SnapCookBook is built so that your recipes stay yours. This policy explains, in plain language, what the app and our website handle, why, and what we never do.
Provider: Buxmann Software Solutions (Pty) Ltd, South Africa ("we", "us")
Contact: support@snapcookbook.com
Last updated: September 30, 2026
The short version
- No account. You never give us your name, email address or a password to use SnapCookBook.
- Your recipes live on your iPhone and in your own private iCloud. We don't run a recipe database and we can't see your library.
- Scans are read on your iPhone or by our server, depending on your plan and device. Photos sent to our server are read and then discarded. We never store them.
- No ads, no tracking across apps, and we never sell your data.
1. Your recipes, notes and photos
Everything you add to SnapCookBook (recipes, ingredient lines, steps, notes, cookbooks, collections, favourites, the photos of pages you scan and cover photos) is stored on your device and synced through your private iCloud database (Apple CloudKit), under your Apple Account. Apple stores it as part of your iCloud storage. We have no access to your private iCloud data. If iCloud is turned off, your recipes stay only on your device.
2. Scanning a recipe
When you scan a page, SnapCookBook needs to read the photo to turn it into a recipe. Depending on your plan and your iPhone, this happens in one of two ways:
- By our server: the page photos are sent over an encrypted connection to our own server and on to an AI model through OpenRouter, which returns the recipe text. We only route to model providers that don't store or train on your data. Neither we nor our server keeps the photos or the recipe text after the request is finished, and they aren't written to our logs.
- On your device: iPhones with Apple Intelligence can read a Scan entirely on the device, using Apple's Vision and on-device language models, and the photo doesn't leave your iPhone. This is also used when our server can't be reached (no connection, for example). On other iPhones such a Scan waits and is read once you're back online.
Camera access is used only while you're scanning. Photos you choose from your library are used only for the Scan or cover photo you picked.
3. What our server does keep
To count free Scans and protect the service from abuse, our server keeps a small amount of data that is not linked to your name, email address or recipes:
- An App Attest key that proves requests come from the genuine SnapCookBook app (an Apple security feature). It identifies an installation of the app, not you.
- Scan counters: how many Scans an installation has used this week (kept for about 8 days) and, for Pro subscribers, how many this month (kept for about 2 months), linked to the anonymous identifier of the subscription.
- A DeviceCheck flag (an Apple service that stores two bits per device) noting that a device has used this week's free Scans, so reinstalling the app doesn't reset them.
- Short-lived security challenges, deleted after 5 minutes.
Your device also stores its own count of free Scans in the iOS Keychain.
4. Purchases
SnapCookBook Pro is sold and billed by Apple. We never see your card details, billing address or Apple Account credentials. To unlock Pro, the app and our server check the signed purchase record that Apple provides (which product, whether it's active). Our paywall provider, Superwall, receives an anonymous app user identifier and your purchase status to show the right purchase options.
5. Analytics and crash reports
To understand which features are used and to fix problems, the app sends anonymous usage events to PostHog (for example "Scan started", "Scan succeeded, 2 pages, 1 line flagged", "paywall shown") and crash and error reports to Sentry. These never include your recipe content, notes or photos, and we don't create personal profiles. We don't use the App Tracking Transparency identifier (IDFA) and we don't track you across other companies' apps or websites.
6. Sharing
We don't sell, rent or share your personal information. The service providers named above (Apple, Cloudflare for this website, OpenRouter and the model providers it routes to, PostHog, Sentry and Superwall) process data only to provide their service to us. We may disclose information if the law requires it.
7. Keeping and deleting your data
You can delete any recipe in the app, or everything at once by deleting the app and its iCloud data (Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Storage → SnapCookBook). The counters on our server expire automatically as described in section 3. See Your data for step-by-step instructions, including how to export your library.
8. Your rights
Depending on where you live (including under South Africa's POPIA and the EU/UK GDPR), you may have the right to access, correct or delete personal information, to object to processing, and to complain to a data protection authority, such as South Africa's Information Regulator. Because we hold almost no personal information, most requests are handled by the controls in the app. For anything else, email us.
9. Children
SnapCookBook isn't directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect personal information from them.
10. The website
snapcookbook.com doesn't use advertising or tracking cookies. Our host, Cloudflare, may collect standard technical data (such as IP address and browser type) to deliver and secure the site.
11. Changes
If we change this policy, we'll update the date above and, for significant changes, tell you in the app.