Privacy Policy

Who you’re dealing with

Granny is made by Addison Fuller. It’s a small operation — there is no data team, no advertising business, and nobody whose job is to find new things to do with what you write.

What we don’t do

This list is short and we intend to keep it that way. Granny contains:

• No advertising, and no ad networks.
• No tracking across other apps or websites. The measuring we do — described below — stops at the edge of Granny. Granny does not ask for permission to track you, because there is nothing to ask for.
• No location services. Granny never asks where you are, and we don’t work it out from your internet address either.
• No data brokers. We do not sell information about you and have no plans to. If that ever changed, it would need your consent first, and we would rather it simply never changed.
• No selling or sharing your conversations. What you say to Granny is not training data for anyone, and it is not a product.

What we keep

When you make an account and start cooking, we store:

• Your email address, so you can sign in and so we can send you a code when you need one.
• What you tell us about yourself — a display name, a username, a short bio, a profile photo, a cover photo. All of it optional except a name of some kind.
• How you cook — any dietary needs, allergies, dislikes, and how many people you usually cook for.
• What you make — your recipes, your cookbook and collections, your conversations with Granny, and the notes and photos you add after cooking something.
• A record of your use of the AI features, so we can keep the service running and stop it being abused.
• Whether you’re a Premium member — one record, described under “Paying for Premium” below.

We never see your password. Sign-in is handled by Supabase, our infrastructure provider, and your password is stored by them in a form we cannot read.

Your display name is whatever you choose to share — we never take one from your email address, and you can change it at any time in Settings.

What Granny sends to the AI

Granny’s answers come from a large language model run by xAI. Granny is not a person, and there is no way to talk to Granny without something being sent there. This is the one place your words travel, so here is exactly what goes:

• The message you typed, and the conversation it belongs to.
• Any photo you attach to a message.
• The recipe you’re discussing, when you’re asking about one.
• How you cook. The four things you told us when you set up: your dietary needs, your allergies, your dislikes, and how many people you usually cook for. Granny gets these so nothing suggested would hurt you, or is something you’d never eat. That is the whole list. Granny does not watch what you cook and build up a picture of you, and nothing sent to Granny about you comes from anywhere but those four answers.
• What you pick when you ask what to cook. When you use the “What should I cook?” sheet, the choices you make there go with that request: how much time you have, what kind of food you’re in the mood for, which meal it’s for, and how many you’re feeding this time. They describe that one ask. None of it is added to your profile.

Your name, your email address, your username and your photo are never sent to the AI. Neither is anything else about you. What Granny is told about how you cook is exactly what you entered under Cooking Preferences in Settings, and you can change or clear it there at any time.

When you’re cooking a recipe step by step, far less is sent: only your allergies. None of the rest of it follows you into Cook Mode.

If you ask Granny about something on the web, or paste a link, the relevant part of that page or search may also be sent so Granny can answer about it.

Requests reach xAI through our own server, never from your phone directly. Your use of Granny is governed by xAI’s handling of that data once it arrives. Nobody here reads your conversations to moderate them, and we don’t hand them to anyone to train a model on.

What other people using Granny can see

Granny is built around cooks sharing food, so some of what you make is visible to other people using the app.

Visible to other people using Granny: your profile, your recipes, your cookbook and collections, and your cooking notes.

Private to you: your conversations with Granny, and your email address.

Photos

Photos you add — to a recipe, to your profile, to a conversation — are stored at a public web address. The address is long and isn’t guessable, but anyone who has it can open the photo without signing in to Granny. Please don’t put anything in a photo you would mind a stranger seeing.

Location data is removed from every photo before it leaves your phone. We never receive the coordinates of where a picture was taken, or the camera details attached to it.

Paying for Premium

Premium is bought through Apple, as an in-app purchase on your iPhone, and nowhere else. Apple takes the payment, renews the subscription, and handles cancellation and refunds under Apple’s own policy. Your payment details stay with Apple — we never see a card.

Between Apple and us sits RevenueCat, a service that processes the purchase on our behalf and tells our server whenever your subscription changes. RevenueCat receives three things: the same random account number as everything else here, Apple’s receipt for the purchase, and the country and currency Apple attaches to it. Not your name, not your email address, not your device’s identifiers, and no advertising id.

What we keep from all of that is one record for your account: whether you’re a member (and whether that’s your first 14 days, on us), which plan, when it next renews, which store it came through — Apple, or our own grant of the first 14 days — and a mark that keeps our own test purchases apart from real ones. It is written only from what RevenueCat tells us, and the app reads it to know what to unlock. There is no receipt, no card and no purchase history on our side — that record is the whole of it.

Deleting your Granny account does not cancel a subscription, because Apple holds it and we don’t. If you delete your account while a subscription is still running, we send you one email saying so, with the date it next renews and where to cancel it. The Terms of Service cover the rest — the price, the first 14 days, and how to cancel.

Email

Three kinds of email come to you, and no others: a code to confirm your address when you sign up, a link when you ask to reset your password, and one message if you delete your account while a Premium subscription is still running — telling you that the subscription carries on with Apple, the date it next renews, and where to cancel it.

Two more kinds come to us, not to you. When you report a recipe, the report reaches us as an email carrying your username and your account’s identifier, the same for the cook whose recipe it is, the note you wrote, and a copy of the recipe as it stood — never your email address. When someone asks for an invite on granny.recipes, the name, email address and “how did you hear about us” they typed come to us the same way.

All of it is delivered by Resend, who see the addresses on each message in order to send it. There is no newsletter and no marketing email.

