Privacy Policy

This policy explains how Balsamic (“we”, “us”) handles information when you use the Balsamic app and website. It applies to everything under this domain, including the public recipe pages that people share by link.

It does not cover other companies’ services. When you follow a recipe link out to another site, or sign in with Google, that company’s own privacy policy governs what it does with your information.

Account information

Balsamic uses Google to sign you in. When you do, Google tells us your name, email address, and profile picture, and gives us a token that keeps you signed in. We never see or store your Google password.

Your cooking preferences

If you complete the short setup — or change it later in Settings — we store your eating pattern, the ingredients you avoid, how many people you cook for, your spice tolerance, and the equipment in your kitchen. All of it is optional, and Balsamic works without any of it.

Some of this can be genuinely sensitive. An allergy is health information, and an eating pattern can imply a religious or philosophical belief. We treat these fields accordingly: they exist so the assistant doesn’t suggest something that would hurt you, they’re used for nothing else, and you can clear them at any time in Settings.

What you create

Balsamic stores the things you make in it:

• Recipes you write, import, generate with the assistant, or save from Discover
• Photos you upload for a recipe
• Meal plans, grocery lists, and your pantry, including expiry dates you set
• Your conversations with the assistant and with Learn, kept so you can scroll back to them
• Reports you file about a public recipe, along with which recipe you reported

Usage and technical information

We count how many assistant messages you’ve sent, recipes you’ve imported, and photos you’ve generated today, purely to enforce the daily limits on your plan. These counts reset every day and are not used to profile you. If you subscribe to Balsamic Pro we also store your plan, when the current period ends, and the customer and subscription identifiers our payment processor gives us — never your card number. Our host records standard server logs, which can briefly include your IP address and browser type. We also collect aggregate page-view and page-speed measurements — these are cookieless and are not tied to your account.

Cookies

Balsamic sets only the cookies needed to keep you signed in. Your settings, including your theme, are saved to your profile rather than to a cookie. There are no advertising cookies and no third-party trackers, which is why you aren’t asked to dismiss a cookie banner.

• To run the app — signing you in, saving your work, and showing it back to you on your next device.
• To make the assistant useful — your preferences are given to the model so it stops suggesting the thing you told it you can’t eat.
• To keep it working — diagnosing errors, measuring performance, and enforcing the daily AI limits that keep the service affordable to run.
• To keep Discover safe — reviewing recipes that people report.
• To reach you when we must — service and security notices. Balsamic does not send marketing email.

If you’re in the UK or EEA, our legal bases are: performing our contract with you (the app doing what you asked), our legitimate interests (security, debugging, abuse prevention), your consent for the optional preference fields described above — which you may withdraw at any time by clearing them — and compliance with law.

This is the section most worth reading closely, because it’s where your words leave our database.

• When you message the assistant or Learn, that message, the earlier messages in the same conversation, and your cooking preferences are sent to Anthropic to generate a reply.
• When you import a recipe from a URL, we fetch that page and send its contents to Anthropic to pull out the ingredients and steps.
• When a recipe needs an illustrative photo, its title and description are sent to OpenAI to generate an image. Your chats, your preferences, and your account details are not part of that request.

Both providers state that content submitted through their APIs is not used to train their models, and both retain it only briefly for abuse monitoring. We rely on those commitments; their current terms are linked in the next section. We do not train models of our own on anything you write.

Please don’t type anything into the assistant that you wouldn’t want processed by a third party — payment details, passwords, or someone else’s medical information don’t belong in a cooking chat.

We share information with the companies that make Balsamic run, and with no one else. Each is bound to use it only to provide their service to us:

• Supabase

  — Database, authentication, and photo storage

  Stores your account, recipes, meal plans, grocery lists, pantry, chat history, and any photos you upload.

  Supabase privacy policy

• Anthropic (Claude)

  — The cooking assistant, recipe generation, and Learn

  Receives the messages you send the assistant, along with your cooking preferences, so it can answer in context.

  Anthropic (Claude) privacy policy

• OpenAI

  — Recipe images

  Receives a recipe title and description when an illustrative photo is generated for a recipe. It does not receive your chats or your account details.

  OpenAI privacy policy

• Stripe

  — Subscription payments

  Handles Balsamic Pro checkout and billing. Receives your email address and payment details, which it stores — Balsamic never sees or stores your card number.

