Last updated 18 September 2026. This policy covers Zala Life. Zala Savings has its own policy at zala-me.com/privacy/zala-savings.

Who we are

Zala Life is operated by Zala Software FZ-LLC, VUNE2496, Compass Building – Al Hulaila, Al Hulaila Industrial Zone–FZ, Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates. We decide how the data described here is handled, which makes us the controller of it. Write to support@zala-me.com about anything on this page, including a request to see or delete what we hold.

Who Zala Life is for

Zala Life is not offered to people who live in the European Union, the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland. We ask which country you live in when you set up your account, and we do not open an account for residents of those countries. If you have told us you live in one of them, nothing from your documents is stored. Where our servers are — in Frankfurt — is a separate matter from who the service is for.

What Zala Life holds

• The documents you give it — uploaded, forwarded to your Zala address, sent to the Zala Telegram bot, or imported from a connected service.
• The text of those documents, and the values read out of them: dates, amounts, parties, and the obligations built from them.
• What you decide — the obligations you confirm, correct or add yourself, and the reminders you keep.
• Your account — your email address and sign-in, held by Clerk, our authentication provider, and the country you told us you live in.
• A linked Telegram chat, if you link one — the chat's number, your Telegram username, and when you linked it.
• A record of what happened — an append-only log of actions on your documents, which is how we can tell you what was read, when, and by which model.
• What you have paid for, if you subscribe to Plus — which plan you are on, when the period ends, and references to your Stripe customer and subscription. Never a card number; see Paying for Plus below.

Where it lives

In our own Amazon Web Services account in Frankfurt, Germany (eu-central-1). Documents are encrypted with keys we control and stored so that they cannot be silently altered. Everything is separated by account at the database level, so one account cannot reach another's documents even if our own code asks for it.

Which other companies ever see a document

Three, each for one purpose, each only with your permission, and each named below rather than described as “our providers”. You can grant or withdraw these separately in Settings; they are never bundled together.

This is about the companies Zala sends your documents to. A service you choose to send a document through — your own email provider when you forward one, or Telegram when you send one to the bot — carries it under your own agreement with that company. Telegram is described below.

Mistral AI — reading scans (France)

Most PDFs contain their text and Zala reads it in Frankfurt. A photograph or a scan contains only an image of text, and turning that into text needs optical character recognition. With your permission, the complete document is sent to Mistral AI, a company registered in France, over an endpoint they operate in the European Union. Zero data retention is enabled for our account, which means they do not store or log the file or the text beyond producing the result, and training on our data is switched off. Only the text comes back; the original never leaves our storage.

Google — reading what a document asks of you (Milan)

With your permission, the text of a document is sent to Google's Vertex AI in Milan, Italy, and read by Gemini to find dates, amounts and obligations. The same applies to a question you ask Zala about your documents. Google's standard terms allow prompts to be retained for up to 90 days where abuse monitoring is triggered. We asked to be excepted from that, and on 14 September 2026 Google granted it for the project Zala Life uses: your documents are not retained by Google, and no Google employee reviews them.

Amazon Web Services — storage and reminders (Frankfurt)

Documents, text and obligations live in our AWS account. Reminders reach you by email, sent from the same region. Push notifications are built but not switched on; when they are, this page will say so.

What is never sent anywhere

• Identity documents. Passports, national identity cards, residence permits and driving licences are held back from reading altogether, and the check is on the words in the document, not on the folder it is in. They are stored and left unread. This began as a consequence of the retention terms above and continues now that those no longer apply: an identity document rarely carries a deadline, so there is little to gain by reading one and a great deal to lose.
• Documents Zala can already read as text are never sent for OCR.
• Who you are. A request to read a document carries the document, not your name, email or account.
• Anything from Zala Savings. The two products do not share documents.

Connecting Google Drive

If you import from Google Drive, Google asks you to allow one narrow permission — access to the files you yourself pick in Google's file chooser, and nothing else. Zala cannot list, search or browse your Drive. The file travels from Google to your browser and then into your Zala storage; the access token stays in your browser and never reaches our servers, so there is nothing for us to keep or lose. You can withdraw the permission at any time in your Google account, and an imported file behaves exactly like one you uploaded.

Using Zala through Telegram

You can link a Telegram chat to your account and send documents to the Zala bot. Nothing happens until you link it: you get a one-time code while signed in to Zala, send that code to the bot, and only then does the chat belong to your account. You can unlink it at any time on the Connectors page.

Telegram is a separate company, and using it is your choice. Messages to a bot are not end-to-end encrypted: a document you send passes through Telegram's servers, and Telegram keeps the chat — the file included — under its own privacy policy, not this one. Deleting a document in Zala does not delete it from your Telegram chat; delete the message in Telegram as well if you want it gone there.

• What Zala takes from a message: the file (a PDF or a photo, up to 20 MB). Its file name becomes the document's title, or its caption if it has no file name, and the document notes that it arrived from your Telegram username. From then on it is stored and handled exactly like a document you uploaded, including every permission above.
• What Zala keeps about the chat: the chat's number, your Telegram username, and a record of each message the bot received — when, and whether it was added, refused or already held.
• A message from a chat that is not linked is refused and its file is never downloaded. We keep the chat's number, username and the fact that it was refused, and nothing else.
• What the bot sends back, unless you turn on answers, is a short confirmation — added, already held, or refused — and nothing read out of a document.

