Frequently asked questions

No. LowScout is in open beta: create an account and you are in. There is no application, no waitlist, and nobody reviewing anything. The only requirement is a verified email address, which is part of signing up. Two-factor authentication is offered and strongly recommended, not required.

Four specific things. Anyone can join. It is free, and there is no card entry anywhere in the product. Screens and features will change while you use it. And some things are unfinished — which we name on this page rather than let you discover. What does not change: every number is computed from your own statement, your uploads stay private, and we never claim a cancellation succeeded that we cannot prove.

The beta is free. There is no card entry anywhere in the product, so nothing can start charging you. Paid plans come later, announced publicly and opt-in, and beta users will hear about it with time to decide.

That is genuinely your call, and the demo exists so you can decide with your eyes open — it runs on sample data and shows exactly what you would get. What we can tell you: two-factor authentication is available and one click away in Settings, files are checked for malware and stored encrypted in private storage, the amounts and merchants in them never appear in our logs, your statements are never shared, sold, or used to train AI models, and one email deletes all of it.

Only if you choose to. There are two equal ways in: connect a bank or card account through Plaid — read-only transaction access, where you sign in at your bank’s own flow and LowScout never receives or stores your bank username or password — or download a statement (PDF or CSV) from your bank’s website and upload the file. Both feed the same analysis. Connecting asks for its own separate consent, syncs periodically rather than in real time, and can be disconnected at any time, which also deletes the transactions it imported.

No — and that is by design, not a missing feature. It guides you: reviewed step-by-step instructions for the specific merchant where we have them, an honest general path where we do not. You perform the cancellation; LowScout never contacts the merchant and never signs in to your accounts.

We never claim it worked. When you mark a cancellation done it shows as "Marked done by you" — your word, honestly labelled. Only when statements you upload later cover about two billing cycles with no new charge does it become "Verified from your statements". If the charge comes back, we tell you that too.

Computed, always. Every total — monthly, yearly, per-charge — is exact arithmetic over the statement you uploaded. Nothing is projected, rounded up, or invented, and each charge shows the evidence it was built from.

Statement formats vary a lot by bank, and coverage is honest work in progress. If a PDF fails, try your bank’s CSV export — and if the columns are unusual, you can point out which is which yourself. Every failure shows a plain reason and a support reference; sending us that reference with your bank’s name is the fastest way to get that bank supported.

The audit itself is fully deterministic — no AI is involved in finding charges or computing totals. There is an optional AI-summary feature that is switched off during the open beta; we will not turn it on until our AI provider’s data terms meet the bar we have set: no retention of your data, and no training on it. When it does arrive it is opt-in behind its own consent, it only ever receives derived facts (merchant names, amounts, cadence — never your uploaded documents), and every figure it states is checked against your own numbers before you see it.

Charts and spending trends, a monthly summary report, alerts when something changes, self-serve deletion and export (we do both by email today), the AI summary (off, above), and native mobile apps (the web app is responsive). Everything on that list is either planned and labelled, or openly undecided.

They are checked for malware on upload, stored encrypted in private storage that nothing can read without a short-lived link tied to your account, and turned into your transactions and audit. They are never shared, never sold, and never used to train AI models.

LowScout is a one-person company. There is no admin screen that shows your audit. Support diagnosis works from the reference shown on error screens, which points at logs that contain no financial values by design. The founder does have direct database access — someone has to run the service — and uses it for an individual account only when diagnosing a problem you have reported. Aggregate reporting is counts only: no amounts, no merchant names, no file names.

It is optional, and we strongly recommend it. A LowScout account can show someone a map of your recurring finances, and a password alone is thin protection for that. We stopped short of forcing it because a mandatory authenticator app locks people out of their own data when they lose a phone, and account recovery is not something a one-person company does well yet. Turn it on in Settings → Account & security: an authenticator app takes about a minute, and save the backup codes somewhere you can reach without your phone.

No advertising pixels on any page you see while signed in, and no session recording on any signed-in page — financial screens are never replayed. That is an architectural rule in this codebase, not a preference. Product analytics is a small, fixed list of events carrying counts and category codes only: no amounts, no merchant names, no file names, no free-form text.

Yes. Email us from your account’s address with "delete my account". We confirm it is really you, then permanently delete your uploaded files, everything computed from them, and your account. What remains afterwards is a single anonymous record that a deletion happened — it contains no personal data. A self-serve button is not built yet, so a person handles this today, which is why it takes a couple of days rather than a click.

Yes — email us and we will send it within the same window. A self-serve export button is not built yet, and we would rather say so than let you hunt for it in settings.

Email us. Anything involving your account or your data goes there, and you will get a first reply within two business days. Anything that looks like a wrong number, a privacy problem, or a security issue gets same-day attention — say so in the subject and it jumps the queue.

To us, yes — it is the most serious class of bug this product can have. A figure that does not match your statement, or a cancellation marked "Verified" that should not be, stops other work the day it is reported. Please tell us, with the reference from the error screen if there was one.

Not yet, and no. There is no revenue today; the plan is paid plans later, publicly announced and opt-in. We do not sell data, we do not run ads, and we have no advertising business to feed — which is exactly why the privacy rules above can be as strict as they are.

No. LowScout does arithmetic on statements you upload and shows you what recurs. What to do about it is your call, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Your account, your uploads, and your audit carry over — nothing resets, nothing is deleted, and you will not wake up subscribed to anything. When paid plans arrive they will be announced in advance and opt-in.

It is a one-person company, so it is a fair question. The commitment: 30 days’ notice by email, an export of your data on request during that window, and deletion of everything afterwards. We would rather write that down now than improvise it later.