The short version
- Keel reads your Gmail to find bills, subscriptions and renewals, and keeps a list of them for you.
- We never store the text of your emails. We keep the details of each bill (company, amount, dates) and a reference to the email.
- Keel never pays, renews, switches or cancels anything for you.
- You can delete your account and everything in it from Settings at any time. That also removes Keel’s access to Google.
What we read from Gmail
Keel asks Google for read-only access to your Gmail (Google calls this permission gmail.readonly). It looks at messages that look like bills, receipts, subscriptions or renewals and works out the details: the company, the amount, when it’s due, how often it repeats and the plan name. To decide which emails look like bills it first checks only the sender and subject; other emails are never opened.
To work out those details, the text of likely bill emails is sent to Anthropic’s Claude AI, which reads it and returns the details to us. We don’t store the email text, and Anthropic doesn’t use it to train its models.
Only if you choose to send a cancellation email from Keel does Google ask you to also let it send email for you (the gmail.send permission). It is used only to send the one email you have just checked and tapped Send on, from your own Gmail, so it appears in your Sent folder. Keel never deletes, labels or changes your email.
Keel’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Bills you add from a photo
You can add a bill that never came by email by taking a photo of it or uploading a PDF. The file is sent once to Anthropic’s Claude to read the details, and we don’t keep it: we keep the details you check and save, a fingerprint of the file (so the same photo isn’t added twice) and what reading it cost. Nothing is added until you’ve checked the details and pressed Save. Bills you type in yourself aren’t sent to anyone.
What we keep
- Your name and Google email address, and an encrypted key that lets Keel keep reading your Gmail in the background.
- For each bill email: the details we found, Gmail’s reference for the message (so we can open it again in Gmail when you ask), a fingerprint of its text (a one-way hash, so the same email isn’t read twice), when it arrived, the sender’s address, which of your addresses it was sent to and how the bill is paid (directly, App Store, Google Play, PayPal or bundled). Never the subject or the text.
- The choices you make in the app: renew or plan to cancel, “not a bill”, categories, what you share with your household.
- Email addresses you’ve asked Keel to skip, so it stops reading new emails from them.
- Keel is invite-only during the beta: we keep which invite code you joined with, so the friend who invited you sees your display name next to their code (never your email or bills). Your own codes and who used them.
- Your answers on the spot-check page (Correct / Wrong and any note you write), used to measure how accurate Keel is.
- Your county, and whether you have an electric car or a smart meter, if you tell us. They’re used only for deal searches.
- Your places and cars, if you name them (for example “Home” with its Eircode, or “Van” with its registration), and for car and home bills the vehicle registration or service address printed on the bill, so each bill can be filed under the right one. They’re kept as part of the bill’s details and are never sent to deal searches.
Reminder emails
Keel emails your Google address before bills are due (by default 7 days and 1 day before), at most once a day, until you turn it off in Settings or tap Unsubscribe in any reminder. Reminders are sent by our email provider, Resend, from Keel’s own address, never from your Gmail.
A reminder is built only from the details of your bills (company, amount, date, plan). We log that a reminder went out (the day, how many bills it listed and whether it was delivered), not its contents.
If you leave reminders and the monthly summary on, Keel also emails you once a month (early in the month) with what your bills cost last month, what’s coming up and anything that needs you. It’s built the same way, from your bills’ details only, and we keep only that it was sent and how many items it listed. Turn it off in Settings.
Find a better deal and the Ask box
When you ask Keel to find a better deal, Anthropic’s Claude receives only bill details: the company, type of bill, category, plan, typical amount, how often you pay, the renewal or next date, “Ireland”, your county if you set one, for electricity whether you have an electric car or a smart meter if you said, and anything you typed. Never your email text, account numbers or name. Claude searches public web pages with those details. The search and its result are kept with the bill.
When you use the Ask box, your question and the matching bill details (your own bills and ones shared with you) are sent to Claude. To answer some questions it may look at up to 5 of your own emails from that bill’s company; short excerpts go to Claude for that one answer and are never stored by us. A housemate’s emails are never searched. We don’t keep your question or the answer, only how much it cost and when.
Households
Your bills are private. If you join a household, each bill stays private until you choose to share it. Shared bills show their company, amount and dates to the people in your household; your emails are never shown to them. Places and cars belong to the household: everyone in it sees their names, registrations and addresses and can edit them. They’re deleted when the last member deletes their account.
Who can see your data
During the beta, the person running Keel may look at the bill details we extracted (never your email text) to fix problems. Testers are told this before they join.
We use these companies to run Keel. Each only gets what it needs for its job:
- Google: your Gmail, which you connect.
- Supabase: our database, in Ireland (EU).
- Fly.io: runs the app, in the EU.
- Anthropic: Claude, which reads likely bill emails and answers deal searches and questions (in the US).
- Resend: sends reminder emails (in the US).
We don’t sell your data, show you ads, or share it with anyone else.
Deleting your data
Settings → Delete account revokes Keel’s access to your Google account and permanently deletes everything we hold about you: your bills, choices, deal searches, spot checks, reminder log and logs of emails you sent. You can also remove Keel’s access yourself at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
You have the right to see, correct, export or delete your data, and to complain to the Data Protection Commission in Ireland (dataprotection.ie).
Contact
Questions or requests: finn.p.fitzpatrick@gmail.com.
See also our Terms.