Privacy Policy
The short version. Your voice never leaves your phone. Saffron carries no advertising and no ad trackers, and we never sell your data. We do measure how the app is used so we can fix what breaks, and that never includes what you cook. Your recipes are private unless you choose to share them, and you can delete your account and everything in it from inside the app.
Who we are
Saffron is made and run by one person, not a company. Saffron is the data controller for the information described below, and saffronrecipesapp@gmail.com is the way to reach it, whether that is a support question or a request about your data.
What we collect, and why
Your account
Saffron uses Sign in with Apple. Apple gives us an email address, which may be one of Apple's private relay addresses rather than your real one, and your name if you choose to share it. We need this to give you an account that your recipes belong to.
Your profile
A username, which you pick and which friends use to find you, plus an optional display name and profile picture.
Your recipes
Everything in a recipe: the title, ingredients, steps, notes, tags, times, servings, and any photo you attach. This includes the text of what you dictated, which is kept so you can have Saffron read it again if it got something wrong the first time.
Friends and households
Who you are connected to, requests you have sent or received, households you belong to and invitations to them, and the notifications that go with all of that.
Meal plans
Your own weekly plan is stored only on your phone. A household plan is stored on our servers, because the point of it is that everyone in the household sees the same week.
Subscription status
Whether Saffron Pro is active on your account and when it expires. We never see your card details. Apple handles the payment and tells us only whether a subscription is running.
Free tier usage
A count of how many dictations you have turned into recipes, so the free allowance can be applied.
Reports
If you report a person or a recipe, we store what was reported, the reason you picked, and when.
How the app is used
So we can see what works and fix what does not, Saffron records how the app is used: which screens you open, which features you use, whether something failed, and roughly how long the app took to turn a dictation into a recipe. Alongside this we record the country you are in, your language, and the kind of device you are on.
This never includes what you cook. No recipe titles, ingredients, steps, dictated text, photos, or anything you type into search. It is counts and timings, not content.
While you are signed out this is tied to your device only. Once you sign in it is tied to your account, so we can tell whether people who join stay.
Saffron also records how the app is moved through, so we can see where people get stuck. Everything you have typed and every image on screen is blocked out before any of it leaves your phone, so what shows is the layout and where you tapped, not your recipes.
What we never collect
- Your voice. Speech recognition runs on your phone using Apple's own on-device framework. No audio is recorded to a file, and none is ever sent to us or to anyone else.
- Advertising identifiers or ad trackers. There are none in the app. Nothing about you is shared with advertisers, and nothing is sold.
- Payment details. These stay between you and Apple.
- Your precise location, contacts, or health data. Saffron never asks for any of these. We do see the country you are in, worked out from your internet connection rather than from your phone's location.
Who else processes your data
These companies handle data on our behalf so that Saffron can work. We do not sell your data to anyone, and none of these are advertisers.
- Supabase stores the database, your account, and your photos, and runs our server functions. Data is held in Europe.
- Google receives the text of a dictation through its Gemini API, and returns it structured into a recipe. The audio is never sent, because it never leaves your phone in the first place. If your dictation contains something personal, that text is part of what is sent.
- RevenueCat keeps track of whether your subscription is active.
- Apple provides Sign in with Apple, processes payments, and provides the on-device speech recognition.
- PostHog receives the usage information described above. Their servers are in the European Union.
- Expo delivers updates to the app itself.
Some of these providers process data outside the European Economic Area. Where that happens it is covered by the transfer safeguards in those providers' data processing terms.
What other people can see
Nothing in Saffron is public. There is no public feed, no discovery, and no way for a stranger to browse your cookbook.
- Your username, display name and profile picture can be seen by someone who searches for you by username.
- Your recipes are visible to accepted friends only if you have turned on sharing in Settings. It is off until you turn it on.
- Members of a household you join can see the household's shared cookbook and its weekly plan.
- Anyone who can see a recipe can save their own copy of it. That copy belongs to them and stays in their cookbook even if you later stop sharing or remove them as a friend.
How long we keep it
We keep your data for as long as your account exists. Deleting your account removes your profile, your recipes and their photos, your friendships, your household memberships, your usage counters, and any reports connected to the account. Backups held by our hosting provider may contain your data for a short period afterwards before they expire on their own schedule.
Your rights
Under the GDPR you may ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask us to restrict or stop processing it, and ask for it in a portable form. You can also complain to your national data protection authority.
Deleting everything is self-serve. Open Settings, tap Account, and choose Delete account. It is immediate and it is permanent.
For anything else, including a copy of your data, email saffronrecipesapp@gmail.com and we will deal with it within one month, as the GDPR requires.
Children
Saffron is not intended for children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect data from them.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it.
Contact
Questions about any of this go to saffronrecipesapp@gmail.com.