Ascend — Privacy Notice

Last updated: 19 September 2026

Ascend is a privacy-forward financial dashboard. Create an account to track your whole net worth. This notice explains what Ascend collects, why it is used, how it is protected, and which service providers process it. By creating an account you acknowledge this notice.

What we collect

• Account and profile information — your email address, optional name, account identifier, security settings, and a password (stored only as a bcrypt hash, never in plain text). If you enroll two-factor authentication, Ascend stores an encrypted authenticator secret and hashed backup codes. Waitlist requests before signup store the email address you submit.
• Financial data you choose to link or enter — balances, account names, holdings, and institution names from brokerages you connect through SnapTrade (Pro); manual bank, retirement, asset, and debt values; public crypto wallet addresses and derived on-chain balances; and property addresses / valuation inputs. Linked brokerage data may also include account activity or transactions made available by the provider.
• Information you enter for optional features — public X handles, questions you ask the AI copilot, goals or preferences you choose to let the copilot remember, and vehicle details for the optional vehicle-value estimator.
• Subscription and purchase records — the billing provider, product or plan, subscription and transaction identifiers, status, renewal setting, and relevant dates needed to grant and reconcile Pro access. Ascend does not store payment-card or bank-account details.
• Usage and diagnostics — account-linked product interactions such as setup milestones and feature opens, plus coarse performance measurements such as load and interaction timing. Performance measurements are stored without a user ID. Logo-delivery diagnostics are aggregate cache, result, byte, and timing counts; they are not stored with a user ID, ticker, institution domain, or object URL.
• Notification information — if you turn notifications on, a web-push subscription or Apple Push Notification service device token and your notification preferences.
• Device and session signals — opaque browser-session digests used for per-device session listing/revocation; and, when offline cache is enabled, an encrypted copy of your last dashboard state on that device.
• Generated artifacts and share tokens — cached AI outputs such as rundowns, research, Signal briefs, podcast call notes, and insights; and public share tokens you create for research or Signal teasers.

Ascend does not store your brokerage credentials. SnapTrade sends Ascend the read-only account data you authorize, which may include balances, holdings, account names, activity, and institution names. Bank and other unsupported balances are entered manually. Ascend never stores crypto private keys or seed phrases.

Who we share it with

To operate the Service, Ascend sends necessary data to these third-party services, each governed by its own privacy policy:

• SnapTrade — connecting brokerages (Pro). (SnapTrade privacy)
• RentCast — estimating real-estate values from the property address you enter (optional seed). The address is also sent to the U.S. Census Geocoder to resolve the property's region for the keyless FHFA House Price Index path.
• Public blockchain & price APIs — for crypto wallets, your public wallet address is sent to public block explorers and price feeds (e.g. Coinbase, Jupiter, GeckoTerminal, Blockscout, Hyperliquid) to read on-chain balances.
• Finnhub and Nasdaq — ticker symbols of your holdings (and watchlist tickers, when enabled) may be sent to look up earnings dates, dividends, benchmarks, and related market facts. Which provider is used depends on the feature and whether that path is enabled under Ascend's source-rights controls (for example, Nasdaq is the primary approved path for benchmarks and dividends; Finnhub is used for earnings, company facts, and optional daily candles only when commercial rights are approved; Nasdaq remains the earnings fallback).
• Logo and favicon sources — public ticker symbols or institution web domains may be sent to brand-image sources, which can include Parqet, Financial Modeling Prep, Google's favicon service, and DuckDuckGo's favicon service. Ascend can retain one validated, global copy of a public brand image for reuse; it is not stored with your identity, balances, share counts, or account.
• Avatars provided by Unavatar — for the optional Signal report, the public X handles you follow are sent to fetch their profile avatars. When Ascend's private avatar cache is approved and enabled, Ascend may retain one validated, access-controlled global copy while that handle remains in use. The stored copy is configured for expiration 28 days after its last successful refresh and is not stored with your identity, balances, share counts, or account.
• Anthropic, PBC — a third-party AI company (Claude) that powers Ascend's optional personalized AI features. This is not Apple and not Ascend. Depending on which you use, we send: the vehicle details you enter (vehicle-value estimator); a read-only summary of your own finances and your questions (AI copilot); a small durable profile of preferences/goals you share in chat (copilot memory — never your balances, which are read live each time); your monthly recap numbers (Wrapped narration); your net-worth metrics (proactive insights); portfolio context for Weekly Rundown and holdings-digest narration; and the ticker symbol you ask about (stock research, which also uses Anthropic's web search). The copilot is scoped to your own data only and provides information, not financial advice. An administrator can turn any or all AI features off for everyone. You can view or clear your copilot memory anytime under Settings.
• xAI — powers the optional Signal report. Ascend sends configured public X handles and portfolio-relevance terms to produce a linked summary. The report cache stores each cited post's public text alongside its summary so you can read the original in-app. If an administrator enables the forward-calendar feature, Ascend also sends xAI the ticker symbols it tracks — a list that includes securities held by Ascend users — to search for announced company events. Your balances, share counts, account details, and identity are never sent to xAI.
• Google Gemini — transcribes supported public podcast videos for the optional Podcast Tape feature before Ascend summarizes them. If an administrator enables the forward-calendar feature, Gemini also reads the titles and snippets of search results about tracked companies to identify announced events. Your balances, share counts, account details, and identity are never sent to Gemini.
• Stripe — processes subscriptions purchased on the web. Payment details are entered with Stripe and are not stored by Ascend. Ascend receives subscription, plan, customer, and payment-status information needed to provide and manage Pro access.
• Apple — processes subscriptions purchased in the iOS app through the App Store and delivers native notifications through the Apple Push Notification service when you opt in. For App Store subscriptions, Ascend receives and stores the product, signed transaction and renewal information, subscription status, and relevant dates needed to grant and reconcile Pro access. Ascend does not receive your Apple ID payment-card or bank-account details.
• Browser push services — when you enable Web Push, Ascend stores your push endpoint and sends notification payloads to the browser vendor's push service (e.g. Mozilla, Google FCM, Apple web push) so alerts can reach that browser.
• Resend — delivers Ascend's transactional, invite, and weekly-recap emails. Emails you've opted into may include your name and your net-worth figures.
• Cloudflare, Render, and the configured cloud database provider — provide content delivery, durable public-logo object storage, application hosting, and database hosting. Production infrastructure providers may process request metadata and encrypted or access-controlled application data as needed to provide hosting, storage, backup, performance, and security services.

