Your Steward.
Watching your money, not your data.
Steward is a personal finance app for iPhone. Your accounts sync through Plaid; the AI that categorizes, chats, and writes your weekly digest lives entirely on your phone.
No OpenAI, no Gemini, no third-party AI API — ever.
iPhone only, iOS 18+. Coming to the App Store.
The whole data path, end to end
Four hops. Three of them are industry-standard bank plumbing. The last one — the one every other AI finance app sends to a cloud — never leaves your phone.
Your bank
Where your transactions start.
connection ↦
Plaid
Fetches transactions. The same connector Venmo and Chime use. The only service in the path.
to you ↦
Your iPhone
Transactions stored in a local database, on your device.
leaves
AI on this device
A ~2.4 GB model runs right on the phone. No cloud AI. No AI API. Airplane mode works.
Straight answers about your data
Most privacy pages are vibes. This one is specific, and the app repeats it word for word during onboarding.
The AI never phones home
Every AI feature — categorization, chat, your weekly digest — runs on your iPhone. We have no AI servers to send your data to. That's a falsifiable claim: watch the app's network traffic and hold us to it.
We never see your bank login
You sign in inside Plaid's secure flow. Your credentials never touch Steward.
Transactions do transit Plaid
Linked accounts mean Plaid fetches your transactions and delivers them to your phone. That transit is real. Anyone who claims otherwise is selling something.
Nothing to sell
Your transactions never reach a cloud AI, never train anyone's model, and are never sold. Our income is your subscription, not your data.
Your subscription is the business model
Flat price, no freemium bait, no "premium AI" upsell. Because the AI runs on your phone, there's no cloud-AI bill for us to pass on to you.
about $5.83/month · first 14 days free · or $7.99 month-to-month
- Unlimited on-device chat, categorization, weekly digest
- Auditable categories: every decision shows its why
- Your rules always win — editable, deletable, yours
- Reports and month-vs-month trends
- Transaction list + CSV export stay free forever, even if you cancel
Be first through the door
Steward is in private testing. Leave an email and we'll send exactly one message when the App Store build ships. No newsletter, no drip sequence.
Draft page: the form is intentionally disabled until a privacy-respecting endpoint exists. We wouldn't collect your email through a data broker while selling you privacy.
Fair questions
Does my data go through Plaid?
Yes. When you link a bank, Plaid fetches your transactions from the bank and delivers them to your phone — the same connection used by Venmo, Chime, and most US fintech. Plaid processes that data under its own privacy policy, and we won't pretend otherwise. What happens after delivery is the difference: your transactions are stored only on your iPhone, and every AI feature runs there. We don't operate servers that store your financial data.
How can an AI run on a phone? Is it any good?
Steward downloads a ~2.4 GB open model (Gemma-class) once, at setup, and runs it with an on-device inference engine. We keep it honest about its limits: all math — sums, counts, largest-expense — is computed from your local database in SQL, and the model only phrases the answer. It never invents numbers, because it never does arithmetic.
What happens if I stop paying?
Chat, the weekly digest, and reports pause. Your transaction list and full CSV export stay free forever — your data is yours, and holding it hostage would be a dark pattern we built this app to escape. Cancelling is one tap: Settings → Manage subscription → Apple's own sheet.
Can you or anyone see what I ask the AI?
No. Questions are processed by the model on your device. Turn on airplane mode and ask something — it still answers. Apps that pipe your questions to a cloud AI can't do that, and that test is the whole point.
Why should I trust the "no cloud AI" claim?
Because it's falsifiable, not vibes. Proxy the app's network traffic: after the one-time model download, you'll see Plaid sync and nothing else. No OpenAI, no Gemini, no third-party AI API. If we ever break that claim, we deserve the one-star reviews.