Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated June 1, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how MealMint handles personal data when you create an account, save recipes, import recipe pages, use pantry and planning tools, or take part in community features.

MealMint is the controller for personal data processed through the service. For privacy questions or rights requests, contact privacy@mealmint.app.

Personal Data We Collect

We collect the data needed to provide MealMint and to keep the service reliable.

Account and profile data, including your name, email address, password hash, verification status, session data, settings, bio, avatar, websites, and social links.
Social sign-in data when you choose Google or Facebook, including the provider identifier, email address, and name returned by that provider.
Kitchen content, including recipes, recipe notes, Markdown recipe instructions, instruction links and image references, ingredients, ingredient and pantry categories, tags, pantry items, meal plans, shopping lists, favorites, ratings, comments, and public community activity.
Creator subscription data, including creator status, monthly subscription price, subscriber relationships, subscriber-only preview settings, subscription status, Paddle customer and subscription identifiers, billing period metadata, payout ledger entries, and estimated creator payout totals.
Import data, including source URLs, fetched page content, extracted recipe fields, and import status.
Images, including profile avatars, recipe images, and image references included in recipe instructions.
Communications, including email verification, password reset, and account notices.
Moderation data, including content reports, report reasons, report details, review status, and related account or recipe identifiers.
Technical data, including session cookie values, device and browser information, IP address, logs, error records, security events, and product analytics such as page views and feature usage.

How We Use Personal Data

To create and secure your account, including email and password sign-in and optional Google or Facebook sign-in when enabled.
To save, organize, categorize, search, and display your recipes, Markdown recipe instructions, pantry items, including items added from recipes, meal plans, and shopping lists.
To import recipes from public URLs, reuse matching public community recipes when available, extract recipe details automatically, and let you review imported recipes before saving them to your library. Imports may use automated or AI-assisted processing, and saved imports may include stored recipe images.
To provide community features, including shared recipes, saves, favorites, ratings, votes, follows, and comments.
To provide creator subscriptions, paywall subscriber-only recipes, process subscription status from Paddle, reconcile subscriptions, support Paddle billing management links, send creator subscription notices, and calculate creator subscriber counts, analytics, payout ledgers, and estimated monthly payouts.
To receive and review content reports, moderate paid and public content, and enforce community and legal standards.
To rank and personalize community recipe discovery using public recipe activity, your follows, and your interactions with public recipes.
To send transactional emails such as verification and password reset messages.
To troubleshoot, prevent abuse, protect the service, and improve reliability.
To measure product usage, understand how features perform, and improve MealMint through privacy-oriented analytics.
To comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Service.

Legal Bases For Processing

For users in the European Economic Area, United Kingdom, or Switzerland, we rely on the following legal bases.

Contract: to provide the service you request, including account access, recipe storage, imports, search, pantry, planning, and shopping lists.
Legitimate interests: to secure the service, prevent abuse, diagnose errors, improve reliability, and understand how core features perform.
Consent: where we ask for optional permission, such as future non-essential cookies or marketing emails.
Legal obligation: where we must retain or disclose information to comply with applicable law.
Vital interests: only in rare cases where processing is necessary to protect someone from serious harm.

Service Providers

We use service providers to operate MealMint. They process personal data only as needed to provide their services to us.

Depending on how you use MealMint, this may include providers that help us host the app, store account and recipe data, process background jobs, deliver account and transactional emails, store and serve images, provide web fonts, power search, measure product usage and performance, process creator subscription payments through Paddle, support recipe imports through automated extraction or public page fetching when needed, and authenticate accounts through Google or Facebook when you choose those sign-in options.

International Transfers

MealMint and its service providers may process personal data in the United States and other countries. Where GDPR or similar laws require transfer safeguards, we use appropriate measures such as contractual commitments, Standard Contractual Clauses, or equivalent safeguards made available by our providers.

Retention

Account data is kept while your account is active.
Profile details, recipes, pantry items, meal plans, shopping lists, comments, ratings, and community activity are kept until you delete them, make changes, or close your account, subject to backups and legal requirements.
Creator subscription, payment processor identifiers, billing period metadata, payout ledger records, and payout estimate records are kept while needed to provide subscriber access, reconcile payments, resolve disputes, comply with law, and maintain financial records.
Content reports and moderation records may be retained while needed to review safety issues, enforce these Terms, prevent abuse, and document decisions.
Import records, extracted metadata, and fetched page content may be kept to support review, troubleshooting, and abuse prevention.
When you dismiss a failed import attempt, MealMint deletes it from active import history, though backups and security logs may retain limited related records for a time.
Session records expire according to the session duration used by MealMint.
Transactional email records and security logs may be retained as needed for delivery, security, audit, and legal purposes.

Your Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, restrict, object to, or receive a portable copy of your personal data. You may also withdraw consent where processing is based on consent.

To make a request, contact privacy@mealmint.app. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request. For GDPR requests, we aim to respond without undue delay and within one month unless an extension is permitted by law.

Public Content

If you make a recipe public or interact with community features, your public profile page, public recipe details, including tags used for community filtering, profile name, username, bio, avatar, websites, social links, ratings, comments, saves, votes, and follows may be visible to other users, visitors who are not logged in, and search engines. Recipe creation and import forms may default sharing controls to public, so review that setting before saving. If you mark a public recipe as subscriber-only, MealMint may still show limited preview details such as title, description, image, creator, and price, while full recipe access is limited to you and active subscribers. Creator profiles may show subscription price, subscriber counts, and subscriber recipe counts. For public recipes imported from the same source URL, MealMint may also show aggregate counts and a limited list of display names for cooks who imported that link or favorited that community version. Other users may save, favorite, or copy public recipes into their own recipe libraries through MealMint features. Favoriting a public recipe creates a private read-only copy in the favoriting user's library; that copy is not editable by them, while the recipe owner and the first importer of the shared source link can edit the public community version. Either maintainer may also transfer ownership of that public recipe to another cook who imported the same source URL. MealMint may use this public activity to rank and personalize community recipe discovery. You can change public recipes back to private when the feature is available for that recipe, but previously visible content may remain in backups, search engine caches, or moderation records for a limited time.

Payments And Creator Subscriptions

MealMint uses Paddle to process creator subscription payments and provide billing management links. Paddle may collect payment details, billing information, tax information, and fraud-prevention data under its own terms and privacy policy. MealMint stores payment metadata from Paddle, such as customer identifiers, subscription identifiers, status, billing periods, price identifiers, webhook event records, and reconciliation logs, but does not store full payment card numbers.

Creator payout totals shown in MealMint are estimates based on active subscriptions and configured subscription prices. Actual payouts may differ because of payment processor fees, taxes, refunds, chargebacks, currency conversion, payout timing, or manual reconciliation.

Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational safeguards designed to protect personal data, including password hashing, session controls, URL safety checks for imports, limited access to production systems, and provider security controls. No online service can guarantee absolute security.

Children

MealMint is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13. If you believe a child provided personal data, contact us so we can review and delete it where required.

Complaints

If you are in the European Economic Area, United Kingdom, or Switzerland, you may have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority. We encourage you to contact us first so we can try to resolve your concern.

Changes

We may update this Privacy Policy as MealMint changes. The updated date shows when the policy was last revised. If changes materially affect your rights or choices, we will provide notice appropriate to the change.