Privacy
What we store, where it lives, and how to ask us to delete it.
Plain English. We are inviting 25 families with children into a private beta, so we are writing this carefully and keeping it short. If anything here is wrong or unclear, please email privacy@mealalchemist.com.
Last updated: 12 August 2026
What we store
To run the chef for your household, we collect and store:
- Your account email — used for sign-in, billing, and the daily/weekly meal emails you opt into.
- Family profile — number of people, ages, dietary preferences, allergies, and taste notes you give us.
- Pantry inventory — what you tell us is in your kitchen, plus items our visual scanner extracts from photos you upload.
- Meal pool, meal plans, recipes, and shopping lists — generated by the chef for your household.
- Chat history with the chef — used to learn your preferences over time and to debug issues.
- Photos you upload — receipts or pantry interiors you scan to add items. See the third-party section below.
We do not collect payment card numbers ourselves — payments run through Lemon Squeezy under their own privacy terms.
Where it lives
All your data lives on Cloudflare's edge network, in two places:
- Cloudflare D1 (SQL) — your account identity, sessions, subscription state, and waitlist/invite records.
- Cloudflare Durable Objects (SQLite) — one dedicated, isolated data store per household, holding everything above except your account identity.
We rely on Cloudflare's default at-rest and in-transit protection for both stores. We do not currently apply additional application-layer encryption beyond what Cloudflare provides by default — so we will not claim "encrypted at rest" or "local-first" in marketing copy.
Third parties we send your data to
MealAlchemist itself is a thin layer on top of three AI providers and a small handful of infrastructure vendors. When you use the chef, the parts of your data described below leave our edge and go to them. We do not sell your data to anyone.
| Provider | What we send | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Workers AI | Your family profile, pantry contents, recent chat messages, and the chef's instructions. |
Generate meal pool, recipes, and chat replies. Model:
@cf/zai-org/glm-4.7-flash.
|
| Zhipu AI / Z.ai | The photos you upload (receipts, pantry interiors) plus the extraction prompt. |
Vision extraction of grocery items from images. Model:
glm-4.6v-flash.
|
| DeepSeek API | Recipe and ingredient context for the week's selected meals. | Turn selected meals into step-by-step recipes and shopping lists. |
| PostHog | Anonymous product analytics (page views, button clicks on marketing pages). | Understand which features are useful. All on-screen text is masked in session recordings. |
| Lemon Squeezy | Your email, billing address, and payment method details (handled entirely by Lemon Squeezy). | Process subscription payments. |
A note on uploaded photos: when you snap a receipt or photograph the inside of your pantry, that image is sent to Zhipu AI for item extraction. We do not use those photos to train any model.
Asking us to delete your data
You can ask us to delete everything we hold about you at any time, and we will do it. Email privacy@mealalchemist.com from the address on your account and we will confirm deletion within 7 days.
A self-serve one-tap deletion button will live inside /settings once it is fully wired up; until then, please use email.
Cookies, analytics, and marketing
- Strictly necessary cookies: one Better Auth session cookie for sign-in.
- PostHog analytics cookies: set only after you accept the cookie banner on marketing pages. All on-screen text in session recordings is masked.
- We do not run third-party advertising trackers (no Meta Pixel, Google Ads, TikTok Pixel, etc.) during the beta.
Children
MealAlchemist is for parents and guardians planning meals for households that include children. We do not target children directly, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 outside what you, the adult account holder, enter into the family profile.
Questions or complaints
Email privacy@mealalchemist.com. We are a small team and will reply personally.