Our Commitment to Privacy
At CartPause, your privacy is paramount. We believe your shopping data is yours alone. This policy explains how we handle your information with the utmost care and respect.
CartPause includes Penny, an AI spending coach who asks you questions about the things you are about to buy. To do that well, Penny needs to know some things about you. This policy is explicit about what she is told, who processes it, and how to take it back.
Data Storage
On-Device Storage
Your paused items, savings data, and app preferences are stored locally on your device using Apple’s SwiftData framework. This is the canonical copy of your cart, the app works fully offline and reads from local storage first.
Backend Sync
To keep your cart in sync across your devices (your iPhone and iPad, and the CartPause browser extensions for Safari and Chrome), we operate a private backend that holds a synchronized copy of your items and your coach profile. The backend is hosted on Vercel and uses Neon (a managed Postgres database) for items and user state, and Vercel Blob for product and favicon images. All data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS) and at rest by our providers.
Your synced data is accessible only to you, authenticated via Sign in with Apple. We never sell your data and we never use it for advertising. You can delete it at any time (see Your Rights below).
Information We Process
Sign in with Apple
CartPause requires Sign in with Apple to enable cross-device sync. When you sign in, Apple provides us with a stable identifier (your Apple Sign In user ID) that is unique to CartPause and cannot be used to identify you in any other app. We never receive your Apple ID password.
Apple’s sign-in token also contains your email address, which may be Apple’s private relay address if you chose to hide it. We do not store your email address on our servers and there is no email column in our database. It is kept only in the secure keychain on your own device, so the app can show you which account you are signed in with. The browser extensions never receive your email address. They use the same Sign in with Apple account, as described in Browser Extensions below.
Your Coach Profile
During onboarding, and later if you choose to finish it, CartPause asks a short set of questions so Penny can be useful rather than generic. These are: the first name you want to be called, what your money goal is right now, how tight money is month to month, how you want Penny to talk to you, who you are budgeting for, when you tend to buy things you did not plan to, which categories get you every time, and an optional free-text answer describing what you want help with.
Your answers are stored on your device and on our backend against your account, so Penny is the same coach on every device you sign in to. You can review, change, or clear any answer at any time in the app under Menu → Profile.
Items You Save
For each item you pause, we store the product name, price, source URL, product image, the store’s icon, an AI-assigned category, and the dates it was added, paused, moved to Someday, skipped, or bought. If you write a note explaining why you saved something, that note is stored and synced with the item.
Photos You Take
If you add an item using your camera, the photo you take is stored with that item and uploaded to Vercel Blob so it appears on your other devices. CartPause does not request access to your photo library and never reads photos you did not take inside the app.
Product URL Processing
When you share a product link to CartPause via the Share Extension, the URL is sent to our backend to extract product details (name, price, and image). To handle the wide variety of e-commerce sites, we use a third-party scraping service (scrape.do) which receives the URL solely to fetch the page on our behalf. After extraction, the URL and product details are saved with your item on our backend so the link works across all your devices.
Browser Extensions (Safari and Chrome)
CartPause for Safari (on Mac) and CartPause for Chrome let you save the product you are looking at without leaving your browser. They only read a page when you click the CartPause button in the browser toolbar, and only the tab that is open at that moment (the browser’s “active tab” permission). They do not run in the background on the sites you visit, cannot see your other tabs, and do not read or record your browsing history.
When you click, the extension reads the product name, price, main product image, and page address from that page, and sends them to our backend over HTTPS to create the item. As with links you share from your phone, the product name and address are sent to our AI provider (Anthropic’s Claude, via the Vercel AI Gateway) to tidy up the product name and assign a category. To show your Cart Value, the extension also asks our backend for the total of your paused items.
CartPause for Safari gets your session from the CartPause for Safari app on your Mac, which handles Sign in with Apple and shares the session with the extension on that Mac only. CartPause for Chrome uses Sign in with Apple on cartpause.com, in a secure window opened by your browser. In both cases the extension stores a session token and your preferred pause duration in the browser’s extension storage on your computer. The extensions never receive your Apple ID password or your email address.
The extensions contain no analytics, advertising, or tracking code. All of their code ships inside the extension package; they do not download or run code from anywhere else.
The use of information received through CartPause for Chrome adheres to the Chrome Web Store User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Penny, Your AI Spending Coach
Penny generates the questions she asks you, the line at the top of your Cart and Someday tabs, and the wording of your decision replies. This text is produced by Anthropic’s Claude models, accessed through the Vercel AI Gateway. Anthropic processes these requests on our behalf as a service provider.
To generate a reply, we send:
- The item in question: its name, price, category, how long it has been paused, and the note you wrote about it
- Your coach profile answers, including your first name and your free-text answer about what you want help with
- Your replies within the current conversation, including anything you type yourself instead of picking an offered answer
- Aggregate counts, such as how many items you have paused and how much you have saved, and how many times you have opened this particular item
We do not send your Apple Sign In identifier, your email address, or your payment information. Generated text is cached on our backend for a short period so re-opening the same item does not repeat the request. We do not use your conversations to train AI models, and our AI provider does not train on data sent through the API.
