Privacy Policy

SousSmart keeps your data in two separate places, deliberately. Your recipe library follows you between devices. Your live cooking does not.

Synced through your own iCloud account — so a recipe you import on one device is there on the next:

• Recipes you type in, import, or edit — names, how many they serve, ingredients with their quantities, and steps with their durations, temperatures, and tools.
• Recipe libraries — the groups you organize those recipes into.

Stored only on the device — never uploaded anywhere, not even to your iCloud account:

• Cooking sessions — the timeline for a meal, when you started and finished each step, delays you recorded, and the resulting schedule history.
• Shopping lists — the items a planned meal needs and which ones you have checked off.
• Preferences — small settings such as whether you view amounts in US or metric units, stored in standard iOS user defaults.

That split is a design decision, not an oversight. Sync is best-effort and can take minutes; a live cook’s timers arriving late on another device would be worse than not arriving at all. So the recipe travels and the cook stays put.

SousSmart uses Apple’s CloudKit to sync your recipe library. It is worth being precise about what that means, because “the cloud” usually means someone else’s server and here it does not.

• It goes to your account, not ours. Your recipes are stored in the private database of your own Apple Account, in an iCloud container Apple assigns to the app. There is no SousSmart server involved at any point.
• We cannot read it. Apple does not give developers access to a user’s private CloudKit database. We cannot see your recipes, cannot list who is using the app, and cannot retrieve anything from your account — by Apple’s design, not by our promise.
• Apple handles it under Apple’s terms. iCloud data is encrypted in transit and at rest. If you have Advanced Data Protection turned on, your iCloud app data is end-to-end encrypted. Apple’s handling of it is governed by Apple’s privacy policy and the iCloud terms you have already agreed to.
• It uses your iCloud storage. Your recipe library counts against your Apple Account storage, like any other app’s iCloud data. Recipes are text, so the amount is very small.
• You can turn it off. In the iOS Settings app, tap your name, then iCloud, then the list of apps using iCloud, and turn SousSmart off. The app keeps working exactly as before with the copy already on your device — sync simply stops.
• It works signed out, and it works offline. If you are not signed in to iCloud, or you have no connection, SousSmart runs normally against local storage. Nothing about cooking requires a network.

SousSmart contains no analytics, advertising, tracking, attribution, or crash-reporting services, and no third-party software development kits that collect data. We do not collect usage data, device identifiers, contact information, or a profile of how you cook. There is no SousSmart account to create and no SousSmart server to receive anything. The only network path the app has is the one between your device and your own iCloud account, and we are not on either end of it.

SousSmart can bring a recipe in three ways. Every one of them is read entirely on your device.

• Pasted text — stays on your device and is read locally.
• A screenshot or photo — you pick one image using the standard iOS photo picker. SousSmart does not browse your photo library and does not request access to it; it only receives the single image you selected. The text is read from that image using Apple’s on-device Vision framework.
• A PDF — you pick one file using the standard iOS document picker. SousSmart reads only that file, on your device, using Apple’s PDFKit framework.

Turning that text into a structured recipe also happens on your device. On iPhones that support Apple Intelligence, SousSmart uses Apple’s on-device foundation model; that model runs locally and SousSmart does not send your recipe text to Apple, to us, or to anyone else. On other iPhones, SousSmart uses its own built-in parser, which is likewise entirely local. No image or file you import is ever uploaded. Once you save the finished recipe it becomes part of your library, which means it syncs to your own iCloud account like the rest of it.

If you allow notifications, SousSmart schedules reminders for your cooking steps. These are local notifications, created and delivered by iOS on your device. Live Activities on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island are generated on your device from your current cooking session and are updated locally. You can turn notifications and Live Activities off at any time in the iOS Settings app.

We do not operate a push server and cannot send you a message. Apple does send the app a silent, invisible signal when one of your other devices changes your recipe library, which is how sync stays current without waiting for you to reopen the app. That signal comes from Apple, carries no content of ours, and is never shown to you.

We do not sell, trade, rent, or transfer your personal information to anyone, because we never receive it. SousSmart has no advertising partners and no data brokers. Your recipe library is shared with nobody — it moves between your own devices through your own Apple Account, and Apple acts only as the storage provider for it under the iCloud terms you already have with them.

• View and edit everything you have saved, directly in the app.
• Delete any recipe, library, or cooking session from within the app. Deleting a recipe removes it from your other devices too, the next time they sync.
• Turn sync off in the iOS Settings app under your name → iCloud → the apps using iCloud. The app continues to work with the copy on your device.
• Remove the app’s data from your device by deleting the app. If sync is on, note that this does not remove the copy in your iCloud account — see below.
• Remove the iCloud copy in the iOS Settings app under your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage, where you can select SousSmart and delete its stored data.
• Revoke permissions — notifications and Live Activities can be turned off at any time in the iOS Settings app.

We retain nothing, because we never receive anything. Your data stays where you put it: on your device until you delete it or delete the app, and in your own iCloud account until you delete it there. Nothing expires on our schedule, because we do not have one.

SousSmart is a planning and timing tool. It schedules around minimum cook times, rests, and safe internal temperatures where a recipe provides them, but it cannot measure your food and does not replace your own judgment or a thermometer. You are responsible for confirming that food is cooked safely.

SousSmart is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. Because the app collects no personal information from anyone, there is nothing for us to collect from a child either.

This policy covers the SousSmart iPhone app. The soussmart.app website is separate: like most websites, it uses standard, aggregate traffic analytics (Vercel Analytics and Google Analytics) to understand how many people visit and which pages they read. That is website measurement only. It is unrelated to the app, and the app itself contains no analytics of any kind.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The updated policy will be posted on this page with a revised “Last updated” date above.

If you have any question about this policy or about how SousSmart handles your information, please get in touch.

Email: privacy@soussmart.app

Support: soussmart.app/support