Travel Kitty · last updated 31 October 2026
Travel Kitty is a shared travel-expense tracker. You record what a trip costs, optionally with other people, and the app works out who owes what. This policy describes exactly what the app stores, where it goes, and how to get rid of it.
Travel Kitty is made by an individual developer, not a company. Questions about this policy or about your data go to support@travelkitty.nz.
Only what you type into it, plus what is needed to sign you in — and, if you subscribe, what Google Play tells us about that subscription, which is described under Subscriptions and payment below. If you set up your own bank connection through Akahu, what you import is kept too; see Connecting your own bank through Akahu. If you scan a receipt, the photo of it is sent to be read; see Scanning a receipt.
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| Email address | Identifies your account and is how you sign in and reset a password. If you sign in with Google, it comes from your Google account. |
| Display name | Shown to other people on trips you share, so they can see who paid. |
| Avatar colour | A colour you choose, so people are distinguishable in a member list. |
| Trips | Name, dates, budget, currency, and an optional cover photo. |
| Expenses | Amount, currency, exchange rate, category, description, date, who paid, and who it is split between. |
| Expense photos | Optional. Only if you attach one. |
| Receipts | Optional. Only if you scan one. Kept with the expense, and private to you. |
| Receipt scan count | How many receipts you have scanned, so the allowance can be applied, and a fingerprint of each recent image, so scanning the same receipt twice counts once. The fingerprint can't be turned back into the image. |
| Expense locations | Optional. Only if you pin one on the map. Stored as coordinates and, where available, a place name. |
| Place search count | Premium only. How many places you have picked from place search this month, so the monthly allowance can be applied. Just a number for each month: not what you searched for, and not where. |
| Surplus transactions and settlements | Amounts, notes and dates you enter to adjust or settle a trip's balance. |
| Invitations | If you invite someone by email, that address is stored until the invitation is accepted, declined or withdrawn. |
The app does not collect your contacts, your device's location in the background, your browsing, or advertising identifiers. There is no analytics or advertising SDK in it, and nothing is sold or shared for marketing.
The app asks for location permission only when you choose to pin an expense to a place, and it uses your position at that moment to centre the map. It does not track you, does not read your location in the background, and works normally if you refuse the permission — you can drag the map to the spot instead.
On Premium you can also find a place by typing its name. When you do, the app sends what you typed to Google, together with your position at that moment — or, if it does not have your position, the point the map is showing — so Google can suggest places near you. See Google Places below. Nothing is sent if you only tap the map, and nothing is sent on the free plan.
People on the same trip. That is the point of the app: if you add someone to a trip, they can see that trip's expenses, amounts, descriptions, categories, photos, pinned locations, and your display name and avatar colour. They cannot see your email address, your other trips, or anything else about your account. They cannot see a receipt you scan, either: it is private to you, even though the expense it belongs to is shared.
On your device, and on Google Firebase in the us-east1
region (South Carolina, United States). Travel Kitty is used by travellers
everywhere; a single region has to be chosen when the database is created and
cannot be changed afterwards, and this one is the closest compromise for
people across the Americas and Europe. This means your information is
stored outside New Zealand. Specifically:
Google processes this data as a service provider. Their handling is covered by the Firebase privacy documentation. Data is encrypted in transit.
Google Maps is separate from the above: it draws the maps and is not where anything is stored. See "Other services the app talks to" below.
Travel Kitty has no bank connection of its own. If you bank in New Zealand and want your transactions brought in, you can set one up yourself, on either plan, through Akahu, a New Zealand service that links apps to banks. You create your own personal app with Akahu, and it gives you two tokens, which you enter in Settings → Advanced → Akahu. If you don't do that, nothing in this section applies to you.
Your arrangement with Akahu is your own. You connect your bank on Akahu's site, under Akahu's own terms. Travel Kitty isn't part of that step, and neither the app nor our server ever sees your bank username or password.
