No, and you do not have to. A cloud service has to store the password and use it while you are not there; software on your own computer can drive a browser you are already signed into.
Mind My Money is the second kind. It runs on your computer and is never told a password.
Anything that shows you where your money goes has to reach your transactions, which live at your bank. Handing over the login, or a standing bank connection, is one way to arrange that, and it is how most money apps work, because they run on somebody else's servers and the access has to be there too.
Most money apps run as a web service. For one of those to read your transactions, it needs standing access to your bank: a bank connection through an aggregator, or your login, held on their side so their servers can use it while you are asleep.
That is not a criticism of how any of them is built, because it is what the shape requires. If the work happens on their machines, the access has to be on their machines too. It does mean the answer to "who can reach my accounts" includes a company, its staff, its subprocessors and whatever happens to it later.
It runs on your computer and drives a real browser there — its own Chrome window on a separate profile kept just for this, not your everyday browsing. You sign into your bank in that window yourself, and that session stays put on your machine. The commitments, in the words they are made in on how it works:
There is no account of yours on a server of ours holding any of it, because there is no server. That is the structural part: we could not read your bank session if we wanted to, since it never leaves the machine it was created on.
Something has to reason about the transactions, and that step goes to a model. Again in the words used on how it works: “The agent step that reasons about your spending does go to a model. Which one, and under whose agreement, is your choice.” Today that is your own subscription, under your own contract with the provider, which is the arrangement you already have if you use one.
So “it all stays on your computer” would be the wrong thing for us to say, and we do not say it. Your transactions are stored on your machine and your logins never leave it; the reasoning step is a network call, the same as any other use of an assistant.
With Claude, how long Anthropic keeps what it is sent depends on one setting in your Claude account. With model improvement off, its usual 30-day retention period applies; with it on, it may keep your sessions, de-identified, for up to five years for training. If you would rather have the shorter one, turn model improvement off in your Claude privacy settings. With ChatGPT, whether OpenAI may use what it is sent to improve its models is your ChatGPT data control “Improve the model for everyone”; turn it off if you do not want that.
A newer kind of money app skips the bank connection altogether. You download a statement from your bank as a PDF, upload it, and an AI reads it and tells you where the money went. Several of these call themselves privacy first, and it is true that none of them ever has your bank login. The statement itself still goes somewhere, though, and for most of them that is the company's own server. This is what each one's own privacy policy and site said on 8 October 2026.
| App | Your statement file | The transactions read from it | AI company it names | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stated | Kept on their servers, encrypted, until you delete it | Kept in their database until you delete them | Anthropic or OpenAI | Free, then $9 to $39 a month |
| Ledger AI | Kept until you delete it, with backups for up to about 30 days after | Kept until you delete them | “Third-party large language model providers”; its site names Gemini | Free for 3 a month, then $12 to $25 a month |
| BankStatement.app | Kept “as long as necessary” | Its policy lists transaction details and account balances among what it collects | None named | $1 a statement |
| mybankstatementanalysis.com | Deleted after the analysis | Kept from 7 days (no account) to until you delete them (paid plans) | Google Gemini | $7 a statement, or $12 to $31 a month |
| Statements Analyzer | Deleted after processing, which “may involve … human-assisted review” | Results “may be retained temporarily” | None named | €9.99 once |
| RetroBudget (iPhone) | Sent through their server to the AI, then kept in your own iCloud | Kept in your own iCloud | OpenRouter, or OpenAI | Free for one a month, or $5.99 a month |
| MyBudgetNerd (iPhone and web) | Parsed on their servers, then cleared | Kept on your phone | OpenAI, only if you switch its AI features on | $4.99 a month |
| FinSight (open source) | Read in your own browser | Kept in your browser | None: a model you run yourself | Free |
| SpendLens (open source) | Read on your phone | Kept on your phone | None: it uses no AI model | Free, Indian banks only |
When you read a policy like these, the useful question is which part of your data a privacy claim is about, because the file and what is extracted from it are usually treated differently. mybankstatementanalysis.com's security page is headed “Zero-retention processing”, which is right about the PDF, and its privacy policy keeps the transactions read from it for between 7 days and as long as you have a paid plan. “Anonymised” needs the same care. BankStatement.app's policy says each statement is “automatically anonymized using advanced encryption techniques” and does not say what is removed or when, and Stated uses the word to mean that you can sign up without giving your real name.
It is also worth reading an app's App Store description against its own website. MyBudgetNerd's App Store page says “Your financial data stays on your device. Period.” and the FAQ on its own site says “The PDF is parsed on our servers and then cleared”, which is the accurate sentence about where the file goes. The first one describes what is kept afterwards.
None of these apps needs your bank login, and none of them cancels or changes anything for you: they read the statement and report on it. The two that keep everything on your own device are free projects, each built by one person. FinSight needs a local AI model installed first, which its author puts at 20 to 30 minutes on a fresh machine, and SpendLens reads statements from Indian banks only.
Uploading the statement to ChatGPT is the other common route. OpenAI's help centre says files uploaded in a chat are saved to your Library, and that “deleting a chat containing files does not delete those files saved to Library”, so the statement stays in your account until you delete it there too. ChatGPT may also use what you upload to train its models unless you turn off “Improve the model for everyone” under Settings, then Data controls.
Mind My Money keeps your statements and transactions in a folder on your own computer, and nothing about them reaches us. The reading is done by your own Claude or ChatGPT subscription, so what a task needs goes to Anthropic or OpenAI under the terms in the section above, and nowhere else.
Worth saying plainly, because the industry has been here before. Xero used to log into supplier portals and download documents on its customers' behalf, and it retired that in 2022, saying the connections had become outdated and were “often blocked by banks and online suppliers”. Banks block automation deliberately, and they are not going to stop.
Driving a real browser that reads the page, rather than a script that expects a fixed one, copes with a great deal more of that. It does not make the problem disappear. What it does is fail in the open: when a login needs you, it leaves the tab there and asks, rather than recording a silent blank you find out about months later.
The longer version of this question, including where it is genuinely up to you, is on how it works under “is it safe to let this near your bank?”.
Runs on your own computer. Pay what you decide, including nothing.