Privacy policy

What we collect

Your account. Your email address and a securely hashed password. We use your email to confirm your account, reset your password, and (rarely) tell you something important about the service.

Your garden. The gardens, plantings, tasks, journal entries, harvests, layouts, and notes you create. That's the whole point of the app, and it stays yours.

Your photos. Pictures you attach to journal entries are stored with our storage provider (Cloudflare R2) and are only shown inside your account.

Community posts and feedback. Tips you submit to the community (shown publicly under the display name you choose, after review) and feedback you send through the feedback button.

Usage events. We record page visits, button and link clicks, form starts and submissions, and feature actions such as opening a garden bed or placing plants in the world to understand what's working and improve the app. Automatic interaction tracking does not record passwords or the text you type into forms. Each event is stored with the page you were on, your browser and device type, your approximate location, your IP address, and your account if you were signed in.

Technical basics. Our server records your IP address with each usage event and uses it for abuse protection, such as rate limiting on sign-in pages. We keep these event records for up to 180 days, then delete them automatically.

Approximate location. To show us roughly where growers are, your browser looks up your city and region from a third-party service (ipapi.co) using your IP address. That lookup happens from your browser, so ipapi.co sees your IP. We store only the city, region, country, and approximate coordinates it returns.

Cookies and browser storage

We use essential cookies: one that keeps you signed in and one that protects forms from forgery. We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not load third-party analytics or advertising tags.

We also store two identifiers in your browser's local storage. One is a random id that lets us count returning visitors without knowing who you are. The other caches the approximate location described above so we don't look it up on every page. You can clear both at any time by clearing site data in your browser.

How we use your information

To run the app: showing your gardens, calculating zone-aware planting dates, sending the emails you ask for (confirmation, password reset), reviewing community posts before they go live, and improving features based on how the app is actually used. Nothing else.

What we never do

We don't sell your personal data. Your garden data and photos are used only to run the service for you.

Service providers

A few trusted providers help us run the service: our hosting provider (where the app and database live), Cloudflare R2 (photo storage), and Resend (delivering transactional email). Each receives only what it needs to do its job.

Your data, your call

You can download a copy of your data any time from Account settings → Privacy & export. To delete your account, send us a note and a human permanently removes your account and everything in it, promptly and with no hoops.

Retention

We keep your data while your account is active, and we use it in aggregate to understand how the app is doing and what to build next. When your account is deleted we strip everything that points back to you from your usage events, including your account link, email, IP address, browser, visitor id, and coordinates, and keep only the anonymous shape of the visit. Short-lived server logs and backups age out on their own schedule.

Children

GrowSomeFood isn't directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their data.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll announce it on the What's new page before it takes effect.

Contact

Questions or requests: use the feedback button on any page (it goes straight to the developer) or the contact form.