What you buy says a lot about you. Even an ordinary grocery run can reveal how many people live in your household, your lifestyle, or what you are going through right now. There is a famous case involving the American retailer Target, where the company was able to infer deeply personal information from shopping data — sometimes even before the person realized it themselves.
What it costs to run Zespr
We do not want your data to be used that way. We want to offer a quality service that genuinely helps our users and is financially sustainable at the same time. Specifically, we need to cover:
- running costs (mainly the smart processing we pay for on every receipt, plus servers and storage)
- the costs of maintenance and customer support
- and, over the long run, the development work already invested and the ongoing investment in new features
For the app to be sustainable and to run without restrictions, we first and foremost have to “pay for” our core feature — the smart processing of any receipt from a simple photo, including reading every line item and matching it to the products we recognize. That is why this feature has daily and monthly limits built into the app. They prevent excessive use and, at the same time, encourage you to switch to a paid plan if you are an active user.
We believe that if you are an active user — and therefore start hitting the processing limits — the app is saving you a lot of the time you would otherwise spend retyping data from receipts. We absolutely do not want to make the app unpleasant for people who use Zespr for free. We would love to avoid ads over the long term, but we cannot promise it. We will keep working on features that allow more manual receipt entry — features that rely less on automatic processing and are therefore cheaper for us. We are also constantly improving the processing itself, and that is gradually getting cheaper too.
Why do we have processing limits?
So how do we intend to make money? At the very start we said that we absolutely do not want to — and will not — work with individual users’ data for targeted advertising or anything similar. That decision automatically leads us to the traditional exchange of value (time saved, clear statistics) for money. For the whole thing to be sustainable, it has to be a recurring payment, because we too have to pay regularly for servers, artificial intelligence, and our own time.
This model makes sense to us:
- Customers (users) pay us for how well the app works, so we are motivated to keep improving it.
- There is a price we have set that is transparent for you too. You can decide for yourself whether it makes sense.
- We can sleep soundly at night, because we know we will get paid, our customers are happy, and their data stays safe.
This sets us apart from “free” services, which are motivated to provide basic functionality and then focus mainly on how to extract enough value from user data to keep running. The exchange of value for money still happens — it just is not transparent to the user anymore. That is why our privacy policy is so simple: we really do not need anything beyond your email and a nickname. We do not collect any other data about your device or about you — we do not need it and we do not want it. We only have what you give us directly, and nothing more. You can see all of your data in the app; we do not read any other information from your receipts.
What we are planning for the future
In the future we would like to offer features based on anonymized, aggregated data — for example, comparing product prices across different stores. We believe such information can be useful not only for individuals but also for research or public institutions. That use, however, will never be based on the specific data of individual users — only on statistics drawn from a larger sample.
We understand this is not for everyone. Not everyone wants to build such a detailed overview of their spending, let alone pay for it. We are here for the people whose lives our app makes easier, and we will always do our best to make it do everything that requires. If you share our approach, we would be glad to have your support for Zespr — whether by getting the paid version or by telling people who might find the app useful about us.