Terms of Service

These Terms are a contract between you and Balsamic (“we”, “us”). By creating an account or using the app, you accept them. If you don’t accept them, please don’t use Balsamic.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we do with your information and forms part of this agreement.

You must be at least 13 years old, and old enough to agree to online services where you live. If you’re using Balsamic on behalf of an organization, you’re confirming you have authority to accept these Terms for it.

Balsamic accounts are created through Google sign-in. Keep your Google account secure — anyone who can sign into it can reach your recipes, plans, and conversations. Tell us at Balsamic.app@gmail.com if you think someone else has access.

You’re responsible for what happens under your account, and for keeping the information on it accurate.

Your recipes, photos, notes, plans, lists, and messages remain yours. We claim no ownership of them.

To run the service, you give us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, back up, reproduce, and display your content — and to adapt it only as the product requires, such as resizing a photo or reformatting a recipe you asked us to scale. This license exists so the app can show your recipe back to you; it doesn’t let us sell your work or use it in advertising.

If you make a recipe public or share its link, the license extends to showing that recipe to the people who view it and to letting other cooks save their own copy, for as long as it’s public. Deleting your content, or making it private again, ends this license going forward — but copies other people already saved remain theirs, and we can’t reach into search engine caches or backups that haven’t yet rolled off.

You confirm you have the right to post what you post, and that it doesn’t infringe anyone else’s rights.

Recipes are private by default. If you publish one to Discover or share its link, it becomes readable by others along with your display name, and a shared link works without signing in. Publishing is a choice you make per recipe, and you can reverse it at any time — see the Privacy Policy for what that reversal can and can’t undo.

Recipes on Discover are written by other people, not by us. We don’t verify them, and section 4 applies to them with particular force.

Balsamic can read a recipe page you point it at and pull out the ingredients and steps. Lists of ingredients and basic instructions generally aren’t protected by copyright, but headnotes, stories, and photographs on the source page usually are.

Import recipes for your own cooking. Don’t use the importer to republish someone else’s writing or photography — if you make an imported recipe public, you’re representing that you have the right to share what it contains, and we’ll remove content when a rights holder tells us it doesn’t belong here.

Don’t use Balsamic to:

• Post anything unlawful, hateful, harassing, or sexually explicit
• Share a recipe or instruction designed to hurt someone — including anything unsafe presented as food
• Infringe someone’s copyright, trademark, or privacy
• Impersonate another person, or misrepresent who wrote a recipe
• Break, overload, or probe the service — including scraping it, circumventing rate limits, or attacking our infrastructure or our providers’
• Use the assistant to generate content unrelated to cooking, or to work around another AI provider’s usage policies
• Resell or redistribute the service, or use it to build a competing dataset

Any public recipe can be reported from its page. We review reports and may remove content or suspend accounts that break section 8. We’re a small team — we act as quickly as we reasonably can, and we don’t promise to review everything proactively.

If you believe content here infringes your copyright, email Balsamic.app@gmail.com with a link to it, a description of the work, and your contact details, and we’ll act promptly.

Free accounts can send 50 assistant messages a day, and also have daily limits on recipe imports and generated photos. AI is expensive to run, and we may adjust those allowances — we’ll change them in the app, not retroactively, and the limit and its reset time are shown to you when you reach it.

Balsamic Pro is a paid subscription that raises those daily limits to 500 assistant messages a day, with matching increases for imports and photos. The price and billing period are shown before you buy and again at checkout. It renews automatically at the end of each period until you cancel.

You can cancel at any time from Settings → Billing, which opens our payment processor’s billing portal. Cancelling stops the next renewal and you keep Pro until the end of the period you have already paid for; we don’t prorate partial periods. If something has gone wrong with a charge, email Balsamic.app@gmail.comand we’ll sort it out. Payments are processed by Stripe — we never receive or store your card number. Any purchase made through an app store is additionally subject to that store’s rules and refund policy.

Balsamic is offered as-is and evolves. We may add, change, or remove features, and there will be downtime — we don’t guarantee uninterrupted availability. If we ever discontinue the service, we’ll give you reasonable notice and a way to export your recipes.

You can stop using Balsamic whenever you like. To close your account for good, go to Settings → Your data → Delete account; it deletes your account and everything in it immediately and permanently. Download your data from the same place first if you want to keep a copy. If you can’t reach those controls, email Balsamic.app@gmail.com and we’ll do it for you.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these Terms, or where we must to comply with the law or protect other users. Where it’s reasonable to do so, we’ll tell you why and give you a chance to retrieve your recipes first.

Balsamic is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don’t warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, or that any recipe, nutritional estimate, cooking time, or AI-generated content will be accurate, complete, or suitable for you.

Some places don’t allow certain warranties to be excluded. Where that’s true, the exclusions above apply only as far as the law permits, and nothing here removes rights you have as a consumer that can’t be waived.

To the fullest extent the law allows, Balsamic will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost goodwill, arising from your use of the service.

Our total liability for any claim relating to Balsamic is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or fifty US dollars.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that can’t be limited by law.

You agree to indemnify and hold Balsamic harmless from claims, damages, and reasonable legal costs arising from content you post, your use of the service, or your breach of these Terms or of someone else’s rights.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of New Hampshire, without regard to its conflict of law rules. You and Balsamic agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located there, except that either of us may bring a claim in small claims court.

If you’re a consumer in the EEA or the UK, this doesn’t deprive you of the protection of the mandatory laws of the country you live in, or of your right to bring proceedings there.

Before filing anything, please email Balsamic.app@gmail.com. Most problems are faster to fix than to litigate.

Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms as Balsamic changes. The date at the top shows when they last moved, and we’ll give notice in the app or by email before a material change takes effect. Continuing to use Balsamic after that means you accept the new version; if you don’t, you can close your account.

The rest

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us. If a provision turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Not enforcing something right away doesn’t waive our right to enforce it later. You may not transfer this agreement; we may transfer it in connection with a merger or acquisition.

Reach us at Balsamic.app@gmail.com — for legal notices, copyright complaints, account deletion, or anything above that isn’t clear.