Privacy Policy

LiveGasCost is operated by Live Gas Cost LLC, Fitchburg, Wisconsin, USA ("we", "us"). This Privacy Policy explains what the LiveGasCost app and website do with your information. Questions go to support@livegascost.com.

The short version

• Your drives are saved on your phone.
• If you sign in to the web dashboard, a copy of each drive goes to your LiveGasCost account so you can see it on the website. If you never sign in, we never receive them.
• The app still goes online for things like maps, fuel prices, place search, app updates and crash reports. We never track you across apps, and we never sell your data. We show no ads and use no ad trackers.
• A few things leave your phone so the app can work: gas prices, map pictures, crash reports, the trip planner and place search while you use them, and the start and end points of a drive, which your phone's own map service (Google on most Android phones, Apple on iPhone) turns into a street address. If you are signed in, our own place-search server also fills in a missing address on its own (section 9). Each one is listed below.
• You can delete a drive, or your whole account, at any time.

Your trips stay on your phone unless you sign in to the web dashboard (your phone's map service turns each drive's start and end into an address). While you are signed in, each finished drive is copied to your LiveGasCost account automatically — signing in is the switch, and Plus has nothing to do with it. Section 1 is what stays on the phone, section 2 is what reaches us when you sign in, and section 4 onwards is every other request the app makes.

1. What stays on your phone

Your recorded drives (times, distance, gas cost, the GPS line of the route, idle time, purpose, notes, vehicle), your saved places, your fill-ups, and your settings. These live in the app's own storage on your phone. We cannot see them unless you sign in to the web dashboard (section 3).

• Vehicle information: the year, make, model, fuel type, and MPG of the vehicles you add.
• Drive data: distance, duration, idle time, estimated fuel used, and estimated cost.
• Location data: the GPS coordinates of your route, recorded while a drive is running so the app can price each mile.
• Motion activity: if you turn on automatic drive detection, the app uses your device's motion sensors to recognize when you start and stop driving.

2. Your phone's own backup

Worth naming plainly, because the rest of this page is precise and this is the exception. Your phone's own backup can keep a copy. On Android, if Google backup is on and the phone has a screen lock, your drives, cars and typed pump prices go into it, encrypted with your screen lock so Google can't read them; the routes never do. On iPhone, if iCloud Backup is on, it includes the app's data the way it does any app's. That copy is in your own Google or Apple account, and we have no access to it. If you would rather it were not there, you can exclude LiveGasCost in your iPhone's backup settings or turn off Google backup on Android, and nothing else about the app changes. If you want a copy without an account, export your drives as a CSV file from Settings → My data and keep it wherever you like.

You can export your drives, with addresses and notes, to a file from Settings > My data. The file is made on your phone and goes only where you send it.

3. If you sign in to the web dashboard

Signing in is optional, and it is the one thing that changes where your drives are. When you sign in with your email and password:

• Your account: your email address and a scrambled (hashed) version of your password. We never see or store your actual password.
• Your drives: each drive's date and times, distance, duration, idle time, gas used, average MPG, cost, purpose (business, personal or commute) and whether you confirmed it, label, note, vehicle name, start and end address, and the line the drive followed on the map. The app sends these automatically after each drive while you are signed in. With each upload it also says whether it is the Android or iPhone app and its version number, which we count only as weekly totals, with no account attached.
• The route line is asked about separately. Before the line a drive followed is sent for the first time, the app asks you, once, and records which wording you agreed to. Until you answer, your drives still sync and the road is held back.
• Edits you make on the website come back to your phone.
• Your vehicles on the website: cars you add on the website's Garage page or bring in by importing a backup file there (name, year, make, model, fuel type and MPG), and any odometer readings you enter, are stored on our server. A car you delete there is hidden, and kept until you delete your account.
• Teams: if you join a team and choose to share, the team owner can see your drives. A team owner can also look up a LiveGasCost account by email address in order to invite that person.
• Emails: if you ask to reset your password, or we send you an invite, your email address goes to our email provider (Resend) to deliver that message.