Your tokens stay on your phone. They are kept in your phone's secure storage, under your Travel Kitty account, and are sent only to Akahu. They are not on our servers or in your Travel Kitty account, so we can't read them. Someone else signing in on the same phone won't see them, and another phone needs them entered again. Anyone who has them can read your bank transactions, so don't share them.
Your transactions don't pass through our servers on the way in. When you import, your phone asks Akahu directly for the settled transactions on the accounts you ticked, for the dates shown. Your balances and account numbers are not saved.
Importing adds those transactions to the trip you imported them into, as expenses or as money in. Each one holds the date, the amount, the currency and the bank's description, along with Akahu's own reference for the transaction and the account. Everyone on that trip can see it, like any other expense. Where the bank gives the account number of whoever paid you, we keep a fingerprint of that number, never the number itself, so the app can recognise the same payer next time. If you delete an imported expense, the trip keeps Akahu's reference for it, so that the next import doesn't bring it back. Your phone also remembers how far each account has been imported.
To stop, go to Settings → Advanced → Akahu and choose Remove from this phone. Expenses you have already imported stay on their trips. That only removes the tokens from Travel Kitty: to end Akahu's access to your bank, do that in your Akahu account.
When you import transactions through Akahu on Premium, the app can work out what kind of business each shop is, so the expenses arrive already sorted into categories rather than all in one pile.
To do that it sends a list of the shop names, and the currency each was billed in, to Google's Gemini model running on Google Cloud, under the same Google Cloud terms that cover your trips. For money coming in, it is the payer's name instead of a shop's.
This one request is not confined to the us-east1 region
the rest of your data is stored in. Google serves its current models
from a global endpoint, routing each request to whichever data centre can
answer it, so the shop names may be processed outside the United States.
We don't keep the list, and your trips, expenses and photos stay in
us-east1. Google may log what it is sent to check for
abuse of its service, under its Google Cloud terms.
The amounts, the dates, your balance and your account number are not sent, and neither is anything about who paid or which trip it is for. What leaves your phone is a list of shop names. That is a deliberate limit rather than an incidental one: a list of names is a much smaller thing to disclose than a financial history, and the app is built so that sending more is not an option it has.
Google processes that list on our instructions, as a service provider, and does not use it to train their models — the same relationship described under "Where it is stored" above, on the same Google Cloud terms. Nothing is sent for transactions you do not import, and sorting sends nothing on the free plan.
A shop the model cannot place is left uncategorised rather than guessed at, and you can categorise it yourself. Correcting a category teaches the app, not the model. The correction is saved as a rule on your own account and applied before anything is sent next time, so a shop you have already named is never asked about again.
When you tap Scan a receipt on Add expense, Travel Kitty reads the photo and fills in the amount, currency, date, shop and category for you to check. Nothing is saved until you save the expense.
To read it, we send the photo of the receipt to Google's Gemini model running on Google Cloud, through our server, along with the trip's currency and dates and the names of its categories. This happens on both plans, and only when you scan.
A receipt can show more than the total. Whatever is printed on it goes with the photo, such as the last digits of your card, your name, or a loyalty number. If you'd rather not send that, type the expense in instead.
Your name, your email address, the trip's name and your other expenses are not sent. Our server keeps no copy of the photo or of what the model read from it, and neither goes in our logs.
Like bank sorting, this request is not confined to us-east1, so
the photo may be processed outside the United States. Google processes it on our
instructions, as a service provider, and does not use it to train their
models. Google may log what it is sent to check for abuse of its
service, under its Google Cloud terms.
Where the receipt is kept. On the free plan it stays on your phone. On Premium it is also backed up to a private folder that only your account can read. Either way, other people on the trip can't see it, and it isn't added to your photo library. Deleting the expense removes its receipt, whoever deletes the expense, and so does removing the receipt from the expense.
We never see how you pay. Premium is bought through Google Play, and Google takes the payment. Your card number, your billing address and everything else you give Google stay with Google: none of it passes through this app and none of it is stored on our servers. Google is the seller, and the subscription is an agreement between you and them.
