Last updated: August 26, 2026
Diem is an app for people who bill their own expenses back. You photograph a receipt, Diem reads the total, and it builds the document you send to whoever is paying you. This policy explains what the app does and does not do with your information.
The short version
- Diem has no accounts. There is no sign-up, no email, no password and no profile. We do not know who you are.
- Your receipts, photographs, jobs, payers and claims are stored on your device only. We do not hold them and cannot read them.
- We do not use analytics, advertising or third-party trackers.
- If you subscribe to Diem Pro, one thing leaves your phone: a receipt photograph Diem could not read on its own, sent to be read. Nothing else — no name, no job, no history, no location.
- You can switch that off in Settings and keep the rest of your subscription.
- Delete the app and everything goes with it. There is no copy on our side to ask us for.
Your records stay on your phone
Everything you put into Diem — receipt photographs, amounts, currencies, dates, merchants, job names, who is paying you, rates, claims and the documents Diem builds — is stored on your device, inside the app's own private storage. It is not uploaded to us, backed up to us, or readable by us.
If your phone backs itself up to iCloud, your Diem data is inside that backup. That backup is Apple's, under Apple's terms, and we have no access to it.
Permissions we request, and why
- Camera — to photograph a receipt. Photographs are saved in the app on your device.
- Photo Library — so you can import a receipt you already photographed, and so Diem can save a receipt photo back to your library when you ask it to. We only touch photos you select or save.
- Location — read once, and only while the app is open, to name the town and country a job is in. Two things ask for it, and both are something you did: tapping the location control on a job, or saving a new job with the place box left empty. You can switch the second one off in Settings — "Offer to find the place". Diem never reads your location in the background, and no coordinates are stored — the place name is kept, the position is not. The lookup that turns a position into a place name is performed by Apple on your device's behalf, under Apple's own privacy terms.
You can refuse or revoke any of these at any time in your device Settings. Diem keeps working; you type the things it can no longer see for itself.
Exchange rates
To price a receipt in a foreign currency, Diem downloads published exchange rates from open.er-api.com. That request carries nothing about you — no receipt, no amount, no identifier. It asks for a public file. As with any request to any website, the service that answers it can see your IP address.
Cloud reading — only if you subscribe
Diem reads most receipts entirely on your phone. Diem Pro adds a cloud reading step for paper the phone cannot read on its own. This is the one time anything of yours leaves your device, and Diem tells you so inside the app, in plain words, before the first receipt is ever sent.
What is sent: the receipt photograph, and nothing else. No name, no job, no payer, no history, no location, no device identifier.
Where it goes: to Diem's own server, which passes the image straight to Anthropic's Claude API to be read, and returns the amount, its currency, the date and the country the paper prints to your phone.
What Diem keeps: no image, ever. The photograph is held in memory for the seconds the reading takes and is never written to disk on our server.
The one thing our server does keep is a count — how many readings your subscription has used this calendar month — so the monthly limit can be enforced and the service cannot be abused. It is stored against an identifier that comes from Apple's signed subscription record. That identifier is not linked to your name, your email or your receipts, and it does not tell us who you are. The count resets each month.
What Anthropic keeps: Anthropic holds what is sent to their API for a limited time — up to 30 days under their current terms — so they can check their service is not being misused, and longer only if a request is flagged for review. Under those same terms, material sent through their API is not used to train their models. Their handling is governed by their privacy policy, not ours.
A receipt photograph normally shows a merchant, a date and an amount. If a particular receipt is one you would rather no third party held even briefly, switch cloud reading off in Settings — Reading receipts — and type the total in yourself. With it off, nothing leaves your phone except the exchange rates described above.
Purchases
Diem Pro is a subscription sold through Apple's App Store. Apple handles the payment — we never see your card, your billing address or your Apple ID. To check that a subscription is live, our server verifies Apple's own signed subscription record. That record does not contain your name or email. There is no account to log in to, here or anywhere.
Third-party services
Diem's own server exists for one reason: an API key cannot ship inside an app. It reads receipts and keeps no images. Apart from that server, the exchange rate feed, Anthropic's reading service and Apple's own payment and location services described above, Diem sends nothing anywhere. There is no analytics service, no crash reporter, no advertising and no tracking software of any kind.
Diem never connects to a bank, a card feed or an accounting system, and it cannot move money. Diem builds a file; a person sends it.
When you send a document
When you produce a PDF or a spreadsheet from Diem and send it, you are sending it — through your own mail, messages or files app, to whoever you choose. We are not a party to that, and what happens to it afterwards is between you and the person you sent it to.
Children's privacy
Diem is a tool for working adults and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect anything from children.
Data retention and deletion
Delete the app and everything goes with it — every receipt, photograph, job and document. There is no copy on our side to request. Inside the app you can also delete any individual receipt, job or claim at any time. The monthly reading count described above expires on its own and holds nothing about you.
Your rights
Privacy law in many places gives you the right to see, correct, export or delete the personal data a company holds about you. We hold none — your records are on your own device, and we have no account, no name and no email address for you. We do not sell or share personal information, because we have none to sell. If you believe otherwise, write to us and we will answer.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy, we will update the "Last updated" date above. Changes that affect what leaves your phone will also be said inside the app.
Contact
Questions about this policy or the app? Email us at jmanrob@gmail.com.