Your working balances, budgets, cards, bills, renewals, ledger, and audit history are designed to live on your device first.
What Catalyst Cash stores, refuses, and protects.
Money apps ask for unusual trust. This page says the quiet parts clearly: what stays local, what can leave the device, what AI sees, what Plaid does, and what Catalyst deliberately refuses to build.
Operating principles
The product is built around control before convenience.
You can use Catalyst without linking a bank. Plaid can improve freshness, but it is optional convenience, not the foundation.
Catalyst does not store bank usernames or passwords and does not build issuer-portal scraping.
Critical finance calculations run through native deterministic logic before AI is used to explain or reason about the result.
AI requests are routed through the backend with minimized financial context and excluded access details. AI is advisory and can be wrong.
Catalyst does not take 35% to 60% of negotiated savings, sell spending data, or build an ad profile from your finances.
Network boundaries
Local-first does not mean nothing ever leaves the phone.
The honest version is better: most working context is local by default, and networked features are specific choices. If you use AI, Plaid, backup, restore, export, or support flows, the app sends the data needed for that feature.
- Plaid is optionalWhen you link accounts, bank credentials are entered into Plaid, not Catalyst. Linked results can refresh the local record.
- AI is consent-gatedAI audits and Ask AI use minimized context through the backend proxy after deterministic math prepares the finance facts.
- Backups are encryptedPortable exports, iCloud backup, and Recovery Vault flows are designed for recoverability without turning Catalyst into a cloud-first finance database.
What we refuse
Some growth shortcuts are not worth the trust cost.
No credential scraping
Catalyst will not ask for issuer usernames and passwords so it can impersonate you in bank portals.
No savings toll
Cancellation templates and negotiation guidance should not become a fee on the money you saved.
No fake precision
AI can explain and reason, but deterministic money math owns the critical numbers before prose appears.
No data-broker model
The app is paid software. Your spending history is not the product being monetized.
User controls
You can inspect, edit, export, and recover your record.
Your card names, balances, limits, bills, renewals, transactions, categories, notes, and manual records are meant to be corrected by you when reality changes.
Encrypted export, iCloud backup, Recovery Vault, and account-backed restore options exist because a local-first record still needs a sane recovery story.
If you disconnect a linked account, manual records still work. The app is not designed to punish tighter privacy preferences.
The security page explains AI routing, Plaid boundaries, backups, and deletion controls in more operational detail.
Use the app only if these boundaries feel right.
Catalyst Cash is for people who want one private weekly money system without bank-password scraping, data selling, or a cut of their savings.