What we keep, and what we never collect.

Your account

Name, email address, password (stored only as a hash), and your display settings: date format, number format and time zone. If you turn on two-factor login, its secret key, encrypted.

What you type

Accounts and balances, transactions with their dates, amounts, payees, categories and notes, budgets and targets, loans and their schedules, wishlist items, and the ratings you give past purchases. This is most of what we hold, and all of it was typed by you or someone in your household.

Your household

Who is in it, what role they hold, who invited them and when. Invitations record the email address they were sent to.

Billing

Which plan you are on, what was invoiced, and whether it was paid. Card details are handled by the payment provider and never reach us (see below).

Sign-in and activity records

Sign-in times, IP address and browser for active sessions, so you can see them and sign them out, and a log of changes made inside a shared household, so members can see who did what.

What you write to us

Messages you send to support and our replies, bug reports, and feedback. A support conversation is yours alone: nobody else in your household can read it. It stays on our servers in India. When you write to us, we get an email saying that you wrote, not what you said.

This list matters more, because data we never collect can never leak.

Bank credentials

None, ever. No Account Aggregator, no net banking login and no permission to read your bank account. You type in your transactions, or import a statement file you downloaded yourself. So even someone who stole everything we hold could not move your money.

Card numbers

When you pay, you enter your card details on the payment gateway's page, not ours, so they never reach us.

Your SMS or notifications

Many Indian budgeting apps read your bank SMS to fill themselves in. We do not. Ahead runs in your browser, so there is no phone permission to give.

Advertising and behavioural trackers

No ad networks, no tracking pixels and no scripts from other companies following you around the web. You pay us, so we have no reason to sell your data.

Your contacts, location or device identifiers

None of these are collected, because none of them are needed.

Only to run the service you pay for. That means: to show you your own numbers, to do the calculations, to let the other people in your household see the same budget, to bill you, to email you about your subscription and account, and to keep everything secure.

We do not use your financial data to build a profile of you, we do not use it to train any AI or other system, and we do not combine it into data about households in general.

Nobody outside your household reads your budget. That includes us, in the normal running of the service. Support does not browse your transactions, and the tool our support uses cannot reach a household’s financial records at all. If fixing a problem ever needs a look at your data, we will ask you first.

A few companies handle data for us to make the service work. They may use it only for that:

Hosting

DigitalOcean, in its Bangalore (BLR1) data centre in India: the servers and the database.

Network

Cloudflare, Inc.. Its network sits in front of our server, carrying the encrypted traffic to it and protecting it from attack. It keeps none of your records.

Email delivery

Zoho ZeptoMail, from its United States data centre. It carries password resets, billing notices, payment receipts and invitations. The message body includes your name and what the notice is about. A receipt also says what you paid us, and for which dates.

Payments

Razorpay Software Private Limited, Bengaluru. It receives your card details directly, and your billing contact. It never receives your financial records.

We will also share data if the law really requires it. If that happens, we will tell you, unless the law does not allow us to.

Your financial records stay in India. Everything you enter (accounts, transactions, budgets, loans) is stored on servers in Bangalore and in backups kept in India, and nowhere else. On its way to you it passes through Cloudflare’s network, encrypted, usually through a Cloudflare data centre in India. Payments are handled by Razorpay, in India.

One thing does leave India: email. The emails we send you (password resets, invitations, billing notices and receipts) go out through ZeptoMail, from its data centre in the United States. They carry your name, your email address and what the email is about, and never an amount from your budget: an invitation to share a loan tells you who sent it, not how much. Bug reports you send us travel the same way. And if you open Ahead while travelling abroad, your own device receives your data wherever you are.

It is encrypted in transit, on every connection. The database sits on encrypted storage, and backups are encrypted before they are copied off the server, and are kept in India as well.

We keep your household’s data for as long as the household exists. If you delete it, the records are really removed, not just marked as deleted, along with the accounts, transactions, budgets, loans, memberships and invitations attached to it.

Three things are kept after that. Invoices for anything you paid, because tax law requires a business to keep its records of what it charged. Each keeps the amount, the dates, and the name and email it was billed to, with the payment and any refund. They are deleted eight years after the end of the financial year (April to March) they were raised in. A record that things happened in the household, who acted and when, with nothing about what they were: no amounts, no names of loans or accounts. And your sign-in, your name and email address, with anything you wrote to support, until you ask us to remove that too.

Backups are kept for thirty days, and our hosting provider’s weekly copy of the server holds them for four weeks after that. So within sixty days of a deletion, no copy of your records exists anywhere.

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 you can ask us for a copy of your personal data, ask us to correct it, ask us to erase it, and complain if you think we have handled it badly. You can also nominate someone to exercise those rights if you cannot.

Two of these you do not need to ask for: export and deletion are buttons in the app, and they work straight away. For anything else, write to [email protected] and we will answer within three working days.

We will not charge you for exercising a right, and we will not make the product worse for you because you did.

Export is in Settings → Household → Your data. It gives you a complete copy of your household’s data as CSV files. It is never refused, including while an account is locked for non-payment and on the day you leave.

Delete this household is on the same screen, and it really deletes, rather than just switching the household off. It asks you to confirm, because it cannot be undone. Download your export first.

The app sets two cookies: one keeps you signed in, and one protects your forms from being submitted by another website. Neither is used for tracking, and neither follows you anywhere else. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.

This website does not use analytics at the moment. If that changes, anything we add will be run by us or built for privacy, and will not build a profile of you. This page will say so before it happens.

Each household kept separate

Every record is tied to the household it belongs to, and that rule is applied deep in the app, not remembered by each screen. So features we add later are covered too, even if the person building them forgets.

Encryption

Every connection is encrypted. The database is on encrypted storage and backups are encrypted before they leave the server. Your records are not encrypted one by one inside the database, because the app has to add up your budget on the server. That is why we strictly limit who can reach the database.

Two-factor authentication

Available on any account, with recovery codes. Mandatory for our own operators.

Passwords

Stored only as a modern hash. We cannot read yours, and neither can anyone who takes the database.

Sessions you can see

Every active sign-in is listed with its device and when it was last used, and you can sign any of them out.

An audit trail

Changes inside a shared household are recorded with who made them, so members can check who did what.

The Security page goes through each of these, and through who can and cannot see your records, in more detail.

No system is perfectly secure. If we ever discover a breach affecting your data, we will quickly tell you and the Data Protection Board, as the law requires, with what we know and what we are doing about it.

Ahead is for adults. Accounts are not knowingly created for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect a child’s personal data. If you believe a child has an account, write to us and we will remove it.

A children’s financial-literacy mode is planned and does not exist yet. If and when it is built, it will be an area inside an adult’s household that a parent controls, and this policy will be updated before it goes live.

We will update this page when what we do changes, and email you first when the change is material. This version is dated 6 October 2026.

Our grievance officer under the DPDP Act is [email protected]. If you are not happy with our answer, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India. The contact page lists every way to reach us.