Asking questions in Telegram

You can also ask the bot about your documents. This is off until you turn it on in the Telegram card on the Connectors page, where you are signed in, and it is turned off again if you unlink the chat or link a different one.

An answer quotes your documents into the chat — a date, an amount, the words it came from, and the document's title and page. That reply sits in your Telegram chat like any other message, on Telegram's servers and under Telegram's privacy policy, and deleting the document in Zala does not remove it. An answer is worked out exactly as it is in the app: from Zala's own records where they answer it, and otherwise with Google in Milan, only if you have allowed asking questions about your documents. Each question counts towards your questions, and Zala records that you turned answers on and what you were told when you did.

Paying for Plus — Stripe

If you subscribe to Plus or buy a top-up, the payment is taken by Stripe. You type your card into Stripe's own pages: your card details never reach Zala, and we could not store them if we wanted to. Zala Life is usable without ever paying, and nothing on this page changes for an account that does not.

• What leaves Zala: the internal id of your account — the sign-in id, not your name or your email address — put on the Stripe customer and subscription so Stripe's answer can be matched back to you, and which of the three things you are buying (Plus monthly, Plus yearly, a top-up). Nothing from your documents goes to Stripe, and Zala does not send it your email address: the address on your receipt is the one you give Stripe at checkout.
• What Zala stores: your Stripe customer id (cus_…) and subscription id (sub_…), the id of the price you are on (price_…), whether it is billed monthly or yearly, whether it is active, overdue or cancelled, when the current period ends, and for each top-up its checkout reference, its amount and its date. It also keeps the id of every Stripe message it has already applied, so one delivered twice is not counted twice. No card number, no expiry, no last four digits, no cardholder name and no invoices — Zala Life keeps no payments ledger of its own.
• Stripe is a separate controller, not a processor acting only on our instructions: for what it collects from you at checkout it decides its own purposes, including preventing fraud, and holds it under its own privacy policy rather than this one.
• Where it happens: on Stripe's own systems, not in Frankfurt with the rest of Zala Life. Stripe is a United States company operating internationally, so paying means your payment details are handled outside the country you live in; where, and under what safeguards, is in Stripe's policy.

Money is the one part of Zala Life whose record is not yours to erase. Invoices and receipts stay in our Stripe account as the company's financial records, for as long as tax law requires us to keep them — seven years in the United Arab Emirates — and closing your Zala Life account does not remove them. What Zala Life itself holds about your subscription goes with the account when you close it.

How long things are kept

• Your documents: until you delete them. Deleting moves a document to Trash, where it stays for 30 days and you can restore it. After those 30 days the file, its earlier versions, the text read from it and any answers quoting it leave Zala automatically, and the subject line and sender of an email it arrived in are cleared. Encrypted backup copies, kept in a separate account so an attack or a mistake can be undone, expire within a further 30 days, and nothing restores them. So a deleted document is gone from everywhere about 60 days after you delete it.
• Documents emailed to your Zala address: the received message is discarded within seven days once the document has been taken out of it.
• A linked Telegram chat: the link is removed when you unlink it. The record of messages the bot received stays with the record of actions below. What Telegram itself keeps is up to Telegram and to you.
• Backups: encrypted database backups are kept for a short period so an accident can be undone, then expire on their own. Backup copies of documents follow the rule above.
• Billing records: what Zala Life holds about a subscription — the Stripe ids, the top-up rows and the record of Stripe messages applied — is erased with the account when you close it. The invoices and receipts themselves are Stripe's copy and our financial records, and stay in our Stripe account for as long as tax law requires, which closing a Zala Life account does not change.
• The record of actions: kept while your account exists, because it is what lets us tell you what happened to a document. It is erased when you close the account.
• Closing your account: in Settings, under Your account, after you type CLOSE. It is immediate and cannot be undone. The account locks at once: reminders stop, mail to your Zala address is refused and Telegram is unlinked. Within minutes every document and its files, the text read from them, your answers, obligations, reminders, settings, permissions, what you agreed to at setup and the record of actions leave Zala. Encrypted backup copies of your files expire within 30 days and nothing restores them; database backups expire within 7 days. We keep one anonymous line saying an account was closed, and a note that cannot be read back as you which stops closing and reopening from starting a new free trial — neither holds your name, email or account id. Zala Savings and your sign-in are not affected, because they are shared; signing in to Zala Life again starts a new, empty account. Messages already in your Telegram chat, emails in your own mailbox and files you downloaded are outside Zala and stay where they are.

Your choices

• Reading scans with Mistral, reading documents with Google, and asking questions about your documents are three separate permissions. Each starts off.
• Refusing any of them keeps the product working: documents are stored, and you can add dates and amounts yourself. Reminders work the same way.
• You can change any of them, in either direction, at any time in Settings.
• Nothing you have to agree to is bundled with anything else, and we do not use your documents for advertising or analytics.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or object to how it is handled. Write to support@zala-me.com and we will answer within 30 days, wherever you live. If you are in the United Arab Emirates, the Federal Personal Data Protection Law applies.

Children

Zala Life is not for people under 18, and we do not knowingly hold their data. Tell us if you believe we do and we will delete it.

If something goes wrong

If personal data is exposed in a way likely to harm you, we will tell you and the relevant authority without undue delay, and say what happened rather than that “an incident occurred”.

Changes

If the way documents are handled changes — a new processor, a different region, different retention — this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. Changes that affect what you have agreed to are put to you in the app, not left here to be discovered.