid, no bank connection — there's no integration that could ever hold your bank login.
- SSN / Tax ID stay off the cloud — an architectural rule, not just a promise.
Signing in & syncing
You start with no account at all. Open Businessily and a new business is ready instantly — your data is usable right away, with zero sign-up friction. You only add a sign-in when you want your books on more than one device.
No account, no card. Your business works the moment you open it.
Email code or password, Google, or Apple — pick any one, or several.
Any method you added signs you in on your other devices.
You can connect any combination of sign-in methods to one business:
Sign in with a one-time magic-link code, or set a password — your choice.
One-tap sign-in with your Google account, using standard OAuth.
Sign in with Apple, again over standard OAuth — we never see a password.
Any single method you've added can sign you in, so you're never locked out if you forget a password or change phones. They're independent: changing your email or password never touches your Google or Apple sign-in, and you can disconnect any method at any time — as long as one remains.
On Apple devices, you may not need an account at all. With iCloud sync turned on, your data stays on-device and travels between your iPhone, iPad and Mac through your own private iCloud — no Businessily sign-in required. On the web and Android, your data lives in your private, row-level-secured cloud row, so there you sign in with Email, Google or Apple to claim it.
Every feature — and where its data goes.
One app for the parts of running a business that usually take five. Here's each one in two lines, with its data path.
Invoicing & payments
Send clean PDF invoices and let clients pay by card, Apple Pay, PayPal or Venmo — straight into your own account. We never take a cut.
Expenses & bookkeeping
Log expenses and income, categorize them, and snap receipts. Your books build themselves as you go — no spreadsheet, no shoebox.
Automatic mileage
Drives get tracked and turned into deductions at this year's IRS rate. Route data is processed on your device, not shipped to a tracker.
US tax prep
Schedule C, 1099-NEC, quarterly estimates and an accountant-ready pack — built all year from your own numbers, never from your bank login.
POS & sale logging
A real point-of-sale register for in-person sales. Each sale flows into the same books, so your day's takings are already reconciled.
Scheduling & booking links
A calendar plus a public booking link clients can use to grab a slot — no double-booking, no back-and-forth emails.
Contractors & W-9
Collect W-9s and prep 1099-NEC forms for the people you hire. Full Tax IDs are handled so they never land in our cloud.
Reports
Plain-language profit, expense and tax reports that read like sentences, not jargon — built from the numbers you already entered.
Trade-offs we made — on purpose.
Every design choice costs something. We'd rather tell you where than pretend there's no catch. These are deliberate, and we'd make them again.
Your books live on your device
No bank auto-import
Built for one person, not enterprises
Free, funded by donations
The locks on the doors.
A short, checkable list of how your data is protected — each tied to something real in the app.
Android's local store is encrypted with SQLCipher; web data sits in your isolated, protected rows.
Lock the app behind Face ID, Touch ID or your device passcode so a borrowed phone can't open your books.
On the web, the database itself only ever returns your rows — not because the app asks nicely, but because RLS enforces it.
There's no bank-connection integration at all, so we can't see, store or leak your bank credentials.
Account creation is gated by a captcha to keep bots out of the system.
Delete your account from inside the app, and export everything in a tap before you go. No email tickets, no waiting.
Things we have never done — and never will.
Absolute, falsifiable, and easy to hold us to. No weasel words.
Sold your data
We have never sold, rented or brokered a single user's data — and the architecture stores nothing worth selling.
Embedded an ad or tracking SDK
No advertising kit, no third-party analytics tracker following you around inside the app. There's nothing watching.
Asked for your bank password
We never built a bank connection, so we have never asked for — and can never receive — your bank login.
Free. Every feature. Every device.
No tier, no upgrade wall, no card to start. Optional donations keep it going — never required.
- Every feature unlocked — no paid tier
- iPhone, iPad, Mac, Android & web, in sync
- No caps, no card, no ads, no data selling
Donations keep it alive
Like Signal, Businessily is supported by people who choose to chip in — pay what you want, whenever you want. It's how an independent, no-investor, no-ads app stays free without selling you out. Give nothing and you lose nothing.
Is Businessily really free?
Yes — every feature, on every device, with no paid tier and no upgrade wall. It's not a trial that ends. It's kept alive by optional, pay-what-you-want donations from people who choose to chip in. That part is always optional.
Do you ever ask for my bank login?
No. We never built a bank connection. We don't use Plaid or any screen-scraping service, so we never see, store, or ask for your bank username or password.
Where exactly does my data live?
On iPhone, iPad and Mac it's stored on the device by default, with optional encrypted sync through your own iCloud account. On Android it's in a SQLCipher-encrypted local database, and on the web it sits in a private Postgres row locked to your account by Row-Level Security — so only you can read it.
Does my SSN or Tax ID go to your cloud?
No. Sensitive identifiers like a full SSN or a contractor's Tax ID are never written to our cloud. That's an architectural choice, not just a line in a policy.
Can I leave and take everything with me?
Yes. You can export all your data in a tap and delete your account from inside the app. There's no lock-in, which means we have no leverage to hold your data hostage.
Now you've seen under the hood.
Free on every device. Private by architecture, not by promise. No account to start. No card. Nothing to cancel.