Privacy Policy

Family Cookbook is a private family keepsake, and we treat it that way. This policy explains what we collect, why, and who ever sees it — in plain language, because that's the whole point.

1. What we collect

• Account information — your name, email address, and sign-in credentials, managed by our authentication provider (Clerk).
• Your family's content — recipes, photos, notes, comments, ratings, meal plans, and shopping lists you and your family add.
• Invitations — the email addresses of family members you invite, used only to send and manage the invitation.
• Payment information — handled by our payment processor when you subscribe; we never see or store your full card number.
• Basic technical logs — standard server logs (such as IP address and request time) used for security, rate-limiting, and debugging.

We don't use advertising trackers or analytics that follow you around the web. Cookies are used only to keep you signed in.

2. How we use it

To run the service: storing and displaying your recipes to your family, sending invitation and verification emails, processing subscriptions, keeping the service secure, and helping you if something goes wrong. That's it. We don't use your content for advertising, and we don't sell it — to anyone, ever.

3. AI features and your content

When you use an AI feature — scanning a recipe card, importing a recipe from a link, or enhancing a photo — the relevant text or image is sent to our AI providers (Google and Anthropic) solely to perform that task, and the result is returned to your cookbook. We only send what the feature needs, and we don't permit our providers to use your content for advertising. If you'd rather keep something out of AI processing entirely, simply type it in by hand instead.

4. Who else touches your data

We use a small set of service providers to run Family Cookbook, each only for its job:

• Clerk — sign-in and account security
• Railway — application hosting and database
• Cloudflare — image storage and content delivery
• Resend — transactional email (invites, verification)
• Google & Anthropic — AI recipe and photo features (see above)
• Our payment processor — subscription billing

We may also disclose information if the law genuinely requires it. There is no other sharing.

5. Who can see your recipes

Only the members of your family cookbook. There are no public profiles, no discovery feed, and no way for strangers to browse your recipes. Photos are stored at long, unguessable web addresses so they load quickly for your family; they are not listed or searchable anywhere.

6. How long we keep it

As long as your account is active — this is a keepsake, so nothing expires. If you delete a recipe, it's removed from your cookbook. If you delete your account, we delete your personal information and content within 30 days, except minimal records we must keep for legal or accounting reasons.

7. Your rights

You can access and edit your content in the app anytime. You can also ask us to export or permanently delete your data — email [email protected] and we'll take care of it. Depending on where you live, you may have additional legal rights (such as under GDPR or CCPA); we'll honor reasonable requests from anyone, regardless of location.

8. Children

Family Cookbook is a family product, but accounts are for people 13 and older. Younger family members' recipes are best added by a parent. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13; if you believe that's happened, contact us and we'll delete it.

9. Security

All traffic is encrypted in transit (HTTPS), sign-in is handled by a dedicated authentication provider, and access to production systems is limited. No system is perfect, but we keep the surface area small on purpose.

10. Changes to this policy

If we make material changes, we'll post the updated policy here with a new effective date, and for significant changes we'll email you.

11. Contact

Privacy questions or requests: [email protected].