What we do store, against your account, is what Google tells us about the subscription itself:
That is what lets the app know an account is entitled to Premium. It is checked with Google on our server rather than worked out on your phone, because an app that could grant itself a paid plan is an app anybody could grant themselves a paid plan with.
We also keep a record linking that purchase token to your account, for a dull but necessary reason: when Google tells us a subscription has renewed, lapsed, been cancelled or been refunded, the message names the token and not the person. Without the link there would be no way to know whose subscription had changed. Those messages from Google contain no payment details either.
Deleting your account does not cancel your subscription. It keeps renewing, and Google keeps charging, until you cancel it yourself in Google Play: Play Store → your profile → Payments and subscriptions. This app cannot cancel it for you, and does not do it quietly on your behalf — the agreement is between you and Google. If you are leaving, cancel there as well as deleting here, or you will go on paying for an app you no longer have.
Deleting your account does remove the records described above.
Until you delete it. Deleting an expense removes it for everyone on the trip. Deleting a trip you own removes it, its expenses and its photos for everyone on it. Deleting your account is described below.
Beyond that, we keep your information for as long as your account is active. We may remove data belonging to accounts that have been inactive for an extended period, rather than hold somebody's records indefinitely after they have stopped using Travel Kitty. We will write to the email address on the account before removing anything.
A photo you take in the app is also saved to your own phone. It goes into your photo library, in an album called Travel Kitty, at the moment you take it — so it is backed up by whatever already backs up your photos, and it stays yours whatever happens to your account or to this app. That copy is not ours and we cannot reach it. Photos you pick from your library are already there, and are not duplicated. Receipts are different: a receipt you scan stays inside Travel Kitty, and is not saved to your photo library.
Photos are the exception, and only on a paid plan. Storing photos and receipts on our servers is part of what a subscription pays for, and a backed-up receipt counts as a photo in what follows. If a subscription ends, we may remove uploaded photos from our servers after a period, rather than store them indefinitely for an account that is no longer subscribed. We do not set that period here, because it depends on how much is being stored and for how many people, but two things hold whatever we choose: we will write to the email address on the account before removing anything, and there will be a reasonable opportunity to save copies first — though for photos taken in the app there is already a copy in your own library, put there when you took it.
That applies to photos only. Ending a subscription does not by itself remove your trips, expenses, amounts, categories or settlements: those follow the same rule as everything else above, and stay while the account is in use. Going back to the free plan is not a reason to delete anybody's record of a trip.
In the app: Settings → Profile → Delete account. This permanently removes your profile, your custom categories, your place search count, your receipt scan count, your receipts, your sign-in credentials, and every trip you own — including that trip's expenses and photos, for all of its members. Trips owned by someone else are left alone; you are removed from them, and expenses you added to them remain, because the trip's balances would not add up without them.
It also removes the subscription records described above — the purchase token, the plan, its state and expiry, and the link between the token and your account.
It also clears your Akahu tokens from the phone you delete the account on. If you added them on another phone too, remove them there. Deleting your Travel Kitty account doesn't end Akahu's access to your bank: do that in your Akahu account.
It does not cancel a Premium subscription, and nothing here can. That is an agreement between you and Google: it renews, and charges, until you cancel it in Google Play — Play Store → your profile → Payments and subscriptions. Do that as well, whichever order you like, or you will keep paying for an app you have deleted. See Subscriptions and payment.
If you cannot get into the app, see the account deletion page, which explains how to request deletion by email.
You can see everything the app holds about you from inside it, export a trip's expenses to a CSV file (Settings → Import & export data), correct anything by editing it, and delete any of it. If you would rather ask for a copy or a correction by email, write to support@travelkitty.nz.
Travel Kitty is not directed at children and is not designed for them.
If what the app collects changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top is updated.
This policy describes the app as built. If you find something it does that is not described here, that is a fault worth reporting — please write to the address above.