What BudgetBeacon is

BudgetBeacon is a budgeting tool. You enter your own income, bills and spending by hand, and it organises those numbers and shows you what they mean.

That is the whole service. It is a calculator and a notebook, working from figures you typed in yourself.

What BudgetBeacon is not

This matters, so we will be blunt about it.

We are not financial advisers. We are not accountants, planners, brokers or tax agents. Nothing in BudgetBeacon is financial, investment, tax or legal advice, and none of it is tailored to your situation.

We do not tell you what to do with your money. The app shows you the shape of the figures you entered. Every decision after that is yours.

We do not connect to your bank. We never see your accounts, and we cannot move money or make a payment on your behalf.

The numbers are only as good as what you enter. If you type the wrong figure, the app will faithfully show you the wrong answer. We do not check your figures against anything, because we have nothing to check them against.

If you need advice about your finances or your tax, please speak to a qualified professional.

Who can use it

You must be at least 18 years old to have an account.

BudgetBeacon is built for people in Australia. You are welcome to use it from elsewhere, but the service and these Terms are written for Australia.

Your account

One account, one person. Your account is for you. Do not share your login with anyone else.

Your password is your responsibility. Choose a good one, keep it to yourself, and sign out on shared or public devices. If you give someone your password, you are responsible for what they do with your account.

Tell us if something looks wrong. If you think someone else has got into your account, email us straight away at hello@budgetbeacon.co.

Keep your email address current. It is how we reset your password and how we reach you. If it stops working, we may not be able to help you get back in.

Your data belongs to you

The figures you enter are yours. We do not claim any ownership of them.

You can export a full copy at any time from Settings, and you can delete anything you entered whenever you like.

How we handle your information is set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

Using it properly

Please do not:

• Break the law with it, or use it to help someone else break the law
• Try to get into anyone else's account, or into parts of the system that are not yours
• Attack, overload or interfere with the service
• Copy, resell or repackage BudgetBeacon as your own
• Upload anything harmful, or anything you do not have the right to upload
• Use automated tools to scrape or hammer the service

Trying to break into other people's financial data is the one thing we take hardest. Do not do it.

Free and premium

Free accounts are genuinely free. Every core budgeting feature works, on one device, with your data stored on that device and a full export always available. There is no trial that expires and no card required.

Premium adds convenience, such as syncing across devices, cloud backup of your receipts and documents, extra exports and additional features. What is included may change as the app grows, and we will tell you if anything material changes.

We do not show ads, on either plan, and we do not sell your information to fund the free tier. Premium is what pays for BudgetBeacon.

Paying for premium

These terms apply if and when you subscribe.

Billing. Premium is billed monthly or yearly, in advance. Prices are shown in Australian dollars.

Automatic renewal. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period, until you cancel. We will email you a reminder before each renewal charge, so a payment never arrives as a surprise.

Card details. We never see or store your card number. Payments are handled by Stripe, and your card information goes to them, not to us. Stripe operates from the United States and handles your payment information under its own terms.

Cancelling. You can cancel at any time from Settings. It takes the same few taps as subscribing did. There is no phone call, no retention offer, and no form to fill in.

What happens when you cancel. You keep premium until the period you already paid for runs out. After that your account drops to free. Nothing is charged again.

Refunds

Change of mind is not refundable. If you cancel partway through a period, you keep access until it ends, but we do not refund the unused part. Australia does not require a cooling-off period for purchases you make yourself online, and we do not offer one.

Your legal rights are untouched. Under the Australian Consumer Law you are entitled to a remedy if a service has a major problem, is unsafe, or does not match its description. That includes a refund where the law says so, and nothing in these Terms takes it away.

If something is genuinely wrong, email us at hello@budgetbeacon.co and we will sort it out. We would rather fix a problem than argue about it.

If you drop from premium to free

Please read this one carefully, because files get deleted.

Premium includes cloud storage for your receipts and documents. Free does not, because that storage costs us money.

If your premium ends, whether you cancel or a payment fails:

• Your account keeps working, on the free plan
• Everything you typed in stays: your income, bills, spending, savings, history
• Your receipts and documents in the cloud are kept for 30 days, then permanently deleted
• Anything already saved on your own device stays on your device

We will email you when premium ends, again with a week to go, and again the day before deletion. You will also see it in the app. But the responsibility to download your files is yours, so please do it early.

Price changes

If we change the price of premium, we will tell you by email before it takes effect. If you do not want to pay the new price, cancel before your next renewal and you will not be charged it.

Closing your account

You can delete your account at any time from Settings. You do not need to ask us, and you do not need to give a reason.

Because deletion is permanent, we ask you to confirm that you have understood what happens rather than just clicking a button.

When you delete your account: your data is scheduled for deletion immediately, you have 30 days to change your mind, and after that it is permanently gone and cannot be recovered by anyone, including us.

Export your data first. Once the 30 days pass, it does not exist any more.

Deleting your account is not the same as cancelling premium. Cancelling drops you to free and keeps your data. Deleting removes everything.

If we close your account

We would rather not, and we will contact you first wherever we reasonably can.

We may suspend or close an account that:

• Breaks these Terms, particularly the rules about other people's data
• Is being used to break the law
• Has an unpaid premium balance, in which case we drop it to free rather than close it

If we close your account for a reason that is not your fault, we will refund any unused premium time and give you a fair chance to export your data.

Keeping the service running

We work hard to keep BudgetBeacon available, but we cannot promise it will never be down. Things break, providers have outages, and updates sometimes need the service offline.

The app is built to keep working offline on your device, so a problem on our end does not usually stop you using it.

We may change, add or remove features as the app develops. If we remove something you rely on, we will tell you.

If BudgetBeacon ever closes

We are not planning to. But if we ever have to shut down:

• We will give you at least 60 days notice by email
• Billing stops immediately. Nobody pays for a service that is ending
• Unused premium time is refunded, worked out proportionally
• Your account keeps working for the full notice period, so you have time to export everything

We would rather over-warn you than have anyone lose their financial history because they missed an email.

Our responsibility, and its limits

We take this seriously, and we have built BudgetBeacon carefully. But there are limits to what we can be responsible for.

We are responsible for providing the service with reasonable care and skill, and for the guarantees Australian Consumer Law gives you. Those guarantees cannot be excluded, and we are not trying to.

We are not responsible for decisions you make about your money, for figures you entered incorrectly, for losses caused by something outside our control, or for data lost from your own device where you had the ability to export a backup and did not.

Where the law allows us to limit our liability, our total liability to you is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the problem arose. If you are on the free plan, that amount is nil.

Nothing here limits any right you have under Australian Consumer Law.

Changes to these Terms

If we change these Terms, we will update the version and date at the top.

If the change is significant, we will ask you to agree again the next time you sign in. We record which version you agreed to, so we always know where we stand.

The legal bit

These Terms are governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia. Any dispute goes to the courts of New South Wales.

If any part of these Terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us.

Contact

hello@budgetbeacon.co

We read every message.

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