We receive your drives only while you are signed in to the web dashboard — each finished drive's summary and the line it followed. Signed out, we receive none of them. We keep it until you delete it (section 19).

4. Background location, and what we do not collect

LiveGasCost records your location while a drive is recording — including when the app is closed or not in use, so a drive is not cut short when your screen locks. If you turn on automatic drive detection, the app also asks Android to wake it when you start driving: Android watches for that on the app's behalf, holding a circle (a geofence) around where you last stopped and watching your phone's activity sensors.

We do not collect your location between drives: the app is not running then, even when it is closed, until a drive starts it again. The place you stopped is stored on your phone so that circle can be drawn, and it is never sent anywhere. You can turn automatic drive detection off, or refuse background access entirely, and still track drives manually with the app open.

We do not collect your contacts, photos, or messages. We do not collect an advertising identifier — the IDFA on iOS and the Advertising ID on Android are both switched off inside the app — and we do not track you across other apps or websites.

5. Crash reports

When the app crashes or hits a serious error, it sends a crash report to Google Firebase Crashlytics: what went wrong in the code, the app version, your phone model and system version, and a random ID for this install of the app, so we can tell one broken phone from many. That is the whole list. There are no usage counters of any kind in the app: it does not count launches, drives, screens or purchases, and the code that used to is gone rather than switched off.

• Crash reports. What went wrong and where in the code.
• With each crash, whether the phone was real or an emulator — so our own test runs stop being counted as your crashes.
• With each crash, which part of drive detection failed — whether it was a permission, a licence, or something else.

The app does not add your name, your email address, your account, a drive, a route, a location, an address or a vehicle to a crash report. A report does include the error's own message, and in a rare kind of error (the phone failing to save a drive) that message can quote part of what was being saved, which may include part of an address or a position. We do not attach a user ID; Crashlytics adds its own installation ID. Google keeps crash reports for about 90 days. We do not use Firebase Performance Monitoring, which would record which addresses your phone requested and when — a far larger disclosure than a crash report, and the app does not need it.

Crash reports are on unless you turn them off: in the app, open Settings and switch off Send crash reports.

iPhone TestFlight builds 83 and older (August 2026) send anonymous usage counts; later builds do not. Update to the newest build.

The website keeps anonymous usage counts. livegascost.com and the web portal count which pages get opened and which buttons get pressed — only the page name, the button name, the day, whether the screen was phone, tablet or desktop size, and light or dark mode — as totals with no name, email, account, IP address, cookie or drive in them, and you can switch this off under Settings in the web portal.

Website visitor counts, by country. When you open most public pages of livegascost.com, our own server adds one to a daily total for that group of pages (the home page, say, or the legal pages) and your country. Cloudflare, which carries the connection to our server, works out the country from your IP address. These totals hold only the day, the country, the page group and the number: no IP address, no city, no browser details, no page address and no cookie. Pages of the signed-in portal are never counted. Nothing is added to these totals if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, or if you switched counts off in the web portal's Settings. We delete the daily totals after about nine weeks.

Website hosting logs. Like any web host, Vercel, which hosts livegascost.com, keeps its own logs of requests to the site, and they include your IP address. Vercel sets how long it keeps them. We do not use them to count visitors.

6. Gas prices

About once a week the app asks the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) for gas and diesel prices for your state or region, worked out on your phone. Your exact location is not sent. EIA sees your phone's internet address, as any website would.

7. Maps

Map pictures come from OpenFreeMap. When a map is on screen, your phone downloads the map squares for the area shown, which means OpenFreeMap can see roughly which area you are looking at, and your internet address. We send them nothing else.

