About

Our mission is to make budgeting easy and accessible to everyone. As part of that mission, we want to provide a ton of functionality that allows you to plan, track, and analyze your budget for free. So we made many of our decisions with that in mind, philosophically, financially, and technically.

As an example, one of the most important technical decisions we made was building our app on top of the Open Source project Actual Budget, by James Long. We want to give full credit because we think James did an incredible job with building Actual Budget— we’re especially big fans of his approach to privacy. Building on top of Actual Budget allowed us to accomplish a couple important things:

(1) It keeps your financial data private. As we all know, most of the time, when something is free, that means the user is the product, because their data is what the service provider wants the most. But in this case, because Good Steward is taking the “local first” approach, when you are using the free version, all of your financial data is stored on your own device. This means you have a free tool and stay in control of your data.

(2) At the same time, because you’re storing your data on your device, there’s no big server cost that we have to pass on to you for the free version, and that helps us keep Good Steward free forever.

So when we say “free forever”, we are serious! Our free tier was designed, on purpose, to be sustainably free from the get-go, without limiting your usage, or compromising your privacy.

Free tier:
If you are using the free version of Good Steward, our solution stores your budgeting and financial data locally to your device so that you own it. So it's completely up to you how to secure your data, you have full control over it!

Paid tier:
For those who choose to opt in and subscribe to the paid version of Good Steward, it offers advanced features such as Bank Sync to automatically import transactions from financial institutions that you choose to connect with, and Device Sync so you can access your budget and finances across multiple devices. In order to offer these services, it means Good Steward must store your data in our servers, hosted in a secure environment inside Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is used by a majority of leading companies and institutions worldwide.

AWS is one of the world's leading Cloud Infrastructure providers, and adheres to industry standard security, privacy and compliance controls, including:
- SOC 1, SOC 2, SOC 3
- FISMA, DIACAP, and FedRAMP
- PCI DSS
- ISO 9001, ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018
- CSA STAR
Our infrastructure and hosting environments are regularly audited for compliance.

Good Steward never has access to your bank login credentials because we only work through established and trusted platforms (such as MX and Plaid) for providing Bank Sync service. And we only work with third party vendors who adhere to and are trusted according to industry security standards.

Good Steward does not collect or store any data that isn't necessary to provide our users with a great experience. The data that we do have access to will never be sold to any 3rd party for commercial gain. So we have no interest in collecting your personal data beyond the bare minimum needed to authenticate/authorize your access and to improve our services to you, since we don't sell ads in our product.

Good Steward never sees or stores your payment card information. Payment processing is provided through integration with Stripe, which is trusted by millions of companies to process user payments.

Good Steward always adheres to the "least privilege" principle, and has read-only access to your banking data, meaning no access to your banking profile, and cannot move your funds or make any changes to your accounts, because our only focus is to help you manage your finances, and nothing else.

We employ many security measures including but not limited to:
- Bank level encryption both at rest (AES-256) and in transit (TLS 1.2)
- As a standard practice, routinely conduct security reviews of our code and security audit of our infrastructure, and will obtain external penetration testing regularly on an on-going basis, to assess, detect, and mitigate any potential risks in our system.

Good Steward

What sets us apart

Free Personal Finance Training

Privacy First

Budget for Free

Proactive Planning

Frequently Asked Questions

Find out what makes us different

What sets us apart

Free Personal Finance Training

Privacy First

Budget for Free

Proactive Planning

Frequently Asked Questions