Privacy

Casserole is a personal project in beta, built and run by one person — Jon Black. There’s no company behind it yet. This page says plainly what Casserole keeps about you, who else touches it, and how to get it back out. When the business side gets set up, this page will be revised and the date above will change.

The short version: your book is private until you publish something or let followers see your log. There are no ads, and nothing about you is sold. Delete your account and your book goes with it.

What Casserole keeps

Your account. Your email address, and your name if you give one. If you sign in with Google, Google passes along your name and email — nothing else is asked for. If you sign in with an email code, the code is sent to you and expires in a few minutes. There are no passwords.

Your book. Recipes, photos, collections, notes, your cook log and ratings, your meal plan, your grocery list, your staples, and any cook in progress. All of it is private to you unless you publish it, share a link to it, or let followers see your log. That last setting is off unless you turn it on, and what it shows is set out below.

Your profile, if you make one. A handle, a short bio, a photo, a location, and up to three links. For location you enter a ZIP code; Casserole stores the ZIP and its approximate coordinates, and only ever shows “City, ST”. Your profile stays off until you switch it on.

Where you shopped, if you say. When you finish a shop, you can save the store’s name with it, and Google’s id for that place when the store came from a location check. Like the rest of the grocery list, it’s shared with your household. Your location isn’t saved with it.

Nutrition settings, if you have Premium. Your dinner target, the servings you had when you log a cook, and any corrections you make to how an ingredient is counted. Like the rest of your book, they’re private to you.

Who you follow, and who follows you.

Payments, if you make one. What you paid for, the amount and the tax, when, and the reference numbers Stripe gives the payment and any membership, so your access and your receipts line up. Never your card number.

Feedback you send. The message, the page you were on, your browser and screen size, the app version, and your name and email so there’s someone to reply to.

Votes on the feature requests page.

How you found Casserole, if it was through a share link or a cook’s public profile: which link or which cook. It isn’t shown to anyone.

A small activity record — things like “a share link was created” or “an account was deleted” — kept so the app can be understood and fixed.

Preferences on your device. Your browser remembers small things like how your book is sorted and which hints you’ve dismissed. Those stay on your device.

What other people can see

Nothing, by default. Then:

• Publishing a recipe or collection makes it public — it can show up on your profile and in Discover, with your handle on it.
• A share link lets anyone who has the link see that recipe, collection, or book. You can revoke a link whenever you like, and it stops working straight away.
• Forking. When another cook forks something you published, they get their own copy with a credit back to you. Their copy stays theirs even if you later unpublish or delete yours.
• Planning together. If you pair up with someone, the two of you share a plan and a grocery list, and you’ll each see the recipes on that plan and who made what. Leaving ends the sharing.
• Letting followers see your log. Your profile has a setting, “Let followers see my log”, under Public profile. It is off unless you turn it on. Anyone can follow a public profile. With it on, the cooks who follow you can see when you make a published recipe, with your rating. If you saved that recipe from another cook, that cook can see it too, unless you have published your own copy. Your note is shown only if you also turn on “Include my notes”. You can hide any one log, or turn the setting off, which takes every log out at once.

Who else handles your data

Casserole runs on a handful of services. Each one sees only what it needs to do its job:

• Convex stores the app’s data and photos, so it holds everything listed above.
• Render serves the website, so it sees requests to the site, including your IP address.
• Resend sends email — sign-in codes, account confirmations, invites — so it sees your email address and the message.
• Google handles sign-in, if you choose it, so it knows you signed in to Casserole. If you have Premium and turn on naming the store from your location, Google Places also receives that one location reading — more on that below.
• PostHog provides usage analytics, error reports and session replays: pages visited, actions taken, errors, your device and browser, and — once you’re signed in — your email, so activity can be tied to an account.
• Stripe processes payments, if you pay for something, so it sees your email, your card details and your billing address. Your card details go to Stripe directly; Casserole never sees or stores your card number.
• USDA FoodData Central is looked up to estimate calories and macros, so it receives ingredient names — nothing about you.
• Anthropic provides the AI model behind a few features — more on that below.

All of these are based in the United States, and that’s where your data lives.