OpenFreeMap says its normal logs do not keep your internet address. If a map request runs into an error, its error log may keep your internet address and the web address of the map square you asked for, for 7 days; if it is looking into abuse of its service, it may keep internet addresses for up to 30 days. A map square shows an area of the map, not your exact spot. We do not send OpenFreeMap your name, email or account. OpenFreeMap's service runs through Cloudflare, which may also see these requests. OpenFreeMap uses no cookies.

8. Trip planner and place search

The trip planner works out what a drive will cost before you make it, and the money is worked out on your phone. Two parts of planning do leave it, and only while you are planning:

• Drawing the road. The coordinates of the stops you put in the planner go to our own routing server so it can draw the real road between them and measure its distance and hills.
• Searching for a place by name. What you type in the planner’s search box goes to our own place-search server so it can offer you addresses — together with roughly where your phone is, so the results are places near you rather than famous places far away. If you add "My location" or drop a pin, that exact point is sent so we can name it. If your phone has no location fix the search still works; it just gets less useful ordering.

Both are machines we run ourselves — not a maps company and not a search company. The routing and search programs, and our dashboard server, do not write down what you send, and it is not linked to your account. These requests pass through Cloudflare, our network provider. Neither server is contacted by your phone while a drive is being recorded, and saved places and map pins never leave your phone at all. The search waits until you have typed three characters and stopped typing, so it sees a search rather than every keystroke. Your recent destinations are kept on your phone and matched there, so opening the search box and picking somewhere you have been before sends nothing at all.

When neither server can be reached the planner still works: it estimates the distance offline, and it tells you on screen that that is what it is doing rather than presenting a guess as a measurement.

If you tap Navigate, your stops are handed to Google Maps or Apple Maps, and their privacy policies apply from there.

If you are signed in, our dashboard also uses the place-search server to fill in a missing street address (section 9).

9. Street addresses

To show a street address for where a drive started and ended, your phone's own map service gets each drive's start and end point and turns them into a street address: Google on most Android phones, Apple on iPhone. This happens on both phones, whether you are signed in or not, and only while the app is open. A drive recorded in the background gets its addresses the next time you open the app. Only the start and end points are sent; the map service never gets the route in between. We do not keep that request. If you are signed in to the web dashboard, the address is saved with the drive (section 3).

Our own server fills in what is missing. If you are signed in and a drive reaches the web dashboard without a start or end address, our own map server (the place-search server in section 8) works the missing address out from the route the drive already saved. This happens on any plan and for drives from any phone. It uses only the first and last points of that route. The server runs on our own machine, so those points are not sent to Google, Apple or any other company. It only fills an address that is empty; it never replaces one you or your phone already set. The address it finds is saved with the drive.

Until a drive has an address, the dashboard says Address pending. We would rather show nothing than a guess.

10. Reference data

The app uses reference data that has nothing to do with you. Vehicle MPG comes from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) database, which is bundled inside the app, so looking up your car makes no network request. Place names are matched on your device against a bundled GeoNames data set. The app does go online for fuel prices from the EIA (section 6) and, when you use the planner’s address search, for our own place-search server as described in section 8. These requests ask for prices and map data; they do not carry your drive history.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Place data © GeoNames, licensed under CC BY 4.0.

11. Purchases

If you buy the app or an upgrade, the purchase goes through the App Store or Google Play. We never see your card or payment details, and we do not receive a list of who bought the app. The app checks the receipt on your phone, which is why restoring a purchase on a new phone is done through the store rather than through us.

Apple and Google show app makers totals of installs and purchases. Figures about how the app is used, such as sessions, come only from people who agreed, in their phone's settings, to share data with app developers. These come from Apple's and Google's own systems, not from anything in our app, and we see them as totals, never per person.

12. App updates (Android website version only)

The Android app downloaded from our website checks a small file on livegascost.com to see whether there is an update, and downloads the update only when you tap it. The Google Play version updates through Google Play instead.

