Frequently asked questions

Sprout is a website for learning how money works, in plain English. It has a 20-lesson course, a step-by-step money plan, a check-up for your investments, a spending dashboard, calculators, and an AI coach that answers your questions and shows its working.

It's built to help you understand your options and make your own decisions, not to make them for you.

Anyone starting out with money, especially teens and twenty-somethings making their first decisions about saving, debt and investing.

You don't need any background. The course starts from the basics, and its glossary explains the jargon in plain English.

Sprout is free to use while it's in development, and there's nothing to buy inside it. Pricing may change once it launches fully.

No. Sprout is an educational tool, not a licensed financial advisor, and nothing it shows or says is personal financial advice. It explains options, trade-offs and risks so you can decide for yourself.

For big or complicated situations, such as large sums, taxes, an inheritance or a divorce, it suggests talking to a qualified professional, like a fee-only fiduciary advisor or a tax professional.

Yes, though some parts are written for the US. Amounts are shown in US dollars, and the lesson on choosing an account uses US accounts such as the Roth IRA and 401(k) as examples.

The assistant asks which country you're in before giving strategy advice, because account types and tax rules differ. If your plan says you live somewhere else, its roadmap points you to your own country's tax-advantaged accounts instead of US ones.

No. Every lesson, tool and calculator works without one, and so does the assistant. What you enter is saved in the browser you're using.

An account saves your chats, course progress and quiz scores, plan, portfolio, monthly budgets and imported transactions, and keeps them in step on every device you log in on. Without one, clearing your browser or switching devices means starting again.

You can create an account whenever you like. What's already saved in your browser is merged into it when you log in.

In your browser first. Your plan, portfolio, budgets, imported transactions, chats and course progress are saved in this browser's storage, on your device.

When you're logged in, they're also saved to your Sprout account so they sync across your devices. Signing out removes them from the device you're using; they stay in your account. Two things are kept only on the device and never synced: the switches that control what the assistant can see, and the dashboard's AI spending review. Signing out clears the review and puts the switches back to their defaults.

Nothing is sent to the AI until you use one of its features, such as asking the assistant a question or importing a screenshot. What the assistant sees has the details.

Your questions and the conversation so far, plus what these switches allow:

• Your past chats saved in this browser (up to the 20 most recent), so it remembers your goals. This is on unless you turn off “Let the assistant use past chats” in the assistant's side panel.
• Your plan and portfolio, while “Let the assistant see my plan and portfolio” is on. It turns on when you first save a plan or ask the assistant about your portfolio, and you can switch it off at any time.
• Your imported transactions, only once you choose to share them: by switching on “Let the assistant see my transactions”, importing them next to the chat, or clicking “Get investing tips”. The Dashboard's “Review my spending” and “Ask about your spending” send them when you use them.

Replies are written by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, so what the assistant sees is sent to Anthropic to write each answer. For each question, Sprout's server writes one log line about how the request went, such as timings and token counts, without your messages.

No, and you can't: Sprout never asks for bank logins, can't move money and can't place trades. Its tools only look things up and do calculations.

To see your spending or holdings, upload a CSV file exported from your bank or brokerage, which is read in your browser rather than uploaded, or add up to 6 screenshots from your banking or investing app. Each screenshot is sent to the AI to read the rows and isn't stored by Sprout, and long account or card numbers are cut to their last four digits. Nothing from a screenshot is saved until you check the rows and confirm.

Never share account numbers, passwords or ID numbers with Sprout, or with anyone online. The assistant is instructed never to ask for them.

• Your password is stored only in a scrambled, one-way form (a bcrypt hash), never as the password itself, and repeated wrong guesses are blocked for a while.
• New accounts are confirmed by email. The account is only created once you open the link and enter the password you chose.
• Sign out everywhere, on your Account page, signs you out on every device, and so does resetting your password. Sessions also end on their own after 30 days at most.
• If you log in with Google, your Google account's own security settings protect that login.

If you have an account, go to your Account page, type your email to confirm, and Sprout permanently deletes your account and everything synced to it, and clears it from that browser. Your other devices are signed out, and Sprout removes its copy from each of those browsers the next time it's opened there.

Without an account, your data is only in your browser. You can clear things one at a time on their own pages, or clear this site's data in your browser's settings to remove everything.

No. It won't tell you to buy or sell a specific stock, crypto coin or other single investment, or when to do it, and it never promises returns. It teaches strategy instead: a safety net first, paying off expensive debt, spreading your money across many investments, keeping fees low and choosing a mix that fits your timeline.

If you saw a tip online, the before-you-buy check walks you through the questions that matter without giving a yes or no. If something sounds like a scam, such as a promise to double your money, the assistant is set up to say so and point you to the lesson on spotting scams.

From calculators written in code and checked by automated tests, not from the AI doing maths in its head. Projections, fee comparisons, doubling times and budget checks come from the same functions as the calculators on this site, and they state their assumptions, like a 7% average yearly return, which isn't guaranteed.

When the assistant quotes a price to the cent after looking up market data, Sprout checks it against the data it received and adds a note under the reply if it can't find a match.

The AI can still misread a question or get something wrong, so double-check anything important before you act on it.

Prices, company facts and market history come from Financial Modeling Prep. Quotes can be delayed, so the assistant says when a figure is from. If the data can't be loaded, it says so instead of guessing a number.