Privacy Policy

Information we collect

• Account information — your email address, and optionally your name and profile details, used to create and secure your account.
• Recipe content — recipe text, titles, ingredients, steps, tags, and notes you add or import.
• Photos— images you capture with your camera or select from your photo library when importing a recipe. These are uploaded to our backend and processed by AI (see “AI features” below) to extract recipe details.
• Meal-plan and dietary preferences — information you provide such as diets, allergens, dislikes, cooking skill, and cook time limits, used to personalize meal plans and assistant responses.
• Assistant conversations— messages you send to our in-app assistant, “Chef Pickle.”
• Household / family data — family or household name, member roster, and roles when you use shared features.
• Diagnostics — crash reports and performance data to keep the app reliable. (Product-usage analytics is instrumented in the app but currently disabled in production.)
• Device and log data — a user identifier, app version, and technical logs needed for security, debugging, and performance.

How we use information

• Provide core features such as recipe storage, import, and meal planning.
• Power AI features like recipe extraction, meal suggestions, and the assistant.
• Authenticate users and keep data synchronized across devices.
• Enable household and family sharing.
• Monitor app stability, troubleshoot issues, and improve quality and safety.

AI features

Chef Buddy uses OpenAI to power its AI features. To do this, we send relevant content to OpenAI for processing, including:

• Recipe text and recipe photos you import, so they can be read and parsed into structured recipes (OpenAI Vision is used for image-based imports).
• Your meal-plan and dietary preferences, to generate meal suggestions.
• Your messages to the “Chef Pickle” assistant.
• Household member names, when they are relevant to personalizing meal plans or assistant responses.
• A user identifier, which is included with AI image-generation requests for abuse prevention and moderation.

OpenAI processes this data as our service provider under its own terms and privacy policy. AI-generated content can be inaccurate, so please review important details (such as ingredient quantities and allergen information) before relying on them.

Household and family sharing

When you create or join a household, its name, member roster, and member roles are shared with other members of that household and are used to personalize shared meal plans and assistant responses.

If you use the “nearby invite” feature to add someone in person, your device broadcasts your household name over the local network so nearby devices can discover and accept the invitation. This exchange happens directly between devices and is not collected by our servers.

Third-party services

Chef Buddy relies on the following service providers, who process data on our behalf according to their own terms and privacy policies:

• Clerk — authentication and account management (email, name, and credentials; Clerk manages your password, which we never store).
• OpenAI— AI processing for recipe import, meal planning, and the assistant (see “AI features”).
• Firebase (Google) — crash reporting and performance monitoring. Firebase Analytics is integrated but currently disabled in production.
• Vercel — application hosting and infrastructure.

These providers may log technical information such as IP addresses as part of delivering their services.

Your choices

You can review and update your account and profile information at any time. You can request account or data-related support, including deletion, by contacting us. You can also stop using the service at any time.

Chef Buddy's AI-powered features (recipe import, meal planning, and the assistant) rely on the processing described above. There is currently no way to use these specific features without that processing; if you prefer not to have this content processed by our AI provider, you can choose not to use those features.