Skip to main content
ChipInPlan Home

Privacy Policy — ChipInPlan

Effective date: August 22, 2026

Who we are: ChipInPlan ("ChipInPlan", "we", "us"), operated by Ferns Tech Inc, a New Jersey corporation. Contact: privacy@chipinplan.com.

ChipInPlan is a group-planning and expense-sharing tool. This policy explains what we collect, why, who we share it with, and your choices.

1. What we collect

You give us:

  • Account details — email address, display name, and a password (stored only as a salted hash, never in plain text). If you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email, and Google account identifier (via OAuth) — not your Google password.
  • Plan content — everything you put into a plan: dates and availability, polls and decisions, tasks, itineraries, discussion messages, uploaded documents, and the people you invite.
  • Expense and receipt data — expense amounts and splits, and any receipt images or files you upload, plus the text extracted from them. ChipInPlan records who paid and who owes; it never moves money and is not a payment processor — payment "status" is something you and your group mark manually.

We collect automatically:

  • Session and security data — an essential session cookie (chipinplan_session), and your IP address and request metadata, used to keep you signed in, enforce rate limits, and protect against abuse.
  • We do not use advertising trackers or third-party analytics cookies.

2. How we use it

  • To provide the service (create and run plans, split expenses, generate itineraries and exports).
  • To send transactional email only — verification, password reset, invitations, and notifications you've enabled. We do not send marketing email.
  • To run receipt OCR. By default this runs on our own servers (no third party sees your receipt). If the optional higher-accuracy mode is enabled, receipt images may be sent to our AI provider (see §3) solely to extract the text.
  • To run the AI planning assistant (optional). When you use it, a snapshot of that one plan's data is sent to our AI provider to answer your question. The assistant is read-only and never changes your data on its own.
  • To secure the service, debug problems, and meet legal obligations.

We do not sell your personal data.

3. Who we share it with (subprocessors)

We share data only with vendors that help us run the service, under contract:

  • Amazon Web Services — hosting, database, and file storage (United States, us-east-1).
  • Resend — sending transactional email.
  • Anthropic (Claude) — only if you use the AI assistant, or if the optional AI receipt-OCR mode is enabled; receives the relevant plan snapshot or receipt image to perform that task.
  • Google — only if you choose "Sign in with Google," to authenticate you.
  • Mapbox (or OpenStreetMap/Nominatim when Mapbox is not configured) — only to turn a place you typed into a map location. It receives that place text and nothing else: never names, emails, balances, expenses, messages or plan descriptions.
  • Pexels — only if automatic destination cover photos are enabled; receives the destination name of a plan (e.g. "Lisbon, Portugal") to look up a stock photograph, and nothing else.
  • Sentry — application error reports, used to diagnose faults.

We may also disclose data if required by law, or to protect the rights and safety of users and the service.

4. Where data is stored

Data is stored and processed in the United States. If you access ChipInPlan from outside the US, you consent to processing there.

5. How long we keep it

We keep your account and plan data while your account is active. When you delete your account (see §6), your personal details (name, email, password) are removed immediately, and backups are purged within 30 days. To keep other members' shared expenses and settlements accurate, your name on past shared expenses becomes "Former member" rather than being deleted outright, and financial records are otherwise retained as needed to comply with law.

6. Your rights and choices

You can access, correct, export, or delete your data. Self-service data export and account deletion are built into the app (Settings → Your data, and Settings → Delete account). For anything not covered by self-service — corrections, or other requests — email privacy@chipinplan.com and we'll respond within 30 days.

Depending on where you live (e.g. EU/UK under GDPR, California under CCPA, New Jersey under the NJ Data Privacy Act), you may have additional rights, including to object to or restrict processing and to lodge a complaint with your data-protection authority.

7. Security

We protect data with encryption in transit (HTTPS), hashed passwords, a database that is not reachable from the public internet, per-plan access controls, and an audit trail on financial changes. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your information and will notify you of a breach as required by law.

8. Children

ChipInPlan is not directed to children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has given us data, contact us and we'll remove it.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy; we'll post the new version here and update the effective date, and notify you of material changes.

10. Contact

Questions or requests: privacy@chipinplan.com.