Your Money, Your Data: How Venova Protects Your Financial Privacy

When you sign up for most personal finance tools, you agree to let the company store, process, and often monetise your financial data. Transaction histories, spending patterns, and account balances all live on someone else's servers, subject to their privacy policy and their security practices.

We built Venova because we believed there was a better way. Your financial data is deeply personal. It reveals where you shop, what you earn, who you send money to, and how you plan for the future. That information should not be a product.

In Venova, encryption is not an afterthought bolted onto a cloud service. It is foundational to how the application works.

Every piece of financial data is encrypted on your device before it ever leaves. The cryptographic stack uses AES-256-GCM for data encryption, PBKDF2-SHA256 with 600,000 iterations for key derivation, and ECDH P-256 with HKDF-SHA256 for key exchange. All network traffic travels over TLS.

This is not marketing language around vague "bank-level security." These are the specific algorithms, and they run client-side on your machine, before any sync happens.

We recognised that different people have different threat models. Some users want the safety net of password recovery. Others want the assurance that absolutely no one, including us, can access their data.

Venova offers two explicit modes:

Default (Recoverable): Your encryption key is also wrapped under a server-side recovery key. If you forget your password, you can reset it and recover your data. The server uses that key to restore your access, which means it is technically capable of decrypting your data. It does nothing else with it.

Advanced (Zero-Knowledge): The server-side recovery wrap is removed entirely. Only your password or your recovery codes can decrypt your data. We cannot access it under any circumstances, including password resets.

We present this choice honestly because the tradeoff is real. Convenience and maximum security are in tension, and you should make that decision, not us.

Venova's revenue model is subscriptions. We do not sell data to advertisers. We do not embed tracking pixels. We do not perform behavioural profiling. We do not share data with third parties for marketing purposes.

Our cookie policy is simple: we use HttpOnly session cookies needed to run the service. There is no consent banner to dismiss because there are no advertising or third-party tracking cookies to consent to.

Encryption does not cover everything. Your email address, which household you belong to, when you last saved a change, and how large the encrypted record is all remain visible to us as operational metadata. We are transparent about that boundary because overstating your privacy would be worse than being precise about it.

The content you put into Venova remains yours. We grant ourselves only the licence needed to operate the service. That licence covers only storing and transmitting your encrypted data so sync works.

We do not use your content to train machine-learning models. We do not sell it. You can export all your data as CSV or JSON at any time, and closing your account removes your cloud-stored data permanently.

If you use the desktop app without signing in, nothing is ever uploaded. The app runs entirely on your machine with no cloud dependency and no account requirement.

We are deliberate about which services touch your data. Our sub-processors are:

• Supabase for authentication, database, and transactional email
• Stripe for payment processing and subscription billing (card details never touch our servers)
• Cloudflare for application hosting, file storage, and network protection across 300+ global edge locations

Each was chosen because they are proven infrastructure with strong security track records, not because they were cheap or convenient. When we add bank import through Plaid in the future, we will update our privacy policy before that feature ships, not after.