Short answers, with the important boundaries left in.

It extracts structured facts from corrected bill text, links findings to document evidence, checks supported arithmetic outside the AI model, and suggests questions you can ask. It does not certify a bill or act for you.

Penny is a fictional AI bill-analysis guide, not a real person or licensed professional. Her answers are educational and may be incomplete or wrong.

No. ExpenseReader extracts selectable text in bounded server memory, then shows it for correction and masking. Only the corrected text you approve is sent for AI analysis.

The application does not intentionally persist original PDFs, extracted text, analysis results, or chats in its database or browser storage. Page state is temporary. Hosting and AI providers process requests under their own retention controls, which is different from application storage.

ExpenseReader sets store:false on OpenAI Responses requests, which prevents Response application-state storage for those calls. It does not by itself establish Zero Data Retention. OpenAI states that abuse-monitoring logs may retain content for up to 30 days, subject to the controls that apply to the service account.

The current maximum is five bill analyses per signed anonymous browser token per UTC day. Contextual and general chat have separate limits, and the shared monthly AI budget or provider availability can stop requests earlier.

Medical bills and EOBs, utilities, phone/cable/internet, insurance, SaaS and business invoices, property tax, and credit-card statements are supported. Inputs are pasted text and text-layer PDFs—not photographs, scans, OCR, or other file types.

No. An EOB describes how an insurer processed a claim and is not itself a demand for payment. ExpenseReader keeps billed, allowed, insurer-paid, adjustments, and patient-responsibility amounts distinct when the document provides them.

Yes, when they are related—for example, consecutive statements or a provider bill and EOB. ExpenseReader requires privacy-preserving matching or your explicit confirmation and will not silently merge an ambiguous pair.

It removes the document, analysis, and follow-up state held by the page. Refresh and session expiry do the same. It cannot retract data that hosting or AI providers have already processed or retained.

No. ExpenseReader is an educational reading aid. Use the issuer, an official source, or an appropriately qualified professional for decisions that affect health, rights, coverage, taxes, credit, or money.