Penny is a prompt to think, not a financial adviser. See our Terms of Service for what that means.
How You Use Your Items
So Penny can notice when you keep circling the same item, we count how many times you open each item, how many of those times you closed it without deciding, and when you last looked at it. These counts are stored with the item and synced across your devices. They are about your own items only.
Push Notifications and Device Tokens
CartPause registers each device’s Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) token with our backend. Tokens are used for two things: sending you a reminder when a pause is up, and sending a silent push that wakes your other devices so they can fetch a change immediately. Some reminders are scheduled locally on your device and never reach our servers; others are sent from our backend to your device via Apple. APNs tokens are issued and managed by Apple, contain no personal information, and are deleted along with the rest of your data if you delete your account.
Subscription Information
Payments are processed entirely by Apple through the App Store. We never receive or store your payment details, card number, or billing address.
To check whether your CartPause Pro subscription is active, and to restore it when you sign in on a new device, we use RevenueCat, a third-party subscription management service. RevenueCat receives your Apple Sign In identifier and your subscription status and receipt from Apple. It does not receive your name, your coach profile, your items, or your notes.
In-App Product Analytics
CartPause records a small set of app events (for example app opens, an item paused, a decision made) so we can understand which features are used and where people get stuck. These events are sent to our own backend and stored in our own database. No third-party analytics, advertising, attribution, or tracking SDK is included in the app.
Events carry a per-install identifier and, once you are signed in, your account identifier, so we can measure how a real journey unfolds rather than counting disconnected taps. Event properties are deliberately coarse: we record price bands rather than exact prices, and we never include item names, product URLs, or the notes you write.
Who Processes Your Data
We use a small number of service providers to run CartPause. They process data on our behalf, under contract, and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes:
- Apple (Sign in with Apple, App Store payments, push delivery)
- Vercel (application hosting and image storage)
- Neon (managed Postgres database)
- Anthropic, via the Vercel AI Gateway (generating Penny’s text)
- RevenueCat (subscription status)
- scrape.do (fetching product pages you share)
We do not share your data with anyone else, and we do not sell it to anyone at all.
What We Don’t Collect
We do not collect:
- Your Apple ID password, card number, or billing details
- Your location
- Your browsing history. We only see the specific product links you choose to share with the app or save with a CartPause browser extension
- Your contacts, calendar, health data, or photo library
- Your email address on our servers (it stays in the keychain on your device)
- Any advertising identifier. CartPause never asks for permission to track you, because it has nothing to track you with
What We Never Do
- Sell your personal information to anyone
- Share your shopping data with retailers or advertisers
- Track your activity across other websites or apps
- Use your data for targeted advertising
- Use your conversations with Penny to train AI models
To be straightforward about one thing: CartPause does build a picture of your spending habits, because that is the entire product. Penny uses your profile, your items, and your past decisions to ask better questions. That picture exists to serve you inside the app, it is never sold, never shared for advertising, and you can delete all of it in two taps.
Your Rights
You have full control over your data:
- Edit or clear your profile: Menu → Profile inside the app. Changing an answer changes what Penny is told from that moment on.
- Delete all items: Settings → Delete All Items inside the app. This removes every item from your device and from our backend immediately.
- Sign out: Settings → Sign Out to disconnect this device from your CartPause account. Your items and profile remain on our backend, so signing in again restores them; this device just stops syncing.
- Sign out of a browser extension: In Chrome, click CartPause in the toolbar, then the gear icon, then Sign out. In Safari, open the CartPause for Safari app on your Mac and click Sign out. Removing an extension from your browser also deletes the session it stored. Items you saved stay in your account either way.
- Delete the app: Removing CartPause from your device wipes the local copy. The backend copy remains until you also delete your account.
- Full account deletion (recommended): Settings → Delete Account inside the app. This permanently removes your account, your coach profile, every paused, saved, skipped, and bought item, your notes, your device push tokens, and your cached AI text from our backend immediately. You’ll be signed out automatically. If you can’t access the app, contact us from the Apple ID you used to sign in as a backup path.
- Cancel subscription: Settings → Manage Subscription (handled through your Apple ID).
Website
The CartPause website (cartpause.com) uses Google Analytics to understand aggregate traffic patterns (e.g., page views and referral sources). Google Analytics may set cookies in your browser. No personally identifiable information is collected through our website. The website does not use advertising or retargeting scripts.
Children’s Privacy
CartPause is not intended for users under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13.
Changes to This Policy
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page with an updated revision date.
Contact Us
If you have questions about this privacy policy or your data, please contact us.
For a plain-language summary, see Is CartPause private? Questions about this policy: contact us.