Last updated 20 October 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.
• Whether checking changed anything — each time you confirm an obligation, correct one or take a confirmation back, a line saying what kind of obligation it was, whether anything changed, and, if it did, by how many days a date moved and by what proportion an amount changed. Never the date itself and never the amount — there is no field that could hold one. It exists to answer one question, whether the values Zala Life starts reminding you about without anyone checking them turn out to be right, and it is read only as totals across accounts, never as a single line.
• 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.

We can see how much an account has used and which plan it is on — how many documents, pages and questions, how many megabytes, Trial or Plus — and never a document, its title, its category or anything inside one; each time an administrator looks, that is written to the record of actions.

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”. From 1 October 2026 the two that read a document you have stored — turning a scan into text, and reading it for dates and amounts — are granted and withdrawn together, as one permission called “Read my documents”: they are the two halves of reading, and asking twice asked the same question twice. Answering a question you type is separate and can be allowed or refused on its own. Nothing is bundled with a purpose you did not choose, and each company is still named below.

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 has been enabled for our account since 9 September 2026, 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.

Anthropic, through Amazon Bedrock — reading what a document asks of you (European Union)

With your permission, the text of a document is sent to Claude, a model made by Anthropic, running on Amazon Bedrock inside the European Union. It reads the document for dates, amounts and obligations. A question you ask Zala about your documents goes to the same model, with the passages it needs to answer from and nothing else.

The request is served from one of Amazon's European regions — Frankfurt, Ireland, Paris, Stockholm, Milan or Spain — and does not leave them. Amazon states that prompts and results are not stored after the request is answered, are not used to train any model, and are not reviewed by anyone. Zala authenticates with its own cloud identity, so there is no API key that could be copied.

Before this, both were done by Google's Gemini on Vertex AI in Milan, Italy, under an exception Google granted us on 14 September from its 90-day abuse-monitoring retention: no prompt stored, no reviewer. Nothing from that period was retained by Google. The two moved on different days — reading documents on 28 September 2026, answering questions on 3 October 2026 — and until 3 October this page said both had moved. That was wrong for questions for two days, and the Terms of Service record it.

Amazon Web Services — storage (Frankfurt)

Documents, text and obligations live in our AWS account. Mail you forward to your own Zala address is received there too. Push notifications are built but not switched on; when they are, this page will say so.

Resend — sending reminder email

A reminder email is handed to Resend, a separate company, which delivers it to your inbox; the mail is sent from its European region. Resend sees the address you saved for reminders, the subject and the message — and nothing else. It never receives a document, a page of one, or your account id, and the messages carry no tracking of any kind, so neither Resend nor Zala learns whether you opened one.

The message itself says as little as it can. By default it names a kind of document, what it needs and when — “a tenancy document needs a payment in 7 days” — and no amount, title or counterparty; health documents are never named as such. It says more only if you turn on detailed reminders in Settings, and then it says what you chose to have said. The link in it opens Zala Life, behind your sign-in.

If an address stops working, or you mark a reminder as spam, Resend tells us and Zala stops emailing that address and says so in Settings. Resend keeps its own record of mail it has sent, on its own schedule; closing your Zala Life account does not reach into it, in the same way that it does not reach into your own mailbox.

What is never sent anywhere

• Identity documents you added before 4 October 2026. Until that date this page said, here, that documents filed under Identity were never sent anywhere at all. Anyone who uploaded a passport having read that keeps it: those documents are not sent — not to be read for dates, not to turn a scan into text, and not to answer a question — and that does not change if you move them to another folder. They are stored, encrypted and left alone.
  
  Identity documents added from 4 October 2026 are read like any other document. A passport or an Emirates ID is scanned and read by the services named above, exactly as a tenancy contract is, and you can switch that off in Settings as you can for anything else. You can still type the details yourself instead — typing is exact, and what you type never leaves. Documents filed as Identity before 24 September 2026 were read then, and their words remain.
• 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.

How the app is used — PostHog

We count what people do in Zala Life so we can tell which parts work: that a document was added, that an obligation was confirmed, that somebody signed in. These counts go to PostHog, hosted in the European Union.

No part of a document ever goes to PostHog. Not its text, its title, its folder, its file name, an amount, a date, or anything read out of it. What is sent is the action, which app it came from, and the identifier your account already has with Clerk. There is no name and no email address, and we deliberately do not send the address you connect from, so nothing there records where you are.

This is not a permission you grant or withdraw separately, because it holds nothing about your documents. Closing your account removes what it holds, along with everything else.

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 Claude on Amazon Bedrock in the European Union, 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.
• How the app is used: the counts described above stay in PostHog while your account exists. Closing it removes the record of your account there, and the events with it.
• 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.
• Whether checking changed anything: kept while your account exists, for as long as we are judging the rule it measures, and erased with the account when you close it.
• 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 Claude on Amazon Bedrock, and asking questions about your documents are three separate permissions, and each can be switched off on its own in Settings at any time — switching one off does not switch off the others. Since 4 October 2026 they are on from the start and described in the Terms of Service rather than ticked on the setup screen, which asks only which country you live in and whether you agree to those terms. If you set up before that date and switched one off, it stays off. Connecting Zala Savings is off until you turn it on.
• 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.