The Coalfinch Household Budget Tool lets you enter your income and household costs and see them visualised as a Sankey diagram. Your financial figures run entirely in your browser. No budget data is transmitted to any server when you use the tool.
This site uses Plausible Analytics to count page visits and understand which pages are useful. Plausible is a privacy-respecting analytics tool: it uses no cookies, collects no personal data, does not track you across websites, and is fully compliant with GDPR, PECR, and the IoM Data Protection Act 2018 without requiring a cookie banner.
The data Plausible collects is aggregated and anonymous: page URL, referrer, browser type, operating system, country, and screen size. Your IP address is never stored. There is no way to identify you individually from Plausible's data, and we cannot link any Plausible visit to your budget figures, which never leave your browser.
You can read Plausible's data policy at plausible.io/data-policy.
No financial data of any kind is collected, stored, or processed by Coalfinch. Your income, spending, household composition, and any other figures you enter into the budget tool are processed locally in your browser and go nowhere else.
When you click "Share link", the tool encodes your figures as a base64 string and appends it to the page URL. This link exists only in your browser and in whatever you do with it — copy it, send it, print it. At no point does this data pass through a Coalfinch server. We have no way of seeing it and no record of it.
If you share the link with someone else, they can see the figures you encoded in it. That is the intended purpose. Only share with people you are comfortable seeing your financial situation.
This site uses no cookies of its own. Plausible Analytics, which we use to count page visits, is specifically designed to work without cookies — it does not set or read any cookies on your device. You will not see a cookie banner because none is required.
The budget tool itself uses no localStorage, sessionStorage, or any browser storage. When you close the tab, everything is gone.
The tool loads fonts from Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com). This is a standard web request and Google may log the IP address of the request as part of their normal infrastructure operation. This is the only third-party request the page makes, and it carries no information about your financial figures.
If you would like to avoid even this, you can save the page and use it offline, or ask us for a self-contained version.
The Coalfinch Household Budget Tool does not fall under the Isle of Man Data Protection Act 2018 or UK GDPR in its current form, because it does not collect, store, or process personal data. Nothing is transmitted to us. We are not a data controller in respect of this tool.
If a future version of this tool introduces data collection (for example, an optional research participation feature), a separate, prominent consent process will be introduced and this policy will be updated accordingly.
This tool is intended for adults managing household finances. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone — including children — because we do not collect data from anyone.
If we change how the tool works in ways that affect privacy, we will update this page and change the "last updated" date above. Given the tool currently collects nothing, any change that introduces data collection would be a significant one and would be clearly flagged on the tool itself.
Questions about this policy or the tool? Email hello@coalfinch.com. We will do our best to respond promptly, though we make no guarantees about response times — this is a public interest project run on limited resources.
Please do not email to ask for a fiver. We are, genuinely, not in great financial shape either.