About the AI. Some of what Casserole does with a recipe is worked out by an AI model, Anthropic’s Claude. To do that, the recipe’s text — title, ingredients, and steps — is sent to Anthropic. If you import a recipe from photos or a PDF, those pages are sent too. Your name and email are never included. Anthropic doesn’t use what’s sent this way to train its models, and Casserole doesn’t use your recipes to train anything either — they’re used to run your book, and that’s all.

Naming the store. This is part of Premium, and it’s off until you turn it on. If you do, your phone’s location is read once, only when you tap Start shopping, and never in the background. It’s sent to Google Places once to find the grocery stores nearby, and it isn’t stored with your shop or your account. Google handles that request under its own privacy policy. The store you confirm is saved with the shop, as above. Your phone also remembers the stores you’ve confirmed, so it can recognise one next time without asking Google. You can turn this off in your profile, under Features, and your browser’s own location setting applies as well.

Importing from a link. When you paste a link, Casserole fetches that page to read the recipe from it, and keeps the link as the recipe’s source. When the page publishes its own nutrition figures, Casserole may read it once more and keep what it publishes — its ingredients, servings and figures — to measure how close Casserole’s own estimates come. The page’s text is read by the same AI model. What’s kept is the publisher’s page, never your version of the recipe, and nothing in it identifies you.

Connecting an assistant. If you connect an AI assistant to your book, it can read and change your book on your behalf, with the access you approved. What that assistant does with what it reads is covered by its own provider’s privacy policy, not this one. You can disconnect it any time from the assistants page.

How your data is protected

• Everything travels over an encrypted connection, and the database and photo storage are encrypted at rest with 256-bit AES. The provider that hosts them is independently audited to the SOC 2 Type II standard.
• There are no passwords to steal. You sign in through Google or with a one-time code sent to your email.
• Every request for data is checked on the server against the signed-in account. Your book is private by default, and nothing in it becomes visible to anyone else without an action from you.
• Access to the live data is limited to Jon, and is used only to run and support the service.
• If a security incident ever affects your data, you will be told promptly — what happened, what was involved, and what is being done about it.

If you find a security problem, please report it to hello@casserole.recipes. It will be treated as the highest priority.

Cookies and analytics

Casserole uses one cookie to keep you signed in. PostHog also stores an identifier in your browser so visits can be counted and errors traced. It also records sessions — a replay of how the pages were used, so a problem can be seen the way it happened. All text, images and anything you type are masked in these recordings: a replay shows layout, clicks and errors, never your recipes or your details. Recordings are deleted after 30 days. There are no advertising cookies and no ad trackers, and there never will be.

Getting your data out, or gone

• Edit or remove anything in your book at any time.
• Export your recipes at any time from your profile. You get every recipe in your book as one plain text file that opens anywhere.
• Take everything offline without deleting it: suspending your account unpublishes your profile and everything you’ve published, and it’s fully reversible.
• Delete your account from your profile. You’ll confirm by email, and then your recipes, photos, collections, logs, plan, grocery lists and past shops, any cook in progress, follows, votes, and profile are removed. A list or shop you share with a household partner stays with them. A Premium membership is cancelled at the same time, so nothing renews.

A few things outlast deletion, and you should know about them:

• Copies other cooks forked from your published recipes stay in their books. The credit to you stops linking anywhere.
• Feedback you sent is kept, along with the name and email that came with it.
• The record of anything you bought from another cook is kept, because what they are owed has to add up. Stripe also keeps its own record of every payment, under its own privacy policy.
• The activity record keeps its entries, without your profile attached.
• If you joined the waitlist before sign-up opened, that email stays on the waitlist record. Ask and it’ll be removed.

For any of those, or for a copy of anything the export doesn’t cover — photos, your cook log — email hello@casserole.recipes. Requests are handled personally and promptly.

Children

Casserole isn’t meant for anyone under 13, and accounts aren’t knowingly given to them. If you think a child has signed up, email hello@casserole.recipes.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, signed-in cooks will hear about it by email or in the app before it takes effect. The date at the top always shows the latest revision.

Contact

hello@casserole.recipes — or see help & contact.