Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 9, 2026

Kithful helps your household keep track of groceries, deals, schedules, chores, and more — largely by letting you take a photo and having it read the details for you. This policy explains what we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices you have.

Who we are

Kithful ("Kithful", "we", "us") is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY], based in the United States. You can reach us at [email protected].

Information we collect

Information you provide

Account details — your email address, username, a securely hashed password, your display name, and household settings you choose (time zone, ZIP code, stores you shop, notification preferences).
Household content you enter or scan — grocery and pantry items, receipts, store flyers and deals, coupons, warranties, recipes and meal plans, shopping lists, to-dos, chores, announcements, appointment/visit notes, and calendar events.
Information about your family, including children — schedule events, chores, and related records may include a child's first name, activities, dates, and the places they'll be (for example, a practice location). This information is entered by a parent or guardian. Children are records within your household — they do not have their own accounts and cannot sign up (see "Children" below).

Photos you upload

When you scan a receipt, flyer, coupon, schedule, warranty, product, or recipe, the photo is held only in memory, sent to our AI provider to extract the details, and then discarded. We do not store the photos you scan — only the information extracted from them (which you review before it's saved).

The one exception is a photo you choose to keep with a saved recipe: a picture of the dish you add yourself, or the dish photo from a recipe link you paste (you can untick it). That photo is stored with the recipe until you remove it, delete the recipe, or delete your household.

Information collected automatically

An essential session cookie to keep you logged in.
Your device's push-notification subscription, only if you turn on reminders.
Your IP address, used for security and rate-limiting. We don't save it in our database, but our hosting provider's request logs record it for a limited time.
When you sign in on a new device and we email you a code: a record of each device you've confirmed (a label like "Safari on iPhone" and a scrambled token, kept 30 days), and the code itself in scrambled form for 10 minutes.
AI usage records (counts and token totals per scan) used to monitor cost and reliability — not the content of what you scanned.
Anonymous visit statistics on our public home page: how you arrived (the referring site, or a campaign tag in the link), your device type and browser, your device's timezone and language (to know roughly what region visitors are in), and which parts of the page you viewed or tapped. We don't use cookies or store anything on your device for this, we don't store your IP address, and visits can't be linked across days or to an account. These are kept for about 13 months.

How we use your information

To provide the service — reading your photos into structured records, and connecting those records (what you have, what's running low, what's on sale, what's coming up).
To send the reminders and the weekly summary you choose to turn on.
To keep the service secure and working (rate-limiting, bot protection, backups, debugging).

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use it to serve you third-party advertising.

AI processing and the services we rely on

To read your photos and text, and to run the app, we share data with the following service providers ("subprocessors"), each only as needed:

Google (Gemini API) and Anthropic (Claude API) — extract details from the photos and text you submit. We use their paid developer APIs, under which Google and Anthropic do not use what we send them to train or improve their AI models. They may keep it for a limited time to detect abuse or meet legal requirements, under their own terms. We don't train AI models on your content either.
Public data services — weekly store ads for your area (Flipp), prices at a nearby Kroger, recipe ideas, and product details from a barcode. These lookups send only what the lookup needs (a ZIP code, product or ingredient names from your list, or a barcode), never your name, email or your family's details. Pictures of items in a weekly ad load straight from the ad provider's servers, so that provider sees your device's IP address, as any website would.
Railway — application hosting and our database.
Stripe — processes payments if you subscribe to Kithful Plus. Your card details go to Stripe directly; we receive only a customer reference and your plan status.
Cloudflare — network/DNS, bot protection on sign-in (Turnstile), and our daily database backups (R2, encrypted at rest by Cloudflare).
Brevo — sends our emails (sign-in codes, password resets, the weekly summary, early-access news), so it receives your email address, your first name for the greeting, and the email's contents.
Google or Apple sign-in — only if you choose "Continue with Google/Apple". We receive your account ID and email from them.
Push notification services — if you turn on reminders, notifications travel through your phone or browser maker's push service (Apple, Google or Mozilla). The message is encrypted so the push service can't read it.

Each provider handles data under its own terms. We may also disclose information if required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, and security of our users and service.

Children

Kithful is designed for parents and guardians. Accounts are created and managed by adults; children do not create accounts or provide information to us directly. Any information about a child in your household is entered by you, and you are responsible for it. "Kid Mode" is an optional, simplified view that runs inside your household's own session — it is not a separate account or login for a child. If you believe a child has created an account or provided us information directly, contact us at [email protected] and we will delete it.

Your choices and rights

Access & export — download everything in your household as a file from Settings → Export.
Delete — permanently delete your household and its data from Settings.
Correct — edit or remove any record directly in the app.
Notifications — turn reminders and the weekly summary on or off in Settings.

We honor access, export, and deletion requests for all users. Depending on where you live (for example, California or the EU/EEA), you may have additional rights; contact us to exercise them.

Retention

We keep your information for as long as your household is active, or until you delete it. Scanned photos are not retained (a dish photo you add to a recipe stays with that recipe). We keep a daily backup of our database for approximately 30 days. When you delete your household, its data is removed from our live database right away, and it rolls out of the backups within about 30 days. If you joined our early-access list, that entry is removed too, from our list and from our email provider's. A recipe you chose to share with every Kithful family stays in the shared catalog, with the photo you shared with it (its location and phone details removed), and no link to you. Two other things are kept. First, a one-way fingerprint (a hash) of the email address that started a free trial, so the same address can’t start a second trial. It can’t be turned back into your address and contains nothing else about you. Second, our own cost records of how many AI scans were run and how large they were (counts only, never the photos or what was read from them), with the link to your household removed.

How we protect your information

Passwords are stored only as bcrypt hashes; traffic is encrypted in transit (HTTPS); each household's data is isolated from every other household's; scanned photos are never written to disk; and we apply rate-limiting and bot protection to sign-in and upload endpoints. No method of storage or transmission is 100% secure, but we work to protect your information.

Cookies

We use a single essential cookie to keep you signed in. We do not use advertising or third-party tracking cookies, and our home-page visit statistics use no cookies at all.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes, we'll update the "Last updated" date above and, where appropriate, notify you in the app or by email.

Contact

Questions? Email [email protected].