Title: FAQ | MoneyBadger URL: https://moneybadger.us/faq/ Description: Short, straight answers. What MoneyBadger is, how your data is handled, and what it costs. Questions # What we get asked the most. Short, straight answers. Don’t see your question? Email [feedback@moneybadger.us](mailto:feedback@moneybadger.us) and we’ll add it. **Is this a calculator or an app?** Both. The web product is the start: [snap your paystub](https://moneybadger.us/snap) and get a prescriptive plan in about 90 seconds, or enter your numbers by hand on the same page. The companion iOS app, [MoneyBadger Budget](https://apps.apple.com/app/moneybadger-budget/id6763796861), is now live in the App Store and helps you stay on the plan between paychecks. The snap is the start; the app is the reinforcement. **Do I have to connect my bank?** No. Your hours and rate is enough to get a useful plan. Linking a financial account is optional, and if you choose to connect one down the road, that is always your call. **How is MoneyBadger different from other budgeting apps?** Those tools are *descriptive*: they show you where your money already went. MoneyBadger is *prescriptive*: it tells you exactly where to put it, before you spend it, with profession-specific defaults none of them model. **Who is MoneyBadger for?** Firefighters, law enforcement and corrections, active-duty service members, and nurses today, with profession-specific pay decoded for each. Teachers, veterans, and the rest of essential work are next on the roadmap. See the [full roster](https://moneybadger.us/who). **What will it cost?** Snapping your paycheck and getting your first plan is always free, and a free account keeps your plan, your payday check-ins, your linked-account net worth, and your linked accounts read in full. Pro is the one paid plan at $30/month: a fresh move every payday, the follow-through on whether it landed, and your whole record. New Pro enrollment opens in waves, so the pricing page is the one place that says whether you can join today or take the waitlist. When it is open you are charged when you join, you can cancel anytime in two clicks, and if you change your mind in your first 14 days we refund it, no questions asked. **Is this financial advice?** No. MoneyBadger is a budgeting and education tool, not a registered investment advisor. Our defaults are research-backed and transparent, but you (or a licensed advisor) make the final call. We cite our sources so you can check the work, see [methodology](https://moneybadger.us/methodology) and [research](https://moneybadger.us/research). **I want to bring MoneyBadger to my organization. Who should I talk to?** Email [feedback@moneybadger.us](mailto:feedback@moneybadger.us) with a sentence about who you serve and we’ll get back to you. **How is my data handled?** The calculator math runs in your browser before you choose to save. When you confirm a Nurse schedule while signed in, its normalized month, frozen pay settings, and row estimates are saved to your account so it can reopen across devices; the raw screenshot and OCR response are not stored in that record, and schedule or account deletion removes it. If you snap a posted schedule, the screenshot is uploaded and read by our AI provider, Anthropic, then the transient read is deleted after your browser picks it up; only the normalized facts you confirm enter the account record. If you snap a paystub, the uploaded image is stored transiently while it is read, then deleted when the read completes, in all cases within approximately one hour. We ask you to keep your member name, SSN, and street address outside the crop. The paystub extraction schema has no field for a member name, SSN, or street address; state and ZIP are intentional fields. On the server, a filter redacts SSN-shaped text and runs of six or more digits from extracted text. It does not detect names or addresses, and it does not alter the uploaded image. A paystub read can retain extracted pay figures and pay-code lines whether or not you save a plan. When a paystub read becomes accepted evidence in your account, account deletion deletes its pay-code lines and clears its corpus dollar and pay-period-date fields, member code, and account link; only anonymized operational PaystubReadEvent metadata remains for that linked read. Account deletion cannot reach a read that was never linked to the account. When you create an account, we store your email and your plan so they are there when you come back. We don’t sell or rent your data, ever. Full posture on the [privacy](https://moneybadger.us/privacy/) and [security](https://moneybadger.us/security/) pages. ## Stop guessing. Get the plan. Your real pay. About 90 seconds. A specific answer shaped to your profession and the way you get paid. [Get your plan →](https://moneybadger.us/snap) Bring it to your department Built with real first responders · feedback@moneybadger.us --- Generated from the live page source by apps/web/scripts/generate-agent-mirror.mjs; do not hand-edit. Regenerate with: npm run generate:mirror -w moneybadger-web. If this file and the live page ever disagree, the live page wins.