Privacy Policy

The short version

softboiled is a personal recipe management app. We do not sell your data, show ads, or track you around the web. Your recipes are yours. You can export them anytime and delete your account whenever you want.

Two things are worth knowing up front. Our AI features are run by Anthropic, so what you send to an AI feature goes to them. And if you link your account with a family member's, they can see the household information you have entered. Both are explained below.

Who we are

The company responsible for your data (the “controller”) is {{ENTITY_LEGAL_NAME}}, {{ENTITY_ADDRESS}}. You can reach us about anything in this policy at privacy@softboiled.app.

What we collect

• Email address — for login and account recovery.
• Display name — shown in the app.
• Recipe data — titles, ingredients, steps, tags, images, source info, notes, ratings, and priorities. This is the core of what softboiled stores for you.
• Photos you upload — cookbook pages, handwritten cards, clippings, and pantry labels, plus the text we extract from them. See “Photos and cookbook indexing” below for what we keep.
• Simmer history — the AI variants you generate and save (“softboilds”), the prompt you asked for, and a record of what you changed between the AI's suggestion and the version you saved.
• Household and dietary information — if you use Family Members, we store the names, age band (infant, toddler, child, teen, adult), allergies with their severity, dietary requirements including pregnancy and breastfeeding, dislikes, likes, and free-text notes you enter for the people you cook for. This can include children and other people who are not softboiled users. Your own allergies, diets, and life stage are stored on your account. This information ranks and marks your recipes, and it is sent to Anthropic when you use a feature that needs it. See “Consumer health data” below.
• Saved questions — questions you ask the recipe help chat, its answers, and any thumbs-up or thumbs-down you give, saved on the recipe so the next answer can build on them.
• Pantry, menus, meal plans, and comments — the items you track, the menus and plans you build, and any comments you write.
• Feedback reports — if you send feedback from inside the app: your message, an optional screenshot (which may include whatever was on the page), the page you were on, your browser type and version, and your IP address.
• Push notifications — if you turn them on: the subscription address your browser gives us and your browser type, so we can send the notification.
• AI usage ledger — for each AI request, which feature you used, when, and what it cost, so we can enforce the monthly allowance and show you your usage.
• Purchases — if you buy Credits: the amount, the fee, the date, and a Stripe reference. We never see or store your card number.
• Ownership attestations — each time you index from a cookbook, a timestamped record of your confirmation that you own the book, with the book's title, author, and ISBN where known, your IP address, and your browser type.
• Copyright notices — if you submit a DMCA notice: your name, email, and the details you provide.
• Drafts on your device — if you save a recipe while offline, it is kept in your browser's storage until it can be uploaded. It never reaches us until then.

Consumer health data

Allergies, dietary requirements, pregnancy and breastfeeding status, and age bands are health data. We collect them only so the app can rank and mark recipes for the people you cook for and answer your AI requests. We never sell them and never use them for advertising. We share them with exactly two parties: Anthropic, to process your own requests, and any account you choose to link. You can delete them at any time.

Our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy says all of this in one place, including how to withdraw consent and how to have the data deleted from our AI provider too. It applies to everyone, and it is written to meet the health-data laws of Washington, Nevada, and Connecticut.

Linked accounts

You can link your account with up to four other softboiled accounts. Both people have to agree. Once a link is accepted, the other person can see your full household roster (every family member, with allergies, diets, age band, likes, dislikes, and notes), your recipes including private ones, your workspaces, and comments on your recipes. They can also post comments and make their own softboilds from your recipes. They cannot edit your recipes.

Either person can end a link at any time from Settings. Access stops immediately.

What we do NOT collect

• No tracking cookies or analytics cookies
• No behavioral profiling or usage tracking
• No location data
• No contact list access
• No device fingerprinting

What “no profiling” means here. Three of the records above could look like profiling, so here is what they are. When you save a softboild, we keep a note of what you changed from the AI's suggestion, attached to that softboild. When you ask the help chat about a recipe, the question and your vote on the answer are saved on that recipe. And every AI request is logged with its feature and cost. Each of these is stored where it happened and used only there. We do not read across them to work out your tastes, habits, or health, and we do not build any profile of you from them. If that ever changes, we will change this policy first and ask for your consent.

About location. We do not collect or store where you are. Photos you upload can carry embedded metadata, such as the location where they were taken. We do not keep it, but it may be sent to Anthropic along with the photo.

AI features

Anthropic processes essentially all AI requests in softboiled. An earlier version of this policy said AI ran on our own private infrastructure with Anthropic as a rare fallback for vision. That is not accurate and we have corrected it.

What gets sent to Anthropic depends on the feature, and can include: the text of a recipe, your own notes on it, photos you upload of cookbook pages, handwritten cards and pantry labels, your saved preferences and household dietary information (including family members' names with their allergies) when a feature needs them, and the parts of your library that are relevant to what you asked.

Anthropic processes this to answer the request and returns it to us. Their handling is governed by the Anthropic commercial terms and their published data-usage policy. We do not send them your email address or your account identifier.

Under those terms Anthropic acts as our processor: it uses what we send only to answer the request, does not train its models on it, and keeps it only for the short window its terms allow.

Which features use AI. Most are things you explicitly start: Simmer, the recipe help chat, menu and meal-plan generation, ingredient suggestions, and importing a recipe from a URL, a photo, or a PDF. Some run automatically when you save a recipe, to fill in tags and details. We say so in the app where a feature has done this, with a ✨ marker. There is currently no setting to turn the automatic processing off.