Where it all lives

We use six outside services: xAI (the AI that answers your messages), Supabase (our database, sign-in and file storage), PostHog (product analytics, crash reports and session recordings), Resend (the email we send), RevenueCat (whether your Premium membership is active) and Expo (delivering updates to the app).

Each time Granny opens, the app checks with Expo for a newer version. Expo sees your internet address, as any server you connect to does, and is told which versions of iOS and of Granny you have, which update the app is running, a random number the app makes up when it’s installed and, if an update ever fails to start, the error it hit. Never your name, your email address or your account.

Granny’s database, sign-in system and file storage are run by Supabase, hosted in the United States (Oregon).

What we measure

We measure how Granny gets used, because we could not otherwise tell whether Granny was failing people. This is the honest version of what that means.

We use PostHog, a product analytics service, hosted in the United States. The app tells it about a dozen kinds of moment: when the app opens, when someone signs up, when they finish setting up, when a message is sent to Granny, when a recipe is saved, when a cook is started, finished or abandoned, when Granny fails to answer, when a recipe is shared out, saved from another cook, or when someone is followed — and which screen you’re on as you move through the app.

For each of those moments, what gets sent is that it happened: that the app opened, that a message went to Granny, that a recipe was saved, that a cook was started or finished or abandoned, that Granny failed to answer. A count, a length of time, a yes or no. Not the name of the recipe. Not your notes. Not your photos. And, with each message you send Granny, the state of your membership — whether it’s active, whether it’s on us or paid through Apple, and whether the free limit applied. Words only: never a price, never a receipt.

There is one exception, and we want to be plain about it. So that we can find and fix the moments where Granny answers badly, the conversation itself is also sent to PostHog — and not only the words you wrote. What goes with each turn is the whole of what our server sends the AI: Granny’s own instructions, the four things you told us about how you cook, the recipe you’re discussing, the text of any web page you asked about, the choices you made on the “What should I cook?” sheet, your messages, and what Granny wrote back. It is tied to the same random account number, never to your name or email. The text is kept for thirty days and then deleted; the note that a turn happened — when, which model answered, how long it took, what it cost us — stays, like any other moment. Your photos are not in that record; where a photo was part of a conversation, a placeholder stands in its place. Screen recordings, below, are different: a photo on your screen is in the recording.

If the app crashes or hits an error it can’t recover from, that is reported the same way, so it can be fixed.

All of it is tied to a random account number, not to your name or your email address. PostHog is told which kind of iPhone, which versions of iOS and of Granny, your language and your time zone — and never your name, your email or your username.

Screen recordings

This one deserves its own heading, because it is the most invasive thing we do and burying it would be the wrong way to tell you.

Some sessions in Granny are recorded — not the camera, not the microphone, just a picture of the screen as you move through the app. That recording can include the actual words of your conversation with Granny, the preferences you type in when you’re setting up, and the photos on screen while you use the app.

Some things are cut out of it before it ever leaves your phone: your email address, the sign-in code we send you, and any password field. Those are never in a recording.

Recordings carry the same random account number as everything else — no name, no email attached. They are occasionally watched by Addison Fuller, for one reason: to see where Granny is confusing or broken, and fix it. They are never shared, never published, and never given to anyone else.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from Settings, under Account. We would rather tell you exactly what that does than say “everything is removed.”

Deleted: your recipes, collections, conversations with Granny, cooking notes and history, your preferences, who you follow, and the photos you uploaded.

Anonymized: your profile record stays, with your name, email and photos stripped out of it, so that recipes other cooks saved from you don’t break.

Kept: a minimal sign-in record, with your email address and name stripped out of it, which can never be signed in to again; a dated note that the account was deleted, which includes your email address and the name you gave when you signed up; your membership record, if you ever had Premium, so a refund or a dispute with Apple can still be looked up; any reports you filed about other cooks’ recipes, and any filed about yours; the log of your use of the AI features; and the record of which version of the Terms you accepted, and when. We keep these to resolve payment disputes, to deal with a report fairly, and to prove a deletion happened if anyone ever asks. None of it is readable by anyone using the app.

Photos: deleting your account removes the photos you uploaded — profile pictures, journal and collection photos, pictures you shared in chat — from our storage before the rest of your account is deleted. If they can’t be removed, the deletion stops and nothing else is touched, so you can try again. A copy can linger at its old web address for about a minute while our content network clears; after that the address stops working for everyone. If any photos are somehow still there after a deletion — for example if you deleted from an older version of the app — our system finds and removes them automatically, usually within a few minutes.

Not removed on the day: the copies at PostHog. We do not delete one person’s analytics records there, so they are not removed when you delete your account. They expire on their own: the text of your conversations after thirty days, screen recordings after thirty days, and the record of moments — counts, times, a yes or no — after seven years. They carry the random account number, never your name or email. RevenueCat keeps its record of your purchase, and Apple keeps yours with your Apple account; neither is ours to delete.

Age

Granny is for adults — you must be 18 or older to use it. Some of what cooks make and share involves alcohol, and we’d rather set the door at 18 than ask anyone for ID. We don’t ask your age, so if someone under 18 has made an account, please write to us and we will remove it.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us what we hold about you, ask for a copy of it, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Depending on where you live you may have these rights in law; we intend to honor them either way. Write to us and a person will answer.

When this changes

We will update the date at the top of this page whenever this policy changes. If a change is significant — if something new starts leaving the app, for instance — we will tell you in the app rather than quietly editing this page.

Getting in touch

Write to hello@granny.recipes and Addison Fuller will respond.