Privacy

PlantParlour is made by two people who keep plants. We built it for ourselves first, and we have tried to write this the way we would want it written for us: plainly, and without burying anything. PlantParlour is operated by Bond Creative Studios, LLC, a Colorado limited liability company, which is responsible for the information described on this page.

What we keep

• Your account. Your email address, and either a password or your Google sign-in. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider — we never see yours. If you sign in with Google we receive your email address and name, nothing else: not your Google password, not your contacts, not anything else in your Google account.
• Your plants. Whatever you put in: nicknames, species, when you acquired a plant and who from, notes, your care log, photos and their captions, and which plants came as cuttings from which.
• Your display name, and a handle if you claim one.
• A count of page views. Which pages get opened, and how often. See below.

There is no advertising and there are no tracking pixels anywhere in PlantParlour. We set no cookies of our own. We do not buy information about you, and we do not sell or rent yours to anybody.

Counting page views

We count how many people open each page, using Vercel Web Analytics — Vercel already serve this site, so the counting happens where the site is already hosted rather than being handed to a third party. It is not linked to your account, and it does not follow you to other websites.

Tag and conservatory links are deliberately blunted before anything is counted. A published tag lives at an address ending in a long random token, and that token is the whole of what makes the link work. Before a page view is reported, the address is stripped: the token goes, every other query string goes, and a handle or a plant's id is replaced by the shape of the page. So we can see that somebody opened a plant tag. We cannot see whose, and neither can Vercel.

What Vercel do with what they receive is set out in their privacy policy.

Where it lives

Your records are stored in a Postgres database and file storage run by Supabase, hosted in the United States (US East). The site itself is served by Vercel. A copy of your plants is also kept on the device you use, so the app works when you have no signal.

Care reminders, if you turn them on in the app, are worked out and scheduled on your phone itself. Nothing about them is sent to us or to anyone else.

About your photos

We want to be straight about this one. Photos are stored at long, random web addresses. Nobody can browse them and nobody can guess them — but anyone who has the address can open the photo without signing in. So a photo is unlisted rather than private.

In practice this only matters if a link escapes. Still: treat a photo the way you would treat an unlisted video. If you would mind a stranger seeing what is in the background, crop it or photograph the plant somewhere else.

What is public, and only when you say so

Nothing you keep is visible to anyone else until you choose to publish it.

• Publishing a plant creates a tag link with 32 random characters in it. Anyone holding that link can read that one plant: its species, dates, notes, care history and photos. It is unlisted, not secret. Unpublishing stops the link working.
• Unlisted means we keep it out of search. Search engines are told not to list a tag page and not to index the photographs on it, and the crawlers that collect text to train AI models are refused it outright. What we cannot control is a link once you have sent it: anyone you give it to can pass it on, and a tag link posted somewhere public is public.
• Claiming a handle creates a conservatory page at plantparlour.org/@yourhandle. That page is public and meant to be found and shared. It shows only the plants you have already published, plus your display name, the date you joined, and how many keepers have left their calling card there (a number, never who). Because it is meant to be found, it is open to search engines and to AI crawlers in the ordinary way. If you would rather not be findable, publish plants without claiming a handle — the tag links work either way.
• Listing your conservatory is a separate switch, off until you turn it on. It adds your conservatory to a list other signed-in keepers can browse and search in the app, by your name, your handle and the names of the plants you have on show. It shows nothing your conservatory page does not already show. Turning it off takes you out of the list straight away; your page stays at its link.

Plants you have not published never appear on either, and are never shown to another keeper.

When you ask the AI

Identifying a plant from a photo, and generating a care guide, both use Anthropic's Claude API.

• Identifying sends the photos you chose to Anthropic. Generating a care guide sends the species name only — no photo, nothing about you.
• Anthropic processes them to produce the answer. Under their commercial terms, inputs sent through the API are not used to train their models.
• We record how many tokens each request used and what it cost, per day. We do not keep a copy of the conversation.
• Care guides are cached and shared between keepers: the guide for a Monstera deliciosa is about the species, not about you or your plant, so the first keeper to ask generates it and everyone else reads the same one.

Who else is involved

Six companies, each doing one job:

• Supabase — stores your records and photos, and handles sign-in.
• Vercel — serves the website.
• Resend — sends the emails an account can get: one welcome when you sign up, a password-reset link when you ask for one, and occasional news about PlantParlour — no more than once a month, and each one says how to stop them. They receive your email address and the message, nothing else. Opens and clicks are not tracked. Resend also delivers page reports to our own inbox (see below).
• Expo — delivers updates to the Android app. When the app checks for one it sends Expo its version and a random number the app made for itself on your phone, which lets Expo count installs, along with your phone's network address. Nothing from your account or your plants.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google.
• Anthropic — only the photos or species names you send for analysis.

Nobody else. We will not hand your records to anyone else unless the law genuinely requires it.

What you can do

• Change or delete any plant, photo, note or care entry, whenever you like.
• Unpublish a plant, and its tag link stops working.
• Give up your handle, and the conservatory page goes with it.
• Delete your account entirely. In the app, open Account and choose Delete account. It erases the account and everything in it — plants, photos, care history, published tags and your conservatory page — straight away, and the copy on that phone with it. Two things are kept with nothing identifying you left on them: a daily total of what the AI cost us, and any bug report you sent. For 30 days we also keep a scrambled (hashed) form of your email address with the dates we emailed it — not the address itself — so that nobody can sign up with your address again and again to have welcome emails sent to you; after that it is deleted too. Our hosting provider's automatic backups age out on their own schedule. If you can't get into your account, email bondcreativestudios@gmail.com from the address you signed up with and we will do it for you.
• Stop the news emails. Turn off News emails in Account, reply "unsubscribe" to any of them, or email bondcreativestudios@gmail.com, and you won't get another. It changes nothing else about your account.
• Ask for a copy of everything we hold on you, and we will send it.

When you report a bug

While PlantParlour is still being tested there is a Report a bug button on your account screen. Pressing it sends us whatever you typed, plus a technical record of what the app was doing: which screens you opened, whether syncing was working, any errors it hit, your browser and screen size, and how many plants are on this device.

It does not send your photos, your notes, or what any of your plants are. Email addresses and access tokens are stripped out of that record before it leaves your device. Nothing is sent unless you press the button.

When you report something

An AI answer. Under every plant identification, health check and care guide there is a Report this answer link. A report sends us the reason you chose, anything you wrote, the answer itself as it was shown to you, and basic technical details (the app version, your browser and screen size), so we can see what went wrong. Not the photos.

A published page. Every plant tag and conservatory page has a Report this page link, which anyone can use without an account. We keep the page's address, the reason, and anything the person wrote, and it is emailed to us through Resend so we see it quickly. We also keep a scrambled (hashed) form of the network address the report came from, only to stop the same source sending reports over and over; it can't be turned back into the address. We don't ask who is reporting, and the keeper of the page is never told who reported it.

If something goes wrong

We take reasonable care to keep your records safe, but no system is perfect and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If your information is ever caught up in a security breach, we will tell you — by email, within 30 days of working out what happened, as Colorado law requires — and we will say what we know rather than what sounds best.

Children

PlantParlour is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly keep information from them. If you believe a child has made an account, email us and we will remove it.

Changes

If we change how any of this works we will update this page and change the date at the top. If a change is significant, we will say so in the app rather than hoping you notice.