Privacy Policy

dChef ("we", "us") builds a personal AI cooking assistant — a mobile app and the services behind it. This policy explains what we collect when you use dChef, why we collect it, and the choices you have. It covers both signed-in accounts and anonymous use, since dChef works without ever creating an account.

1. Information we collect

Account information. If you choose to sign in, our authentication provider (Clerk) stores your email address and basic profile details, and issues us a token that identifies your account. Signing in is optional — dChef works on an anonymous, device-generated session if you never create an account, though that history won't follow you to a new device.

Kitchen and fridge photos. When you scan your fridge or pantry, the photo is sent to our AI vision provider to identify ingredients, quantities, and likely storage location. We don't keep a copy of the photo itself after it's processed — what we store is the resulting ingredient list, which you can edit or delete at any time from your kitchen inventory.

Recipes, cooking activity, and taste memory. We store the recipes you've cooked, skipped, or rated, and use that history to decide what to recommend next. This is the core of how dChef's recommendations improve over time.

Nutrition and goals. If you set a daily calorie or protein goal, we store that figure and the nutrition totals from meals you've actually cooked in dChef, to track progress against it. This is self-reported wellness information you choose to enter — it is not medical data and dChef is not a medical or diagnostic product.

Community content. Posts, comments, and likes you make in dChef's community are stored and shown to other users as part of that feature. Don't post anything there you don't want to be public.

Push notification tokens. If you enable meal or expiry reminders, we store a device-specific push token (issued by Expo/Apple/Google) so we can deliver those notifications. Turning reminders off stops future notifications and we discard the token.

Subscription status. If you subscribe to dChef Pro, our payment and subscription provider (RevenueCat) manages billing through Apple's or Google's app store and tells us your subscription status. We never see or store your payment card details.

Usage analytics. We log basic product events (like opening the app, viewing a recipe, or completing onboarding) to understand how dChef is used and to fix problems. These events are tied to your session, not sold to anyone.

2. How we use this information

• To identify ingredients from your photos and build your kitchen inventory
• To decide and personalize recipe recommendations, including "Tonight's Pick" and weekly meal plans
• To generate a grocery list from recipes you plan to cook
• To track progress against nutrition goals you've set (dChef Pro)
• To send the reminders you've opted into
• To operate the community feature and show your posts to other users
• To maintain, secure, and improve dChef

3. Third parties we work with

We rely on a small number of infrastructure providers to run dChef, each of which processes data only on our behalf and under its own privacy commitments:

• Clerk — account creation and sign-in, if you choose to use one
• Cloudflare — hosts our backend and database (via Neon Postgres) and processes requests the app makes
• AI model providers, accessed through Vercel's AI Gateway — process fridge photos and generate recipe text; they don't retain your data for their own use
• Openverse — supplies openly licensed food photography for cooking steps; no personal data is sent to it
• Expo — delivers push notifications to your device
• RevenueCat — manages dChef Pro subscriptions through the Apple App Store or Google Play

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own marketing purposes.

4. Your choices and rights

• Use dChef anonymously, without ever providing an email address
• Edit or delete any ingredient, recipe history entry, or nutrition goal from within the app
• Turn off push notifications at any time from Settings
• Request a copy or deletion of your data by emailing us at the address below — we'll respond within a reasonable time and delete what we're not required to keep

If you only ever use an anonymous session and never sign in, deleting the app removes your local session token, after which we can no longer link past activity back to you.

5. Data retention

We keep account and kitchen data for as long as your account is active, and anonymous session data for as long as the session remains in use. Fridge photos themselves are not retained beyond the moment they're analyzed. You can request deletion at any time.

6. Children's privacy

dChef is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we'll remove it.

7. Changes to this policy

If we make a material change to this policy, we'll update the date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, notify you in the app.

8. Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns about your data can be sent to hello@dchef.app.