Chefo turns the things people send you into recipes, and to do that it has to read them. This page says plainly what reaches our servers, what is kept, for how long, and how to get rid of it. It describes the version of Chefo on the App Store and on Google Play today.
1. What we collect
Chefo starts without an account. The first time you open it the app makes an anonymous box on our servers, so a recipe can be saved and synced before you have told us anything about yourself. That box carries no name and no email.
Signing in gives that same box an identity rather than starting a new one. On iPhone that is Apple and on Android it is Google, and from either we receive only what you release — an email address, real or relayed, and your name if you allow it. Through email we receive the address you typed, so we can send the code that signs you in.
Paying for Pro goes through Apple on iPhone and through Google on Android. The App Store or Google Play takes the payment and RevenueCat, which manages the subscription, tells us only that the account is entitled and until when. Card details never reach Chefo.
- The recipes you keep — title, ingredients, steps, notes, the photo, and the line saying where it came from
- What you build around them — cookbooks, the days you planned, what is ticked off the shopping list
- Nothing else. No analytics, no advertising identifiers, no third-party trackers, and never your location
2. How imports are read
When you bring a recipe in, what you sent goes to our server and from there to a model that reads it and writes the recipe down. Chefo uses two — Anthropic's Claude and Google's Gemini — and asks the second when the first cannot answer, which is why both are named here. Neither is given your name, your email or your account. They are given the thing being read and nothing more.
Links work one way worth spelling out. Instagram and Facebook will not serve a video to a server that is not signed in, so those go through a copy of the open-source cobalt that we run on our own hosting; YouTube and TikTok are read directly. In every case the page or the video is fetched to be read once and is not kept afterwards.
3. Photos, audio and clipboard
A photograph, a video or a voice note is uploaded to a private bucket that only your own account can write to, read once by the model, and deleted as the recipe comes back — awaited deliberately, so it is gone before the request ends rather than whenever the server gets round to it. The camera, the photo library and the microphone are asked for at the moment you use them, and Chefo never opens any of them on its own.
ON THE CLIPBOARD
Chefo does not read your clipboard behind your back. iOS raises a permission dialog for any silent pasteboard read and Android shows a notice when an app reads the clipboard, so pasting stays something you do: you tap paste, and only then does the app see the link.
4. Sharing and cookbooks
Nothing you keep is public until you send it. Sharing a recipe or a cookbook mints a link at a long, unguessable address, and only somebody holding that exact address can open the page — the rest of your box stays sealed, and an anonymous read of it returns nothing. The page shows the recipe, and your name only if you put it there. Revoking a share deletes the link and the page stops opening, but a link already sent may sit in somebody's messages for years, so treat sending one as publishing it.
5. Retention and deletion
Most of what Chefo holds is kept until you get rid of it, and what does not need keeping is not kept at all. Deleting your account from Settings removes the account, everything attached to it, and your recipe photographs, which live outside the database and so are removed as an explicit part of the same step. It cannot be undone.
6. Your rights
Your recipes are yours. Edit or delete any of them whenever you like, and delete the whole account from Settings without having to write to anybody. If you would rather ask us — for a copy of what we hold, for a correction, or for deletion — write to the address below and we will do it. Your recipes are never sold, rented or handed to advertisers, and they are not used as training data.
7. Contact
Questions about any of this, or about something you would like removed, go to the same place. Write to us and a person answers.
privacy@trychefo.app