themenu is a small service for planning a household's meals, run as a hobby. This page says in plain words what we keep about you, who handles it for us, how long it lasts and how to delete it. It is written to be read, not as legal advice. We don't show ads, we don't use analytics or tracking scripts, and we don't sell or share your data with anyone beyond the services named below.
What we collect
- Your email address, to sign you in with a code and to send the few emails themenu sends: sign-in codes, household invites, notices about your household, a reminder before a yearly renewal and a reminder before free time from a code ends. Your name, if you give one, so your household knows who is who.
- What your household puts in: recipes, photos, weekly menus, shopping lists, family notes, tags, cooking logs, Discover suggestions and any feedback you send.
- How much AI your household uses, as an amount per day, to keep within the monthly allowance.
- Your IP address when you sign in, to stop people guessing sign-in codes, and your browser's user agent string for each sign-in, so the Account page can list where you are signed in.
- If you subscribe, Stripe's ids for you and your subscription and the date your household is paid until. We never see your card.
- Codes. An admin may enter email addresses to restrict a code to those people, so the code holds those addresses.
One cookie keeps you signed in. There are no others.
Who handles it for us
- Railway runs our server and database.
- Cloudflare R2 stores recipe photos.
- Resend sends our email.
- OpenRouter passes AI requests (planning, swaps, shopping lists, Discover, imports, keywords and nutrition) to the model providers it works with. Each request carries only what that job needs, such as recipes, family notes or a photo, never your email. OpenRouter keeps no copy of them, and every request tells it to deny data collection, so it sends them only to AI model providers that neither store nor train on them.
- Exa is the web search Discover uses, through OpenRouter. It receives only the search query, made from your household's tags and notes. The data-collection setting above covers the AI model providers, not the search.
- Stripe takes payments as the merchant of record: it collects any sales tax or VAT. Payments are handled by Link, Stripe's checkout, and its receipts include its own support contact.
How long we keep it
What your household puts in stays until you delete it or delete your account. Some records go sooner:
- Sign-in records are deleted 7 days after they expire, and so are signed-out sessions.
- Records of sent email (the address and subject; the message itself is not kept) are deleted 7 days after sending.
- Records of too many sign-in attempts are deleted after 7 days.
- Wrong guesses at a code are deleted after a day.
- Payment notices from Stripe are kept by id for 30 days, so none is handled twice.
Outside our own servers:
- Our database is backed up daily and each backup is kept for 6 days, so anything deleted is gone from backups within 6 days.
- Resend keeps the email we send for 30 days.
- Stripe keeps payment records for as long as tax law requires.
Deleting your account
Delete your account at any time from the Account page. It deletes; it does not hide.
- If you are a member of a household, it removes your account, your sign-ins, your feedback, the records of email sent to you and your place in the household. The household and its recipes stay for the others.
- If you own the household, it also removes the household and everything in it for everyone: recipes, photos, menus, shopping lists, family, tags, Discover suggestions and cooking logs. Each other member gets an email saying so and keeps their account. To keep the household for them, make someone else the owner first.
- A subscription is cancelled at once, with no further charges. Ask for any refund before you delete your account; once it's deleted we can't find your payments from inside themenu. Your email is removed from every code that lists it.
Nothing is kept to recognise you again. If you sign up later with the same email, you start fresh, free month included.
Not paying never deletes anything: a household whose free time ends keeps all its recipes.
Taking your recipes with you
A way to download your recipes is coming. Until then, every recipe is on its own page in the app.
Questions
Use Send feedback in the app, at the bottom of every page once you are signed in, or email support@getthemenu.app. To ask what we hold about you, or to have something corrected or deleted, ask either way.