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PantryBucks

Track your pantry, rescue food before it expires, and discover recipes with what you already have. Coming soon to the App Store.

PantryBucks Privacy Policy
PantryBucks Terms of Use Policy

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PantryBucks Privacy Policy

Effective November 3, 2026.PantryBucks is made by Prickly Pear Software LLC in Scottsdale, Arizona.
This policy explains what the app collects, where it goes, and what you
can do about it.

The Short Version

PantryBucks does not ask for your name, your email address, or a password.
There are no accounts. We cannot tell who you are, and we cannot connect
your pantry to you as a person.Your pantry lives on your phone. A copy is saved to our server so you do not lose it, and you can turn that off. We can read that copy. What we cannot do is tell whose it is.When you scan a receipt, a shelf, or a recipe, the photo is sent to an AI
service to read it. We do not keep it, and neither does the AI service
beyond 30 days.If you record allergies or a diet, that goes into your backup and to the
AI service that writes your recipes. Nowhere else.You can export everything, and you can delete it.

What the App Collects

What you put inItems in your pantry, shopping lists, saved recipes, meal plans, prices
you have paid, and what you did with food you tracked - used it, froze
it, or threw it away.Photos you scanReceipts, shelves and fridges, barcodes, and recipe pages. The app asks
for camera access to take them, and for photo library access if you want
to scan a picture you already have. These photos leave your phone to be read and turned into text. They pass through our own server on the way to the AI service, and neither end keeps them.Allergies and diets, if you tell usPantryBucks has a place to record food allergies and a diet you follow, so
that it can keep them out of the recipes it suggests. You do not have to
fill it in, and the app works without it.Two of the diet options - Halal and Kosher - say something about your
religion. Allergies are health information. We treat both as sensitive,
and this section says exactly where they go.What you record is kept on your phone. It is also included in your cloud backup, which is on unless you turn it off. And it is sent to the AI service when it writes you a recipe, so that the recipe can honor it — the words "Halal" and "Kosher" are included, because the AI needs to know what rules to follow.It is not shared with anyone in your household, even if you share a pantry with them. It never goes into the community price pool. We do not use it for anything other than making recipes work for you.Being exact about the backup, because this is the sensitive part: your allergies and diet sit inside that copy in a form we could read. What we cannot do is work out whose copy it is. If that is not good enough for you, it does not have to leave your phone at all — turn off cloud backup in Settings, leave these fields empty, and tell the recipe writer what to avoid each time instead.A device identifierWhen you install the app, it creates a random identifier so your phone can
talk to our server. It is not tied to your name, your email, your phone
number, or your Apple ID. If you delete and reinstall the app, you get a
new one, and the old one cannot be connected to it.Where you shopWhen you type a postcode or an address to find stores near you, the app looks it up so it can work out which stores are nearby. That lookup is done by a public mapping service, which receives the text you typed. The app never reads your phone's location to do this — only what you enter yourself.Anonymous usage dataCounts of how often features are used, to help us understand what works. These are numbers only — no text you wrote, no photos, nothing that identifies you. You can turn this off in Settings, under Usage Analytics.

What the App Does Not Collect

Your name, email address, phone number, or postal address.
Your contacts or your calendar.
Your device's location. The app never reads GPS and never asks for location access.
Your payment details - Apple handles subscriptions, and we never see your
card.
Any login credentials, because there is no login.

Where Your Data Lives

On your phoneYour pantry, lists, recipes, and history are stored on your device, and you can use them without an internet connection. Scanning and recipe writing need one, because both depend on the AI service.Backed up to our serverA copy of your pantry is saved so that you do not lose it if something goes wrong. This is on by default and you can turn it off in Settings.The copy is stored under a random reference number that only your phone holds. Nothing kept alongside it — no name, no email, no account, no device identifier — says who it belongs to.Worth being plain about what that does and does not mean. We can open the copy and read what is in it. What we cannot do is work out whose it is, or connect it back to you. If our database were breached, or we were handed a subpoena, what anyone would find is a large number of unlabeled pantries.It also means we cannot recover it for you. The reference number lives on your phone and nowhere else. Lose the phone and the link to your copy is gone, and we have no way to find it again. An unused backup is deleted automatically after a year.If you turn backup off, we stop keeping a copy and the existing one is deleted.Shared with your householdIf you share a pantry with someone, the shared pantry and lists are stored
on our server so both phones can see the same thing. Anyone in your
household can see the shared pantry. Invitations expire a few minutes
after they are created and are then deleted.

Who Else Sees Your Data

We share data with the services below, and each is bound by its own terms to protect it to the standard this policy describes.Google (Firebase)We use Google's Firebase to store data and run the app's server. Data is held in the United States. Scans and recipe requests pass through our own server on Google's platform on their way to the AI service.AnthropicScanned photos and recipe requests are sent to Anthropic's AI service to be read and understood. Nothing identifying is attached. Anthropic deletes these automatically within 30 days and does not use them to train its models.AppleSubscriptions are handled by Apple. We receive confirmation that a subscription is active. We do not receive your payment details.OpenStreetMapWhen you type a postcode or address to find stores near you, that text goes to OpenStreetMap's public lookup services, which are run outside the United States. They receive what you typed and nothing else.Open Food FactsWhen you scan a barcode, the number is sent to Open Food Facts, a public food database, so the app can tell what the product is. Only the barcode is sent.Recipe sites you chooseIf you import a recipe by web address, your phone fetches that page directly, the same way your browser would. The site you picked sees the request. We never see the address.We do not sell information about you, and we never will - we do not have
any. We may license or sell aggregate grocery price data, which contains
no identifier and is not connected to any person. We do not share anything
with advertisers, and we do not build a profile of you.

