Privacy Policy

Last updated 25 September 2026

SaltBird is an AI cookbook and food social network for iOS, operated by SaltBird Inc., a Delaware corporation. This page explains what the app collects, who else processes it, and how to get it deleted.

This website collects nothing

saltbird.food is a static page. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and has no sign-up form. It loads fonts from Google Fonts, which means Google receives your IP address in order to serve the font files. Everything below is about the iOS app.

What the app collects

Account

Sign-in is handled by Clerk, which holds your email address and login credentials. Our own database deliberately does not store your email — it keeps a handle, display name, optional avatar and bio, and timestamps for account creation and last activity.

What you create

Recipes, cookbooks, photos, comments, reviews, saves, and messages you send. Anything you publish is visible to other users by design; drafts and private cookbooks are not.

Taste profile

The app stores the dietary preferences, food allergies, equipment preferences, and cooking skill level you choose to provide. It also derives a taste profile from what you cook, search for, save, and rate, and uses it to personalize recipes and recommendations. We store follows and other social interactions to support the food community. This information comes from your choices and activity within SaltBird.

We store requested allergen terms as anonymous aggregate counts, with first and last request dates. We do not add these terms to your profile, link the aggregate records to your account, or attempt to re-identify requests. A separate temporary account-based counter limits request frequency and contains no requested terms.

Purchases

Purchases and creator payouts are unavailable in the initial beta. SaltBird does not collect payment card or bank details in this release.

Notifications

If you enable push notifications, Apple issues a device token that we store with your account to deliver notifications through Apple Push Notification service. We use it for SaltBird activity notifications, not advertising. You can turn alerts off in iOS Settings. In-app notifications remain available.

We do not use advertising SDKs or track you across other companies' apps and websites. Our servers retain activity and diagnostic records, including the account identifier, request outcome and timing, to operate and improve reliability. Clerk handles authentication security and session information, including a device identifier, device details, IP address, and approximate city/country derived from that address. We do not request GPS location. We do not sell personal information, and we do not use your data to train our own models.

Recipe dictation (audio)

When you dictate a recipe, the recording is sent to OpenRouter and transcribed by a Whisper speech model. Three things about that are worth stating precisely:

• The audio is transcribed in memory and is not stored by us — it never reaches our media storage. We keep the resulting text, because that is your recipe.
• The audio is excluded from our request tracing. Traces record only the clip's duration, size, and language, never the recording or the transcript.
• Dictation only runs when speech transcription is switched on and the key it uses belongs to an account we have verified for zero data retention. If either condition is not met, the feature refuses to run rather than falling back to a less private path.

AI processing — read this one

Generating a recipe means sending your prompt, and the relevant recipe content, to AI providers for processing:

• OpenRouter and its model providers — recipe text generation, embeddings, and recipe and step images. Images currently use Google's Nano Banana 2 model through OpenRouter.
• Langfuse — request tracing. For text generation this currently records prompt and response content, not just metadata, so it can carry what you typed. Dictation audio is deliberately excluded.

These providers process the content in order to return a result and under their own terms. If that matters to you, avoid putting personal details into recipe prompts and notes.

Who else processes your data

Provider	What it handles
Clerk	Accounts, email, authentication
Neon	Primary database (US, aws-us-west-2)
Cloudflare R2	Photos, recipe scans, and encrypted message attachments; recipe dictation audio is not stored here
Fly.io	Application servers (US)
Upstash	Queues and cache
OpenRouter and its model providers	Recipe text generation, embeddings, images (Google Nano Banana 2), and speech-to-text
Langfuse	Tracing, including prompt content
Apple	Sign in with Apple, TestFlight distribution, and push notifications

Data is stored and processed in the United States. Using SaltBird from elsewhere means your information is transferred there.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from within the app. This removes your account and associated content records from our primary database and deletes your Clerk account. It does not currently automatically erase every uploaded media object, AI content trace, operational log, or backup; those may remain stored after account deletion. Contact us at info@saltbird.food to request removal of retained personal data.

Where a recipe has already been purchased, the account-deletion process preserves buyer access to that recipe and removes its attribution to your account. Purchases are unavailable in the initial beta.

To request deletion without the app, or to ask what is held about you, email info@saltbird.food.

Children

SaltBird is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will remove it.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, we will update the date above and notify you in the app before the change takes effect.

Contact

SaltBird Inc., a Delaware corporation. Questions, requests, or complaints: info@saltbird.food.