When you download a personal finance app, you're trusting it with some of the most sensitive information about your life: where you shop, how much you earn, what you spend money on, and your overall financial health. Most apps take this data and upload it to their servers. MyFin takes a different approach.
The Problem with Cloud-Based Finance Apps
Traditional finance apps operate on a simple model: your data goes to their servers, where it's processed, analyzed, and stored. This creates several problems:
- Data breaches are inevitable. Every company that stores user data is a target. When a finance app gets hacked, your entire financial history is exposed.
- Your data becomes a product. Many "free" apps monetize by selling anonymized (or not-so-anonymized) data to advertisers, credit agencies, and data brokers.
- You lose control. Once your data is on someone else's server, you can't truly delete it. Even if you close your account, copies may exist in backups, logs, and third-party systems.
- Privacy policies change. The company that promises privacy today might be acquired tomorrow by one with different priorities.
The Local-First Alternative
MyFin is built on a principle called "local-first" computing. Your financial data is processed and stored entirely on your device. Here's what that means in practice:
- No accounts to create. You don't need to sign up or log in. Just install and start tracking.
- No servers to hack. We don't run servers that store your financial data. There's nothing to breach.
- No data to sell. We can't sell what we don't have. Our business model is simple: build a great app that people want to use.
- Complete control. Your data stays on your phone. Delete the app, and everything goes with it.
"The most secure way to handle sensitive data is to never collect it in the first place."
But How Does Smart Categorization Work?
You might wonder: if everything is local, how can MyFin automatically categorize your transactions? Don't you need AI and cloud computing for that?
We've solved this through a clever approach:
- Pattern matching: We maintain a library of SMS patterns from Kuwait banks that your device uses to extract transaction data.
- Merchant database: We keep an anonymized database of merchant names and their categories. When you shop at "The Sultan Center," your device looks it up locally and knows it's a grocery store.
- Anonymous learning: If we encounter a new SMS format, we can submit just the anonymized pattern (with all personal data stripped) to improve our templates. The pattern "Purchase of [AMOUNT] at [MERCHANT]" contains zero personal information.
What About Backup?
Local-first doesn't mean you lose everything if you switch phones. MyFin offers optional backup to Google Drive, but with a crucial difference:
- Backups go directly to YOUR Google Drive account
- We never see or have access to your backup files
- Files are encrypted before upload
- You can delete them anytime from your Drive
It's your data, stored in your cloud storage, under your control.
The Future is Local
As computing power on mobile devices continues to increase, there's less and less reason to send sensitive data to the cloud. Machine learning models can run on-device. Databases can handle millions of transactions locally. The "cloud required" paradigm was a technical limitation that's rapidly becoming outdated.
We believe the future of personal software is local-first: apps that respect your privacy by design, not just by policy. MyFin is our contribution to that future.
Ready to take control of your finances without giving up your privacy? Download MyFin today.