Terms of Use

Version 2026-09-17

These terms cover your use of Cents. They are written to be read, not to be skipped.

What Cents is

Cents is a personal finance app that runs entirely on your iPhone. You record what you earn and spend; Cents organises it and shows you what it means. There is no account and no server.

Cents is a record-keeping tool. It is not financial, investment, tax or legal advice. The figures it shows — including budgets, forecasts, interest calculations and debt schedules — are arithmetic performed on what you entered. Decisions you make with them are yours.

Your data is yours

You own what you record. The developer has no access to it and no copy of it. See the Privacy Policy for the detail.

Keep a backup. Because there is no cloud copy, losing or resetting your iPhone without a backup means losing your records. Cents provides Backup and Export for this purpose and will remind you to use them. The developer cannot recover data that only ever existed on a device you no longer have.

Accuracy

Cents calculates carefully — money is handled in whole minor units, and rounding happens in one place, deliberately. Exchange rates come from a public service and are indicative, not a dealing rate; a rate marked stale in the app is one that has not been refreshed recently.

Even so, Cents is provided as is, without warranty of any kind. The developer is not liable for losses arising from your use of it, from errors in it, or from data you lose by not keeping a backup. Nothing in these terms limits any right you have under applicable consumer law.

Message capture

Cents can record a transaction from a bank's SMS that you pass to it, either through an automation you set up in Apple's Shortcuts app or by pasting the text into Settings. Cents has no access to your Messages app and does not read anything you have not handed over.

A transaction created this way is a suggestion based on the text of a message, produced by fixed rules. It may read an amount, a vendor, a currency or a date wrongly, particularly if your bank changes how it writes its messages, and it may file something under the wrong category. Check captured transactions against your own bank statement. Your statement is the record of what you were charged; Cents is your notes about it.

Turning message capture on does not create any obligation on the developer to keep supporting a particular bank's format.

Vendor categories, and sharing them

The list matching vendors to categories is stored on your device. You can edit or delete any part of it.

If you choose to email your list to the developer from Settings, you are giving permission for those vendor-and-category pairs to be included in the built-in list that ships to all users of Cents. Only pairs using categories Cents ships with are included; pairs using categories you created are excluded automatically. Nothing is sent unless you send it yourself from your own Mail app, and you can read the whole message first.

Donations

Every feature of Cents is free, for everyone, forever. Donations unlock nothing and remove nothing.

If you choose to donate, half of every donation goes to elementary education in Egypt. This is a personal commitment from the developer, published with a public ledger in the app so it can be checked. The other half covers the Apple Developer Programme fee and the time that goes into Cents.

Donations are processed by Apple under Apple's own terms. They are voluntary gifts, not purchases of goods or services, and they are not refundable by the developer — refund requests go to Apple. A donation is not a charitable contribution for tax purposes, and no tax receipt is issued.

Acceptable use

Use Cents for your own record-keeping. Do not attempt to use it to break the law.

Changes

These terms may change. If they change materially, Cents will ask you to read and accept the new version before you continue. The version you accepted is recorded on your device.

Ending

You can stop using Cents at any time by deleting it. Erase all data in Settings removes everything from your device first, if you would rather not rely on deletion alone.

Contact

Questions about these terms can go to ${SUPPORT_CONTACT}.