13. Send diagnostics

If you tap Send diagnostics, the app builds a text report about how drive detection has been running: times, on and off states, reasons, app and system version, the car Bluetooth name or address it last heard, and your vehicle's name. Map coordinates are removed. It opens your phone's share sheet and you choose where it goes, usually an email to us. The report leaves your phone only when you send it, and not before.

App testers only. If we invited you to test the app and you turn on Help test LiveGasCost, the app sends us a check-in after drives: the app version, when the app woke up and why, drive start and stop, whether you were driving, walking or still, your permission settings, crashes, and the tracking log with all locations removed. It never sends maps, routes, addresses or places. Only we can read it. We delete each check-in after 30 days, and turning the switch off deletes all of yours straight away. The switch is off unless you turn it on, and it is not shown to anyone else.

14. Email we send you

Today we send four kinds of email, all of them about your own account or your own team: the link to reset your password; a mileage report you or your team owner asked for; a note saying a team owner would like to send you those reports; and a team invitation. That is the whole list. We send no marketing email, no newsletter and no product announcements. If we ever start, those emails will carry an unsubscribe link and unsubscribing will never stop the account emails above, because losing a password-reset link is not a marketing preference.

If you put your address on the waitlist on this website, we keep that one address so we can tell you when the app is ready, and nothing else from that form. Email is sent for us by Resend, who hold their own sending logs for their own retention period; what reaches them is your address and the message. Reply to any of these emails, or write to support@livegascost.com, and we will take your address off the waitlist.

15. Who else touches your data

We do not sell your data, and we do not "share" it for cross-context advertising, as California law uses that word — so there is nothing to opt out of. We do not rent it and we do not use it for ads. These companies process data for us only in order to run the service: Google (Firebase Crashlytics; Google Play; street addresses through the phone's own map service on most Android phones), Apple (App Store; iCloud backup; street addresses through the iPhone's own map service), Cloudflare (network; backup storage; every request to our servers passes through Cloudflare's network), Resend (email), OpenFreeMap (map pictures), EIA (prices), Vercel (website hosting). We may disclose data if the law requires it.

16. Links to other apps and sites

When you tap Navigate, your stops are handed to Google Maps or Apple Maps and you are in their app from that moment, under their privacy policy and not ours (section 8). The same goes for any link on this website that leaves livegascost.com, and for the app store page you came from. We do not control what those companies collect, we receive nothing back from them, and a link from us is not an endorsement of what they do with your data.

17. Where your data is stored

• On your phone: wherever your phone is. That copy is the original and it never needs us.
• Your account, if you signed in: on our own server in the United States, along with the nightly backups of it.
• A copy off the server: One encrypted copy a night also goes to Cloudflare R2, a storage service. We lock it on our server before it leaves, so Cloudflare cannot read it; the key stays with us, not with Cloudflare. Cloudflare lists where it keeps it as its Eastern North America region. That is where Cloudflare placed it, not a promise that it stays in the United States.
• This website: hosted by Vercel. The website holds no drives and no account database — it asks our server for your drives while you are signed in and shows them to you.
• In between: Cloudflare carries the connection between your phone or browser and our server. Cloudflare runs a worldwide network, so the machine that passes your request along is whichever one is near you; it is a pipe, and your drives are not stored in it.
• Not ours to place: crash reports go to Google and, on iPhone, your own iCloud backup goes to Apple (sections 2 and 5). Those are their networks and their policies say where they keep them.

18. How long we keep data

• Drives on your phone: until you delete them. We never expire them, and we could not — they are not ours to reach.
• Drives in your account: until you delete the drive, delete your account, or ask us to. There is no other clock on them.
• Your account: until you delete it or ask us to.
• Backups: we take a copy of the account database every night and keep it for 14 days, then delete it. So something you deleted can still sit in a backup for up to 14 days after you deleted it, and after that it is gone from those too.
• Backups kept off the server: Those off-server copies delete after 14 days, the same window as the copies on our own server.
• Crash reports: Google keeps Crashlytics data for about 90 days. That period is theirs, not ours.
• App tester check-ins: 30 days, or until the tester turns the switch off, whichever comes first; see section 13.
• Email: Resend holds its own sending logs for its own period, which we do not set.
• Website visitor counts: the daily totals by country are deleted after about nine weeks.
• Website hosting logs: Vercel keeps them for its own period, which we do not set.

