ReceGuardOn-Device Privacy: What Never Leaves Your iPhone
Receipts are more revealing than people assume. A year of them maps where you go, when, with whom, and what you buy.
Three specific claims
Privacy pages are usually written in adjectives. Here are the statements that can actually be checked, and what each one means.
| Claim | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| Recognition runs on your iPhone | Text is read through Apple's Vision framework locally. Receipt images are not sent to a ReceGuard server to be processed, and scanning works in aeroplane mode. |
| No account needed | Open the app and scan. There is no email, no sign-up, no profile. Sign in with Apple exists but is optional and only links a subscription. |
| Backups go to your iCloud | Sync is off unless you turn it on, and it uses your own private CloudKit database. We do not operate a receipt store and do not hold a copy. |
Analytics, and the consent that gates them
ReceGuard counts anonymous product usage — which features get opened, how many receipts are scanned, whether the subscription screen was viewed. It never receives receipt photos, merchant names, amounts, notes, searches, your name, or an Apple ID.
Nothing is sent until you allow it on the analytics screen during onboarding, and declining the iOS tracking prompt is respected rather than worked around. You can change your mind in Profile at any time.
The one thing that never syncs
Payment accounts — the names and last four digits of your cards — are written to a file excluded from device backups. Not iCloud, not CloudKit, not your Finder backup. Deleting the app deletes them. This is deliberate, and it is stated on the screen itself rather than buried here.
Because there is no account and no server-side copy, there is no password reset and no support path that recovers your receipts for you. That is the trade: nobody at ReceGuard can read your records, which also means nobody at ReceGuard can restore them.
Why this is a product decision, not a technical one
On-device text recognition has been fast and accurate on iPhones since iOS 13. Any receipt app that uploads your images to read them is choosing to, often for reasons that are perfectly reasonable — human verification, a cross-platform web app, a bookkeeping backend. It is simply worth knowing which choice an app has made before you hand it a year of your spending.
Start with one receipt.
No account, no upload, no setup. Scan something from your wallet and see what the record looks like.
Download ReceGuard free