Your data is never sold. Ascend does not share it for advertising.

Public share links

If you create a research or Signal share link, Ascend publishes a non-personal teaser page (and optional preview image) at a public URL. Those pages are designed not to include your balances, holdings sizes, follow list, or identity. Anyone with the link can view the teaser. Share tokens are revoked when you delete your account where they are user-scoped; some Signal share content is drawn from global, non-personal caches and may remain reachable by token.

How it's protected

• Each user's data is isolated — you can only ever see your own accounts and history.
• Sensitive provider connection tokens, your authenticator secret, and optional Ask Ascend memory are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, with the key held separately from the database.
• Sensitive actions (account erasure, data export, institution unlinks) may require a fresh password or authenticator confirmation.
• All traffic is served over HTTPS.
• Face ID / Touch ID on supported devices is a device-local privacy lock only — Ascend does not receive your biometric data.

Administrator access

Administrative routes require an administrator role. Support views are intended to lead with connection health and diagnostic metadata rather than balances, holdings, transactions, wallet addresses, or AI chat content. Authorized administrators retain the technical ability to access application systems for support, security, and incident response. Privileged actions and sensitive support access are logged. To reveal specific identifiers in the support diagnostic tool, an administrator must request access and the affected member must approve with a fresh password or authenticator code in Settings → Security → Support access. Approval expires after 15 minutes and can be revoked sooner. Declining does not remove account features. The member directory still shows names and emails for account administration. Public wallet addresses can reveal balances and activity through outside blockchain services.

Keeping your data, disconnecting, and deleting it

Active account data is generally kept while your account exists. Account-linked usage events generally use a rolling 400-day window; a small number of once-per-account lifecycle milestones may remain until account deletion. Coarse performance samples are stored without a user ID and generally kept for 90 days. Security, billing, audit, and backup records may be retained for a limited period when needed to protect the service, meet provider or legal requirements, resolve disputes, or restore systems. After account deletion, Apple billing reconciliation retains a one-way digest of any original transaction identifier plus non-user-keyed notification delivery metadata (event ID, type, processing status, and timestamps) needed to deduplicate and acknowledge later App Store notices. It retains no user ID, Apple account token, raw transaction identifier, product, signed transaction or renewal data, receipt, or subscription state. You can:

• Remove an individual account row from Ascend. For manual accounts, this deletes the saved row. For linked SnapTrade accounts, the provider connection remains linked but that account stops counting locally unless you reconnect the source.
• Unlink a full brokerage connection at any time from the app. Ascend revokes supported upstream access and removes the source's current synced accounts from your dashboard, so they stop counting toward your net worth. Those account rows are then kept, hidden, for 90 days, so that reconnecting the same source restores your history instead of starting over; after 90 days Ascend permanently deletes them along with their per-account history and cash-flow rows. Deleting your whole Ascend account removes them immediately rather than waiting out that window. Manual accounts, your saved net-worth history, and other connections are not affected.
• Remove a saved property or crypto wallet. This deletes the saved address/property and local valuation rows from Ascend; crypto removal has no private keys to revoke because Ascend never stores them.
• Clear your saved net-worth history from the app; disable offline cache; revoke browser sessions; or turn off push notifications (which removes stored push endpoints for that device).
• Permanently delete your entire account — open Settings, choose Account & security, and then choose Delete account. Ascend attempts to cancel an active Stripe web subscription and revoke supported brokerage access before purging user-scoped application data (including push subscriptions and waitlist rows for your email). Ascend cannot cancel an App Store subscription for you; deleting your Ascend account does not cancel that subscription or stop Apple billing. Account deletion remains available and purges your user-scoped Ascend data even while an App Store subscription is active. Manage or cancel it separately in your Apple ID subscription settings. If a brokerage provider is temporarily unavailable, Ascend locks the account and retries its access-revocation step rather than silently claiming that upstream access has ended.
• Request help with deletion by emailing [email protected].

Contact

Questions about your data or this notice: [email protected].

See also our Terms of Service, Trust & Security, and AI Transparency.