19. Deleting your data

• One drive: delete it in the app. You can also delete it on the website if you are signed in.
• Everything on your phone: Settings → erase all data, or uninstall the app.
• Your account and everything in it: livegascost.com/data-deletion, or email support@livegascost.com from the address you signed up with. We delete it from our live database right away.

20. Security

Data travels over encrypted connections (HTTPS). Passwords are stored hashed, so we cannot read yours. Sign-in tokens on your phone are kept in the phone's secure storage. Your drives are also protected by your device's own storage protections and screen lock, which is why keeping your phone locked and updated matters.

21. Children

LiveGasCost is for drivers and is not meant for children under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 13.

22. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see, correct, download or delete your data, and to say no to its "sale" or "sharing" — we do neither. This covers the rights California residents have under the CCPA, and the rights of readers in the European Union, the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom under the GDPR, including access, correction, export and erasure. If you have never signed in to the web dashboard we hold nothing about you, so there is nothing for us to produce or erase; you already hold and control it directly, on your phone. Email support@livegascost.com and we will help within 30 days. California residents: section 23 says the same thing in the statute's own words — the categories, the sources, the purposes, and how we check a request is really yours.

23. California residents

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, these are the categories of personal information we collect, in the statute's own words. Each one points at the section above that says it in ours:

• Identifiers — your email address, and nothing else that names you. We never ask for your name (section 3).
• Commercial information — that you bought the app, and which product. Apple and Google take the payment; we never see a card number (section 11).
• Geolocation data, including precise geolocation — the start and end of each drive, the line it followed, and the street addresses of the two ends, and only while you are signed in to the web dashboard (sections 3, 4 and 9). California calls precise location sensitive personal information. We use it for one thing: showing you your own drives and what they cost. We do not use it to work anything out about you, which is the use that would give you a right to limit it, so there is nothing here for you to limit.
• Internet or other electronic network activity — the crash reports in section 5 (not linked to your name, email or account), and the website's own page and button counts, which carry no name, email, account, IP address or cookie and which you can switch off in the web portal's Settings (section 5), and the website visitor totals by country (section 5).
• Inferences — none. We build no profile and we guess nothing about you.

Where it comes from: from you, and from your phone with the permission you gave it, and, as totals only, from Apple's and Google's store statistics (section 11). Not from data brokers, not from advertising networks.

Why we collect it: to run the feature you turned on, to keep the service working and secure, to answer you when you write to us, and to meet the law. Nothing else.

We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising — not in the past 12 months and not today, so there is no opt-out to offer you (section 15). We do not treat anyone differently for exercising a right.

Your rights, and how to use them. You may ask us what we hold and why, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, and ask us to limit how we use sensitive personal information. Email support@livegascost.com — that one address reaches all of it, and a person answers it. We answer within 30 days — section 22's promise, kept here rather than falling back to the 45 the statute would allow us.

How we check it is you: we answer the email address on the account, so send the request from that address — that is the whole verification, and it is why we ask for nothing else. If you write from a different address we will reply to the account's address to confirm before we do anything. If you have never signed in to the web dashboard we hold nothing to produce, correct or delete.

Someone acting for you may make a request with your written permission; we will still confirm it with you at the account's address before acting.

If we say no: we will tell you why in that reply. Write back saying you want it looked at again and a person will review it and answer you within 30 days.

24. Changes to this Policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page and tell you in the app before anything new leaves your phone.

25. Contact

Questions or requests about your privacy? Email support@livegascost.com, or write to us:

Live Gas Cost LLC
2935 S. Fish Hatchery Rd., Suite 3, #154
Fitchburg, WI 53711
United States