Eva. softboiled can run against Eva, a self-hosted AI service, instead of Anthropic. That mode is off, and no user traffic goes through it today. If we turn it on we will update this policy first.

Photos and cookbook indexing

When you photograph a cookbook page, a handwritten card, or a pantry label, the photos are sent to Anthropic for text extraction. We keep the extracted recipe. We do not keep the photo after extraction, and we do not keep the raw text that came off the page. For cookbook pages we store only a mathematical fingerprint of the image, which cannot be turned back into the picture.

Recipes you index from cookbooks are kept private to your account. We never make them public, never share them with third parties beyond what is required to operate the service, and never include their contents in any analytics shared outside softboiled.

Third-party services

• Supabase — hosts our database, stores uploaded files, and handles login. Everything you store in softboiled lives there, in their US data center.
• Vercel — hosts the website and runs our code. Receives your IP address and request details in its server logs.
• Anthropic — all AI processing: recipe text, photos you upload, your household dietary information when a feature needs it, and the library context a feature needs.
• Stripe — payment processing when you buy Credits. Stripe receives your email address and the details you enter on its checkout page. We never see your card number.
• Sentry — error reporting. When something breaks on our servers, Sentry receives the error message, a stack trace, and the page or action involved. We have turned off its collection of IP addresses and request headers.
• Upstash — rate limiting. Holds short-lived counters for login, signup, and other rate-limited actions. The counters are keyed to your email address (or a hash of it) or your account id and expire on their own within minutes.
• Browser push services — if you turn on notifications, your browser maker's push service (Google, Apple, or Mozilla) delivers them. The service sees that a message was sent to your device; the message itself is encrypted to your browser.

We do not use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or any advertising network.

How long we keep things

• Your account and everything in it — until you delete it, or delete the account.
• Server logs (IP address, request path, timing) — kept by our host for a short time, measured in hours to days, and never more than 90 days.
• Error reports in Sentry — up to 90 days.
• Feedback reports and screenshots — until you or we delete them, or until your account is deleted.
• Purchase records — our copy is deleted with your account. Stripe keeps its own record of each payment under its terms, as payment processors must.
• DMCA notices and counter-notices — kept indefinitely as legal records, even after the account involved is deleted.
• Ownership attestations — kept for three years after your account is deleted, with your account id replaced by a code that cannot be traced back to you. This is the record that shows cookbook indexing was done by someone who owned the book, and the law gives a copyright holder three years to bring a claim.
• Drafts on your device — until they upload or you clear your browser's storage.

How we protect your data

• Encryption in transit: All connections use HTTPS with TLS 1.2+. HSTS is enforced.
• Encryption at rest: Supabase encrypts the database at the infrastructure level.
• Row Level Security: Database rules ensure you can only access your own data, plus what a linked account or the public library has made visible to you.
• Log sanitization: Passwords and tokens are stripped from our logs, and email addresses are masked (you would see j***@example.com).

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can:

• See your data — everything you have stored is visible in the app.
• Correct it — edit anything in the app, or ask us to.
• Export it — download everything tied to your account as JSON from Settings: recipes, softboilds, family members, your own preferences, pantry, menus, plans, saved questions, comments, feedback, purchases, and attestations.
• Delete it — delete individual items in the app, or delete your whole account from Settings.
• Withdraw consent — for health data, by deleting it; for notifications, by turning them off in Settings.
• Not be treated differently for exercising any of these rights.

For anything you cannot do yourself in the app, email privacy@softboiled.app from the address on your account. We will respond within 30 days.

What deleting your account does

Deleting your account removes your login, your recipes, softboilds, family members, preferences, pantry, menus, plans, comments, feedback and its screenshots, push subscriptions, and every uploaded file. It cannot be undone.

A few things survive deletion:

• DMCA notices and the de-identified attestation records described above.
• Stripe's own record of any payment you made.
• Copies our service providers hold for their own short retention windows, such as Anthropic and Sentry, under their own terms. You can ask us to request their deletion; see the Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy.

If you have unused purchased Credits when you delete your account, we refund them automatically.

Children

softboiled is for adults. You must be 18 or older to have an account, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger. Adults can enter information about the children they cook for, including allergies and age band. That information is handled as described in “Consumer health data” above, and the adult who entered it can edit or delete it at any time. If you believe a child has created an account, email privacy@softboiled.app and we will delete it.

Where your data lives

Your data is stored in the United States, and the Service is offered from the United States to people in the United States. If you use it from elsewhere, your data is transferred to and processed in the United States. Our legal basis for processing is the contract we have with you (these features are what you signed up for), your consent for health data and notifications, and our legitimate interest in keeping the Service secure.

If something goes wrong

If we learn of a security breach that affects your data, we will tell you by email without undue delay, and within any deadline the law sets, with what happened, what data was involved, and what we are doing about it.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy in a way that matters, we will show you a notice in the app summarizing the change and ask you to accept it before you continue. Small clarifications just update the date at the top. Every past version is kept so you can see what you agreed to.

We will never

• Sell, license, or trade your data
• Show you ads
• Build behavioral profiles
• Track you across other websites
• Share your data with data brokers
• Share your recipes with anyone unless you choose to make them public or link an account

This commitment is permanent. It survives any change of ownership.

Contact

For privacy questions or to exercise your rights: privacy@softboiled.app

{{ENTITY_LEGAL_NAME}}, {{ENTITY_ADDRESS}}