Last updated 13 November 2026
Privacy
What Does It Cost is run by Field Friend Ltd (company number 17120050, registered in England and Wales; registered office: Higher House, Wetherby, LS23 6JN). This page explains what happens to the budgets you check and the little else we collect. Questions or requests: james@fieldfriend.africa.
In short: we use your budget only to check it. The file is deleted when the check ends and the report within 60 minutes. To read the budget, we send it to Anthropic's Claude AI, which deletes it within 30 days and doesn't train on it. There are no accounts, cookies or tracking; we only count visits and checks per day.
Budgets you upload
A budget can contain personal data, such as staff names, roles and salaries. We use it only to produce your report.
- It's uploaded over an encrypted connection to our server in Frankfurt, Germany.
- The uploaded file is deleted as soon as the check ends.
- The report, the spreadsheet of lines and the AI's reading of the budget are deleted within 60 minutes, and whenever the server restarts. Save the report if you need it.
- To find each line, quantity and price, the budget's contents are sent to Anthropic's API, where the Claude AI model reads them. Anthropic deletes API inputs and outputs within 30 days, unless they're flagged for breaking its usage policy or it must keep them by law. Its commercial terms don't allow it to train its models on what we send.
- Budget lines are not added to our price database, and we don't sell or share budgets with anyone else.
To share less, you can remove names from a budget before uploading it. The check works on roles and amounts, not on who people are.
Other information
- Your address on the internet (IP address). We hold it in memory for 15 minutes so we can stop someone guessing the access code. It isn't written to disk.
- The access code. It's checked on each request and not stored in your browser.
- Visit counts. Our server counts, per day, how many pages are viewed, how many different people visit, and how many budgets are checked in each country. To count different people without storing anything about them, it combines your IP address and browser type with a random key that changes every day and keeps the result in memory only for that day. Neither your address nor that result is written down, and one day's visitors can't be linked to another's. Only the daily totals are saved.
- No cookies, third-party analytics or tracking. The counting happens on our own server. The fonts are served from our own site too, so loading a page doesn't tell any other company you visited.
- Our host and its network provider process visitors' addresses to deliver and protect the site, under their own policies.
Who processes data for us
- Render (Render Services, Inc., USA) hosts the site on servers in Frankfurt, Germany.
- Anthropic (Anthropic, PBC, USA) provides the AI model that reads budgets.
Both process data on our behalf under data processing terms. This means budget contents can be processed in Germany and the United States.
Why we can use this data
We process a budget because you ask us to check it, the access code and IP address to keep the service secure, and visit counts in our legitimate interest in knowing how much the service is used. If you upload a budget with other people's personal data, you should be allowed to share it for this purpose.
Your rights
Depending on where you are, data protection law (for example Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023, Kenya's Data Protection Act 2019, Ghana's Data Protection Act 2012 or the GDPR) gives you rights to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, and to complain to your data protection authority. Because we delete budgets within an hour, we usually hold nothing by the time you ask, but write to james@fieldfriend.africa and we'll help.
Changes
If we change how we handle data, we'll update this page and the date at the top.