  Stripe privacy policy

• Vercel

  — Hosting, analytics, and performance monitoring

  Serves the app and records aggregate, cookieless page-view and performance data. Server logs may briefly include your IP address.

  Vercel privacy policy

• Google

  — Sign-in

  Handles the sign-in itself and tells us your name, email address, and profile picture. Your Google password is never seen by Balsamic.

  Google privacy policy

We may also disclose information if the law genuinely requires it, or to protect someone’s safety or our rights. If Balsamic is ever acquired, your information could transfer with it — we’ll tell you before that happens and before any new policy applies to data collected under this one.

Every recipe starts private. Two things change that, and both are your choice:

• Setting a recipe to public lists it in Discover, where any signed-in cook can find, read, and save a copy of it.
• Sharing a recipe link makes that recipe readable by anyone who has the link, without signing in, and lets it be previewed in messaging apps and indexed by search engines.

A public recipe shows your display name and profile picture alongside it. Making a recipe private again removes it from Discover and from its share link, but we can’t retrieve copies other people already saved, or clear a search engine’s cache.

Your meal plans, grocery lists, pantry, preferences, and conversations are never public and are never shown to other users.

• We do not sell your personal information, and we never have.
• We do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. Balsamic has no ads.
• We do not use your recipes, photos, or conversations to train AI models.
• We do not run third-party advertising or tracking pixels.

Your content stays until you delete it or close your account — a recipe you wrote in your first week should still be there in your fifth year. Deleting an item in the app removes it from your account immediately; residual copies can persist in encrypted backups for a short period before rolling off.

Server logs and aggregate analytics are kept on our providers’ standard schedules, which are short. Daily AI message counters reset every day.

In the app

You can edit or delete any recipe, plan, list, pantry item, or conversation yourself, and change or clear your preferences and display name in Settings at any time.

Getting a copy, or deleting everything

Both are in Settings → Your data, and both take effect immediately. Download my data gives you a single JSON file containing your profile and preferences, every recipe and its ingredients, your meal plans, grocery lists, pantry, and your full chat history.

Delete account permanently removes your account and everything in it — recipes, photos, plans, lists, pantry, and chat history — the moment you confirm. It is irreversible, there is no grace period, and public recipes you had shared stop resolving. Residual copies can persist in encrypted backups for a short period before rolling off.

If you cannot reach those controls for any reason, email Balsamic.app@gmail.com from the address on your account and we will do it for you within 30 days.

If you’re in the UK or EEA

The GDPR gives you the right to access, correct, delete, export, or restrict how we use your information, to object to processing based on legitimate interests, and to withdraw consent. Access, export, and deletion you can exercise yourself in Settings; for the rest use the address above and we answer within one month. You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.

If you’re in California

The CCPA and CPRA give you the right to know what we collect and why, to get a copy, to correct or delete it, and to opt out of sale or sharing — and as stated in section 7, we don’t sell or share your information, so there is nothing to opt out of. We will never treat you differently for exercising a right. Use Settings for a copy or a deletion, and the same address for anything else.

Traffic is encrypted in transit, and data is encrypted at rest by our database provider. Access to your rows is enforced at the database itself through row-level security, so one account cannot read another’s recipes, lists, or chats even if the app has a bug. Sign-in is handled by Google, so Balsamic never holds a password.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach ever affects your information, we will tell you and the relevant regulators as quickly as the law requires.

Balsamic is operated from the United States, and the providers listed in section 5 process data there. If you use Balsamic from outside the US, your information is transferred to and stored in the US, which may have different privacy laws than your country. Where those transfers require a safeguard — such as the Standard Contractual Clauses — our providers put one in place.

Balsamic isn’t built for children. You must be at least 13 to have an account, and we don’t knowingly collect information from anyone younger. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we’ll delete it. Some countries set a higher age for consent to online services, and where that’s the case, that age applies.

We’ll update this page as Balsamic changes, and the date at the top will always tell you when it last moved. If a change materially affects how we handle your information — a new category of data, a new company receiving it, a new purpose — we’ll tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect, rather than quietly editing this page.

Questions, requests, and complaints all go to the same place: Balsamic.app@gmail.com. A real person reads it.

See also our Terms of Service, and Google’s privacy policy for the sign-in step.