Privacy Policy

Who we are

Budget Bird is operated by Budget Bird Limited, a New Zealand company. This policy explains how we handle personal information under the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020. If you'd like to talk to a person about any of it, email harry@budgetbird.co.nz.

Students

When a class plays Budget Bird, each team joins by entering the class code their teacher gives them and choosing a team name. That's the whole sign-in. No account is created, and no password exists.

What we store for a session:

• The team name the students typed in.
• The budget decisions the team made during the game.
• Answers to any reflection questions their teacher chose to ask.
• Basic technical information needed to keep the game working, such as whether the device is still connected.

We deliberately don't ask for a student's real name — but a team can type whatever it likes into the team name box, and reflection answers are free text. Teachers should ask students not to put personal details in either. A teacher can delete a class, and everything in it, from their dashboard.

The student pages — the join screen, the game itself, and the budget explorer — carry no advertising pixels, no marketing cookies, and no third-party trackers. The class results belong to the teacher who ran the class, and go nowhere else.

Teachers

When a teacher creates an account, we collect and store:

• Their name and email address, and the school they tell us they teach at.
• The classes they run, and the reports those classes generate.
• Billing details if they buy a report, subscribe, or ask to be invoiced.

We use this to run the product, provide support, send service messages about their account, and — if they haven't opted out — occasional emails about Budget Bird. Every marketing email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing never affects the service.

Analytics and advertising

On our marketing pages and the signed-in teacher area we use two measurement tools. Neither runs on the student pages.

Google Analytics

Tells us which pages people visit and where they get stuck, so we can improve the product. It records page visits and in-product actions against an anonymous identifier.

Meta Pixel and Conversions API

Lets us measure whether our advertising on Facebook and Instagram actually works — whether someone who saw an ad went on to sign up or subscribe. We share with Meta the fact that these actions happened, and, for signed-in teachers, an irreversibly scrambled (hashed) version of the account email address so Meta can match the action to the ad that prompted it. We do not send Meta any student information, any class results, any reflection answers, or any teacher's readable email address.

If you'd rather not be measured this way, browser tracking protection or an ad blocker will stop both tools, and the site will work exactly the same. You can also review your ad settings directly with Meta and Google.

Payments

Payments are handled by Stripe. Card numbers are entered on Stripe's own checkout page and never reach Budget Bird — we only ever see that a payment succeeded, and the billing details we need for a receipt or an invoice. Stripe processes this information under its own privacy policy.

Who else touches your information

• Google Firebase — hosting, database, and login, on Google Cloud servers including in the United States.
• Stripe — payments and invoicing.
• SendGrid — sending account and service emails.
• Google Analytics and Meta — as described above, on non-student pages only.

That's the complete list. We don't sell personal information to anyone, and we don't share it with anyone else except where the law requires it.

How long we keep things

Class data and reports are kept while the teacher's account is active, so they can go back to previous classes. A teacher can delete individual classes at any time, or ask us to delete their account entirely — which removes their classes and the student responses inside them. We keep billing records for as long as New Zealand tax law requires.

Your rights

Under the Privacy Act 2020 you can ask us what personal information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. Email harry@budgetbird.co.nz and we'll respond within 20 working days.

Parents and guardians with a question about a particular class should start with the school, since the teacher runs the class and controls its data — but you're welcome to contact us directly and we'll help.

If you're not happy with how we've handled a privacy matter, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll update the date at the top and tell account holders by email.