Privacy Policy

Cookaday answers one question — what do I cook tonight — and it needs very little about you to do it. There is no account, no name, no email address and no password. This policy sets out exactly what the app touches, where it is stored, and how to get rid of it.

Who operates Cookaday

Cookaday is operated by Palms Studio LLC, 135 Birchwood Ter, Wayne, NJ 07470-3836. For anything about your data, write to cookaday@palmstudio.app.

The short version

• Your installation is identified by a random device id. No name, email, phone number or password is collected.
• We store a household food profile: how many people you cook for, allergies, dislikes, kitchen equipment, a weeknight time budget, and which staples you already own.
• We store the recipes you save and the ones you mark as cooked, so the app stops suggesting the same dinner twice.
• We do not collect weight, calories, body measurements or any other health data. Cookaday is not a diet app.
• No advertising, no advertising identifiers, no third-party advertising or analytics SDKs, and no sale of personal data.

What we handle, and why

Anonymous device id. The first time you open Cookaday, Firebase Anonymous Authentication creates a random identifier on your device. It is not linked to your name, email, phone number or any real-world identity. We use it so your saved recipes, your household profile and your subscription status are recognised as belonging to the same installation.

Household food profile. The onboarding questions — usual number of portions, allergies and intolerances, dislikes, kitchen equipment, a normal weeknight time budget, and the staples already in your cupboard. Allergies are treated as a hard constraint: they are used to exclude ingredients from every answer, and they are re-checked before an answer is shown to you. Dietary styles such as vegetarian, halal or pescatarian are preferences about food and are stored the same way.

Saved recipes and cooked history. Links and recipes you save from the share sheet, and the meals you mark as cooked, with the date. This is what lets the app raise something you already saved to the top of tonight’s answers, and what stops it repeating a dish you had on Tuesday. Saving is free and unlimited, and it always will be.

Feedback on an answer. When you tap “cooked it” or “did not work”, we record that against the recipe, not against you, so bad answers can be withdrawn and rewritten for everyone.

Purchases. Subscriptions are processed entirely by Apple or Google through your store account. We use RevenueCat to check whether your anonymous installation has an active subscription. We receive subscription status and anonymised transaction records — never your name, billing address or card details.

Diagnostics. If the app crashes, a technical crash report (device model, operating system version, app version, stack trace) is sent so the fault can be fixed. Crash reports are tied to an app installation, not to an identity.

Photographs. Step photographs are served from a content delivery network. Like any file server it processes your IP address in order to deliver the image. We do not use this to build a profile of you.

What we deliberately do not collect

This is a product decision, not only a legal one. Cookaday never asks for, and has no field to store:

• Your weight, height or any body measurement.
• Calorie targets, macronutrient goals or weight-loss goals.
• Any health, fitness or medical data, and nothing from Apple Health or Google Fit — the app requests no such permission.
• Your contacts, your photo library, or your precise location.
• An advertising identifier. There is no advertising in Cookaday, so there is nothing to target with.

Allergies and dietary styles are the one place where food and health touch. We treat them strictly as cooking constraints — used to keep an ingredient out of a recipe — and never as a health record.

How recipes are written

Cookaday does not keep a catalogue of recipes. When you ask for a dinner, the request — the ingredients, the cooking method, the time budget, the number of portions, the equipment, and the allergens that must be avoided — is sent to Anthropic’s API, which writes the answer.

Your device id, your saved recipes and your cooked history are not part of that request. The request describes a meal, not a person. Because identical requests have identical answers, each answer is written once, cached, and served to everyone who asks the same question — which is also why an answer cannot be traced back to whoever asked for it first.

Anthropic processes the request in order to produce the recipe. Under Anthropic’s commercial terms, inputs and outputs sent through its API are not used to train its models; Anthropic may retain them for a limited period for trust-and-safety purposes, as described in its own documentation.

Cooking temperatures, doneness cues and core timings are not written by a model. They come from a hand-checked table with a cited source for each row, and generated text is validated against that table before it is shown to anyone.

Where your data is stored

Your profile, saved recipes and cooked history are stored in Google Firebase (Cloud Firestore), in Google’s EU region europe-west3 (Frankfurt, Germany). Some data also stays on your own device so the app works without a connection.

Processors we rely on

These companies process data on our behalf, under their own data protection commitments:

Some of these providers are based in the United States. Where data leaves the EU, transfers rely on recognised safeguards such as the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework or EU Standard Contractual Clauses, as documented by each provider.

How long we keep things

• Profile, saved recipes and cooked history: kept until you delete them or delete your data in the app. See Delete your data.
• On-device data: removed when you delete your data or uninstall the app.
• Crash reports: retained for the diagnostic provider’s standard rolling window (90 days), then deleted automatically.
• Published recipe pages: the answers Cookaday writes are published on this site. They contain no personal data and are not linked to whoever first asked for them, so they are not deleted when your data is.
• Purchase records: Apple, Google and RevenueCat retain transaction records as required for accounting and subscription management.

Your rights

If you are in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or another jurisdiction with equivalent rules, you have the right to access, rectify, erase, receive a copy of, or restrict and object to the processing of your personal data, and to complain to your local data protection authority.

Deleting your data in the app exercises the right to erasure immediately. For anything else, write to cookaday@palmstudio.app. Because installations are anonymous, we may ask you to contact us from inside the app, or to send the support id shown in the app’s settings, so we can find the right record — we have no other way to identify it.

Children

Cookaday is a cooking tool for the person who does the cooking in a household and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version is published on this page with a new effective date. For significant changes we will also say so inside the app before the change takes effect.