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Google has 93% of searches in Europe and 88% in the US.

If such a company refuses their services to somebody who is compliant with every single of their publicly shared rule, it's an abuse of their power. And an anti-trust issue.

But I didn't offer to break them up. The real solution to this problem, I think, would be to create a transparent process for moderation. That is what the article is about.

Among other sites Microsoft serves ads on DuckDuckGo, so if you're a privacy enthusiast, you'll probably see the ad :)

The problem with this policy is that we're nowhere near cryptocurrency exchanges. Not at all.

We mentioned crypto because we allowed people to pay for our services using BTC or ETH, that is it! You're also allowed to pay using usual banking card.

Still, I submitted an appeal after we tore down this whole feature but no luck, still got banned after that.

Oh, yeah, thanks, but those should not be applied to us. Probably.

> For the purposes of this policy, we consider financial products and services to be those related to the management or investment of money and cryptocurrencies, including personalised advice

We don't do anything of this kind. We're basically an excel spreadsheet with your expenses, no "money" actually involved here.

If you're interested in this, please reach me out at [email protected]. I need some more information to move it up in the backlog, maybe you could help us with that?

Thanks!

Most of our competitors say they have "strong encryption", but when you read the page it actually means they have SSL. Or that they use SHA256 for hashing the passwords. That is… disappointing.

Author's here.

It is a standard privacy policy generated by getterms.io.

We have no data on you. You can read about our security model here (https://safeapps.io/content/security) and walk through our source code here (https://github.com/safeapps-io). TL;DR: every bit of data you create within the product is encrypted in the browser. The server only sees a blob of encrypted bits, that's all. You can sign up without an email. But if you do, we use Sparkpost for sending emails, which is a EU-based ISP. We do not have any third-party scripts or cookies across all the site at all. No Google Analytics, no Facebook Pixel, no Intercom support chat. We use German hosting and I'm personally from Russia.

So no, we do not violate GDPR (but we do violate Russian laws because we do not have any servers in Russia). And we do take privacy seriously.

Thanks for your support across the thread. It is kind of difficult to oppose to a lot of people screaming "scam" into your face :)

> Nobody puts a history like

Yeah, a bunch of people here told me we have a huge problem with copy. Will rework it. Storytelling is not my feature, but I'll try my best :)

> it’s just me missing clear UI borders and color-cued sidebars and property sheets

Will think of a better way, thanks!

I am afraid this it what I will have to do. Small rebranding, new domain, fresh IP, new card, etc.

Still it's hard to understand this decision.

> Why isn't it possible to make a new ad if the first one was rejected ? I don't fully understand how it played out.

The whole account was banned, that's why. The ad actually passed the moderation and even had 200 impressions.

> Other marketing strategies should be used to bootstrap it and grow it's user base

It's pretty common for the new players to burn money on ads, because it's scalable and predictable. So it actually would be super difficult to run the app for a few years without any predictable traffic source.

I, the author, submitted it an hour before :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27812051

I'll never understand how HN works, honestly.

Thanks for the support. It's hard to defend against all the people that keep screaming to my face that I'm the scam here.

> Google's financial services advertising page

Can you give me the link?

> It's also worth noting that the service seems to be offered from Russia

That is true. But Google is available in Russia and allows businesses to buy ads without any limits. I know a Russian service called raindrop.io (bookmark sync app) that buys ads in Google and runs a worldwide service, and they get no bans.

Author's here.

Yes, that is true and was the big red flag for me. I believe it would be in their best interest to exchange the data on potential fraudsters, because it would make their life simpler.

Your input is invaluable, thanks. Honestly, I appreciate it

I see that your comment got the most upvotes here, so it IS what I needed to hear.

At least I won't need to change a lot in the product itself as it actually has a rather boring and standard design: https://imgur.com/a/KabWkNS

I think we'll go with your idea of changing the brand and the landing. Might help.

> screams "my first time playing with CSS", not "you should trust us with your $$".

Lol :) Thanks for your honest feedback! The app looks more traditional, btw. (https://imgur.com/a/KabWkNS) Based on the feedback here I will probably change the landing page to something more traditional.

