You spent $247 at Costco.
On what?

I built Zedi for my own banking, before anyone else’s.

Every personal-finance app you have heard of sits somewhere inside a larger holding company, venture fund, or conglomerate whose balance sheet has to be fed. The way it gets fed is by reselling aggregated spending patterns to advertisers, lenders, and “research partners.” I did not want that arrangement for my own money, so I built Zedi as the personal-finance app I would use myself. I am the first customer. Public signups only opened because my IME 543 Human Factors and Ergonomics class with Dr. Duha Ali at Cal Poly gave me the opportunity to turn the tool I was already using every day into a platform I could share with friends, family, and eventually anyone else. It still has to be good enough for me to trust with my own money before I ask anyone else to trust it with theirs.

Scale is not security. A consumer fintech app with millions of users is a larger target with a wider attack surface and a longer chain of people, services, and automated pipelines that touch your data on its way through. The number those companies will never publish on a landing page is how many of those people and systems actually have access to your records, and how many of them can identify a user’s habits from what they see. For Zedi, that number is one, and it is me. For everyone else it sits somewhere between “we won’t say” and an acquisition deck.

My background is industrial engineering, with concentrations in computer-science development, statistics, data analytics, and a cybersecurity-first approach to building software. I wrote the Rust backend. Rust is the memory-safe systems language behind Cloudflare, Discord, and a lot of modern security-critical infrastructure, picked specifically because the bugs that leak user data are hard to write in it. I wrote the Postgres database with row-level isolation policies that scope every single query to your user id at the database layer itself, not in application code where a forgotten check could expose another customer’s row. I wrote the Cloudflare R2 storage layer, and the Anthropic OCR pipeline that deletes your receipt image the instant the line items are parsed. I read every line of all of it, because I am the one who answers the email when it breaks.

Personal privacy is not a feature I bolted on for marketing. It is the reason this app exists at all. I built the version of a finance tool I would actually trust with my own data, and the only honest way to ship it is to give other people that same version, on the same code, with the same posture.

If anything in the data policy or the comparison table above is unclear, email [email protected] and I will answer it personally. There is no support team to forward it to.