Privacy Policy

When you create an Essen Plan account we collect your email address and a password (stored as a salted hash by our authentication provider). Sign-in is by email and password only. We also store timestamps for account creation and last sign-in.

Essen Plan lets you take or choose pictures of your fridge, pantry, or grocery receipts to identify food. With your agreement (see "AI service providers" below), each photo is sent to Google Gemini to extract the list of items in the image. We do not store the photo itself on our servers; only the recognized item names you accept are saved into your pantry.

The family members, dietary preferences, budget, pantry/fridge/freezer items, meal history, and ratings you enter are stored in our database and tied to your account. This data is used to personalize meal suggestions and is only accessible to you when signed in.

Essen Plan uses Google's Gemini API, an AI service run by Google, and sends data to it only if you agree. The first time you sign in, and again if this section changes, we ask for your permission; you can say no and keep using the rest of the app, and you can withdraw your permission at any time on the Account page. Our servers also refuse to call Gemini for an account that has not agreed. What is sent, and when: (1) photos of your fridge, pantry, or receipts, when you scan; (2) text you dictate, when you add pantry items by voice; (3) when you plan a meal, your request together with the family members you entered (names, ages, allergies and dietary restrictions, likes and dislikes), your pantry, fridge and freezer items, your meal history and ratings (including any free-text notes you add when rating meals), titles of recipes you saved or skipped, your budget, your chosen appliance, and any one-off guest; (4) pantry item names, so they can be translated when you switch between English and Spanish. Your email address and password are not sent. Google processes this to return a response and is subject to Google's own terms and policies, which we do not control. If you decline or withdraw, photo and receipt scanning, voice entry, meal planning and automatic translation of pantry names are turned off. On the website, voice input also uses your browser's built-in speech recognition, which your browser's maker may process; we receive only the resulting text.

Essen Plan counts page views with its own simple counter: each view stores only the page path (for example /pantry) and the time. It does not store your account, IP address, or device details with the count. When something goes wrong on our servers (for example a failed AI request or a usage-limit hit) we keep a short error record: which feature, an error message, the time, and in some cases the internal ID of your account. The app does not send crash reports or stack traces from your device to us or to any third party. We do not use third-party product analytics or advertising trackers. Our hosting and database providers handle requests to run the service and may keep their own standard operational logs.

Essen Plan's pages load their fonts (Cormorant Garamond and Karla) from Google Fonts, so your browser requests them directly from Google (fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com). Google receives your IP address, your browser details (user agent) and, with most browsers, the address of the Essen Plan site you are on (normally the domain only, not the specific page), under Google's own privacy policy.

The iOS and Android apps do not offer or process purchases: inside the apps every account uses the Free plan. For an account that has a billing record with us, we store its Stripe customer ID, subscription ID, subscription status, and the end date of the current billing period. Stripe keeps its own billing records under its own privacy policy.

We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for advertising. We share the minimum data needed with the service providers that power the app: our authentication and database provider (which stores your account and pantry data), Google (Gemini, only if you agree, as described above), and Stripe (billing records only). We may also disclose information if required by law.

You can delete your data yourself from inside the app:

• Clear pantry data: Sign in and open Account, then choose "Clear pantry data" to remove every saved pantry, fridge, and freezer item.
• Delete your account: On the same Account page, choose "Delete my account" to permanently remove your account and the family, pantry, history, and saved-recipe data in it, and to cancel any paid plan. If we cannot cancel a paid plan or remove your data, the account is not deleted and you are told so, and you can try again. Some records remain; see below.

What stays after you delete your account

Deleting your account does not remove everything. These remain:

• A one-way code made from your email address. To stop the free plan being reset by deleting an account and signing up again with the same email, we keep a keyed one-way hash (HMAC-SHA256, using a secret value kept on our servers) of your normalized email address. It is stored on its own, with no account ID and no link to any account, and it cannot be turned back into your email address. We currently have no automatic expiry for it. As a result, signing up again with the same email on the Free plan may be refused.
• Billing records at Stripe. If you ever subscribed, we cancel the subscription but do not delete your customer record at Stripe, which Stripe keeps under its own policies.
• Short technical records. Usage-limit counters, error-log entries, and "not tonight" recipe skips are stored against an internal account ID and are not removed when the account is deleted. After deletion that ID no longer belongs to any account.
• Deletion-request and admin audit records. If a deletion request was logged by our team (for example from a support email), the log keeps the email address you wrote from, the date and any note, and it is not erased when your account is deleted. An administrator audit-log entry that includes the email address is written both when a deletion request is logged and when our team deletes an account; audit-log entries cannot be edited or deleted. Requests still pending after our internal review period are also copied (email address and request date) into an internal operations alert for our team. We currently have no automatic expiry for any of these records.

If you can't access your account, email us at hello@essenplan.com from the address on the account and we will delete it for you.

Essen Plan is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

If we make material changes we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, notify signed-in users.

Questions or privacy requests: hello@essenplan.com.

Mailing address: 850 Euclid Ave, Ste 819#7357, Cleveland, OH 44114

Owner: Bucket Headz LLC (Stephen McDonald)