> Also, the name and domain seem like you're compensating for something, or trying to trick people

Wow, that is the opposite thing we were aiming for. There are a lot of other apps that provide the same value while being completely unsafe to use. We're just emphasizing on the core value. Strange to hear that it causes the opposite reaction.

Hi! Author's here.

Hell, it's AN INNOVATION I came up with — or at least so I thought I thought most people would be able to see this name instantly BECAUSE of the brackets, lol.

Thanks for your sympathy, I appreciate it.

Hi! Author's here.

We submitted multiple appeals, but they were all declines — presumably, by real humans. I appreciate your feedback on the copy though. I guess, no harm in trying.

Hi! Author's here.

> On the other hand, this post talks about having a similar response from Microsoft, and those companies didn't collude

As I wrote, I got the ban from Microsoft minutes after Google even before I created an ad or told them what site I planned to advertise. So my guess is that they do exchange data about potential fraudsters.

> applies no matter who you are

In this case we're talking about a monopoly that is the internet's gatekeeper. If they decide they can refuse their service to us, we die, no guesses. Is that the right way?

Hi! I'm the author.

1. it's hard to judge about that right away. It would be cool to see the ads data beforehand. If I saw the ad performs poorly I would change it obviously. "[safe] money" is our brand, so it would be strange not to start with it.

2. the ad does not reference crypto. We had a mention of it on the landing page, that is all. We allow people to pay with crypto along with banking cards — so it's kind of your decision to go one way or another.

4. its more or less the same. You can be e2ee if you, say, have an encrypted version of Google Drive. e2ee in this case means that even though there's a server (which we also have) it cannot read the data in any way. We're mostly the same.

5. ok, we'll think about it, thanks!

Thanks for your detailed feedback.

Is it a scam to charge a price for a product?

We're freemium. You're not forced to get a subscription right away. You can even use the product without it at all.

> there appears to be no way for you to self-host the service at the moment

We will provide such an option if there will be any demand. For now it would just waste a lot of our time without any real output. Still, you can do this if you want.

What is it that you don't like about the design? I just tried not to follow the common guidelines for the design and make the design more… developer friendly?

Hi there! I'm the founder of this app.

> After reading it a third time, I realize I guess it's just an open-source version of Mint?

Well, not a great sigh for us, but at least… you guessed right!

> But the author provides zero evidence that Google bans ads for "privacy-first services". It was probably classified as a crypto scam or similar.

I made this conclusion based on the information provided by my friends working in Google and Microsoft. Again, there's no way I can reliably say the _real_ reason because all Google said was "Unacceptable Business Practice" linking to this page. (https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020955?hl=en#36...)

That's actually more or less the point of the article: you get banned for life for no apparent reason. Is that how it's supposed to be?

> it looks like a scam

What is it that you don't like about the design? I just tried not to follow the common guidelines for the design and make the design more… developer friendly?

Hi, I'm the author.

That was my first thought, but the problem is that the site was moderated by actual human beings and all the appeals were still denied.

> Many similar companies run ads on Google all the time

Like I said in the end of the article, it's a thing that is allowed for established companies, because I too run into such ads all the time. I made this conclusion based on the information provided by my friends working in Google and Microsoft. Again, there's no way I can reliably say the _real_ reason because all Google said was "*Unacceptable Business Practice*" linking to this page. (https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6020955?hl=en#36...)

Hi there! I'm the founder of this app.

It's very upsetting that you found us scam-alike. It was never meant to be this way. If anything, we're trying to be the opposite: we open-sourced the whole app, we do not ask for your email during sign up, we wrote a post about our security measures in details (https://safeapps.io/content/security).

We'll work on our marketing to be more… convincing?

At first I was afraid to open news, but hey, it's not that similar! There's a competitor of mine called everydollar. They have the same similarity, lol.

It will have the full dataset and all features. Whatever you expect from a real offline mode :)

Ooooh, I get it! “Upload” is a bad word for that. Will change it to something else, thanks!

Oh, I see.

OFX/CSV files are processed on the client-side, and we never get the raw file, only the processed and encrypted transactions. Does that make sense?