Privacy

Last updated 15 August 2026. Written in English only — the bot itself answers in three languages, but a translated legal page that drifts out of step with this one would be worse than none.

SpendLens reads bank and card statements you send it on Telegram and answers questions about your spending. This page says what it keeps, for how long, and how to get rid of it. It describes what the software actually does rather than reserving rights it does not exercise.

It never touches your bank

There is no account linking, no open-banking connection and no credential of yours anywhere in this system. SpendLens will never ask for a banking login, and there is nothing in it that could use one. You send a file; it reads that file.

What it holds

• Statements and receipts you upload. Deleted after 30 days, automatically, whether or not you ask.
• The transactions read out of them — date, amount, merchant, category. These are kept, and that is deliberate: it is what lets your spending history build up so that “versus last month” has something to compare against.
• Your Telegram name and username. Telegram sends these with every message; they are held with your chat record.
• The language you are answered in, decided from how you first greeted the bot.
• Donation records, if you have ever sent Telegram Stars — see below.

Deleting it

Send /forget in the chat. Your transactions, your uploaded files, your chat record and your stored name and username are deleted, and the bot reports back how many rows it actually removed rather than simply claiming success.

One thing survives it, and the bot says so before you confirm: a record of any donation you have made. A charge ID is the only way a refund can be issued afterwards, so it is not held with the spending data and it is not erased with it. Everything else goes.

Payments

SpendLens is free. If you send a tip it is paid in Telegram Stars, because Telegram requires anything paid inside a bot to be. The payment itself runs through Telegram — no card details reach SpendLens, because none are ever shown to it. /refund asks which donation you mean and sends it back.

Processing

Reading a statement means passing its contents to a language model to extract and categorise the transactions. Uploaded files are held in Google Cloud Storage and the extracted data in Firestore, both within this project. Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared with anyone for advertising.

Group chats

The bot can be added to a group. Anything sent in one is visible to everyone in it — that is Telegram, not SpendLens — so a statement is better sent in a direct message.

Contact

Questions go to the bot itself: @spendlenssg_bot. Send /help to see what it can do.