Terms of sale and use

Section 1What you are buying

The app is a free download and everything works from the first day — entries, reconciling, search, recurring bills, transfers, export and backup. It asks for the one-time $9.99 after you balance your first statement, or after 100 entries, whichever comes first.

What the $9.99 buys is a one-time unlock of the app on the store account you bought it with — your Apple Account if you bought it on the App Store, your Google account if you bought it on Google Play. One payment. No subscription, no premium tier, and free updates. There are no ads, before you pay or after, because there is no ad code in the app at all.

The two stores keep separate records and neither can see the other, so a purchase on one store is not a purchase on the other. If you buy the unlock on an iPhone and later move to an Android phone, or the other way round, the new store has no record of your payment and will ask you to buy it again. We would undo that if we could reach into either store, and we cannot. Restoring a purchase works on the store you bought it from, across your own devices, as far as that store’s own rules allow.

If you decide not to pay, nothing is taken away. The register stays readable, searchable, printable and backed up. You just cannot write new entries until you unlock it. We think that matters more than any promise we could make, so it is written into the terms and not just the sales copy: not paying us never costs you your records.

BalanceWright is a phone app for iPhone and Android. It is built for phones. It is not designed or tested for tablets.

BalanceWright is going through store review, so it is not on sale yet. When it does go on sale, the App Store and Google Play are the only places to buy it. Nothing on this website takes your money, and no page here will ever ask you for a card number.

Section 2You buy it from the store, not from us

The sale happens in the App Store or on Google Play, depending on which phone you have. The store takes the payment, the store keeps the receipt, and the store’s own terms cover that sale. Apple applies its standard license for apps, the one you agreed to when you set up your Apple Account; Google applies the Google Play terms of service in the same way. Nothing on this page replaces either of them. Where this page and the store’s terms ever disagree about the sale itself, the store’s terms are the ones that govern it.

Because the store handles the payment, we never see your card number and we never store one. Records the one-time purchase so it can be restored on a new phone. What the app and this site do and do not collect is set out in full on the privacy page.

One purchase is for you and the App Store or Google Play account you bought it with. How far that reaches across your own devices, or your family, is decided by that store’s rules, not by ours.

Section 3Refunds go through the store you bought it from

Because the store takes the money, the store is the one who can give it back. We cannot refund you directly, however much we would like to. That is not us passing you around; it is simply how buying an app works, on either phone.

There are two routes, and which one is yours depends on where you bought it. If you are not sure, the receipt came by email from Apple or from Google, and that tells you.

If the store turns you down, or that page will not work for you, write to us and we will help you chase it. We cannot overrule Apple or Google, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we will not do is argue with you about whether you deserve your money back.

Section 4Your records are yours, and your backups are your job

Your register belongs to you. We do not hold a copy of it. That means we cannot lose it for you. It also means we cannot get it back for you. Both halves of that are true, and you should read them together.

It works with no internet connection. There is no bank login, so there is no password of yours to lose and no sync to break.

So keeping a copy is your responsibility. The app is built to make that as close to effortless as we could get it:

• Your register lives on your own phone, and the app keeps rotating copies of it by itself.
• On iPhone, if you are signed in to iCloud with iCloud Drive turned on, every copy is also written to the app’s own iCloud Drive folder, by itself. If you are not, the Backup screen tells you so rather than claiming a copy it did not make.
• On Android, the register is included in the phone’s own backup, and you can pick a folder for the app to write its copies into — one that syncs to Google Drive if you want it to.
• You can also save a copy anywhere you like and restore from it — your own folder, a file you emailed to yourself, or iCloud Drive on an iPhone.
• Any register exports to a CSV file or a printable PDF, whenever you want, and that keeps working whether or not you have paid.

Please do keep one. A phone can be dropped in a sink, and a sink is not something either of us can undo. If you would rather hold your register on paper as well, the printable copy is there for exactly that.

Section 5What BalanceWright is not

BalanceWright is an independent app. It is not affiliated with Apple, with Google, or with any other checkbook or finance app. It does not connect to your bank and it does not give financial advice.

It is a check register. It adds up what you write down and it shows you the total. Nothing in the app is advice about your money, your taxes or your legal position, and nothing in it should be treated as such.

If you use your register to prepare a tax return, to support a claim, or to settle anything legal, check the figures yourself and take proper professional advice. We do not warrant that the app is fit for those purposes, and we do not hold it out as accounting software.

Reconciling means checking your register against your bank’s statement. It is not a replacement for that statement. Where the two disagree, your bank’s record is the one that counts with your bank. Finding that disagreement early is the whole point of keeping a register.

Section 6What we promise, and what we do not

What we promise is small and we intend to keep it: to build it carefully, to fix what breaks, to keep your records readable, and to answer your email.

Beyond that, the app is supplied as it is. We do not promise it will never have a fault, that it will suit every way of keeping a register, or that it will run forever on every future version of iOS or Android. Software written by people has faults in it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

In the ordinary legal words: the app is provided “as is”, without warranties of any kind, so far as the law allows. If a figure in your register is wrong, the consequences of that land with you, not with us. That is the trade you make with any register, paper or otherwise — you write it down, and you check it against the bank.

None of that takes away a right you have as a consumer that cannot be signed away. And nothing here limits our responsibility for anything the law does not permit us to limit.

Section 7Fair use of the app

There is not a great deal to say here, because there is not much you can do wrong with a check register on your own phone. Use it for your own money, for as long as you like.

Please do not:

• take the app apart and sell it, or something made out of it, as your own;
• work around the one-time unlock, or help other people to, instead of buying it on your own App Store or Google Play account;
• use the app to do something against the law.

If you do one of those, we may stop supporting your copy. We cannot reach into your phone and delete your register, and we would not want the ability to.

Section 8If these terms change

If we change this page, the date at the top changes with it. Some changes matter more than others. If one touches what you paid for, or what happens to your records, we will say so plainly at the top of this page. We will not quietly edit a sentence in the middle and hope you miss it.

What you have already bought stays bought. We are not going to rewrite these terms to take back an unlock you have paid for, or to turn it into something you have to keep paying for. That is the thing most of our users are leaving behind, and doing it to them here would make this whole site a lie.

Section 9Which country’s law applies

These terms are governed by the laws of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Nothing here removes any consumer rights you have that cannot be waived under the law where you live.

In plain terms: if something ever went wrong between us, Pakistani law is the law that reads this page — but the consumer protections you have where you live still stand, and nothing above asks you to give one of them up.

Section 10How to reach us

BalanceWright is an independent app studio. Support is read by the person who built the app — not a queue, not a form, and not a robot that closes your ticket after four days.

Write about anything: a fault, a question about this page, a refund the store would not give you, or a sentence here you think is unfair.

support@balancewright.com

The pages next to this one: what we collect, the questions people actually ask, and who is behind this.