Community Price Data

When you scan a receipt, PantryBucks contributes grocery prices and store
names to a shared pool, so the app can tell everyone where things cost
less.These contributions carry no account, no email, and no device or user identifier. They record what was bought, at which store, in which city, on what date, and at what price. Items from the same shopping trip are grouped together, so a single basket can be seen as a basket. Nothing connects one trip to another, so no purchase history builds up about you over time.If you correct an item name the app read wrongly, that correction is shared too, so the app reads it better next time. Because that is text you typed yourself, the app checks it first: anything containing an email address, a web address, a long run of digits, or more than 80 characters is not sent at all. Corrections cannot be withdrawn once they are sent.You can turn all of this off in Settings, under Community Data. That switch is separate from Usage Analytics, so you can share prices without sharing anything about how you use the app, or the other way round. Turning it off stops anything further being sent. It does not withdraw contributions already made — they carry nothing identifying, so there is no way to find them again.

What You Can Do

Export everythingSettings has an option to save a copy of your pantry as a file you keep.Delete your dataTurning off cloud backup deletes the copy on our server. Erasing the app's
data in Settings removes what is on your phone. Deleting the app removes
everything on the device.Turn off usage data or price contributions
Settings has a separate switch for each: Usage Analytics and Community Data.Because there are no accounts, we cannot look up your data for you, and we
cannot delete it on request - we would have no way to find it. The
controls in the app are how it is done, and they work without us.

Children

PantryBucks is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly
collect information from them.

For California Residents

California law gives residents the right to know what personal information
a business collects, to request its deletion, and to opt out of its sale.PantryBucks does not sell personal information and does not share it for
cross-context behavioral advertising.The practical position is unusual and worth stating directly: because the
app has no accounts and collects no identifiers tied to a person, we
generally hold no personal information about you as California law defines
it. If you believe we hold information about you, write to the address
below and we will do what we can - but in most cases there is nothing for
us to look up, which is by design rather than evasion.California treats health information and religious belief as sensitive personal information. The allergy and diet fields are the only place PantryBucks holds anything of that kind. They are used for one purpose — keeping your recipes suitable for you — and are not disclosed for any other purpose.You will not be treated differently for exercising any of these rights.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or what
happens to it, we will update this page and change the date at the top.

Contact

[email protected]Prickly Pear Software LLC
Scottsdale, Arizona

PantryBucks Terms of Use

Effective: November 6, 2026 Version: 1.0Prickly Pear Software LLC ("we," "us") makes PantryBucks. These Terms are an agreement between you and us about how you use the app. By tapping "Get started," you agree to them. If you don't agree, don't use PantryBucks.

1. What PantryBucks is

PantryBucks helps you keep track of food you already own, notice what's getting old, and waste less of it. It does this by storing what you tell it, reading receipts and photos you take, and generating recipe suggestions.It is a tracking tool. It is not a food-safety service, a nutrition service, or a medical service, and nothing in it is professional advice.

2. Expiry dates

PantryBucks shows an expiry date for every item. Some of those dates come from you or from a package you scanned. Most are estimated by the app from the kind of food it is.We can't guarantee that these dates are correct. Shelf life varies with the product, the storage and the kitchen, and the app works from a general estimate rather than from the item in front of you.Treat a date in PantryBucks as a prompt to check, and use your own judgment about whether food is good to eat.

3. Recipes

Recipe suggestions are generated by an AI service when you ask for them. They aren't written or reviewed by us, and we can't guarantee that a recipe will work, taste good, or be suitable for you.Cooking times and temperatures in a generated recipe are suggestions. For food safety when cooking — particularly meat, poultry, eggs and seafood — follow established guidance rather than the recipe.

4. Allergens

If you tell PantryBucks about allergies, it asks the AI service for recipes without those ingredients, and it looks through every recipe it shows you for words associated with them, flagging any it finds.We can't guarantee that this catches everything. The flagging is a word search against a fixed list: it can't read a brand, it doesn't know what's inside a named dish, and a recipe can leave an ingredient out of its own list. A recipe with no flag hasn't been cleared — it means the app found nothing, not that there is nothing to find.Read the actual ingredients and the actual packaging before cooking for someone with an allergy, and don't rely on this app where a reaction would be serious.

5. Photos and what we do with them

When you scan a receipt, a shelf, or a recipe, the photo is sent to an AI service to be read, and we get back text. The photo is not added to your photo library, and we do not keep a copy once it has been read.A shelf photo often catches more of your kitchen than you meant it to. We don't share shelf photos.

6. Community price data

PantryBucks keeps a shared pool of grocery prices built from what its users scan. It's what lets the app tell you an item is cheaper somewhere else, or that what you paid was above or below what others are paying. Everyone who contributes draws from it, and it only works because people contribute.Community data sharing is on by default and you can turn it off in Settings. While it's on, scanning a receipt sends what you bought, where, when and how much to that pool. Nothing identifying you goes with it — no name, no email, no account, no device identifier that persists. Your pantry, your recipes and your lists are never part of it.The license you grant. By contributing, you grant Prickly Pear Software LLC a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, aggregate, publish and distribute that contributed data, including in aggregated or derived form, including by showing it to other users of PantryBucks, and including for commercial purposes. This license covers contributed price data only. It does not extend to your pantry, your recipes, your lists, or anything else stored on your device or in your backup.That license is what makes the shared pool possible: showing you a price someone else scanned means redistributing what they contributed, and the same is true in the other direction.A contribution can't be withdrawn. Once it's sent it's part of an anonymous pool, with nothing to point at and remove. Turning sharing off stops future contributions; it doesn't undo past ones.

7. Your data

PantryBucks has no accounts. We don't know who you are, and we have no way to identify your data as yours.Cloud backup is on by default. It keeps a copy of your pantry, recipes, lists and settings on our server, so a new device can get them back. You can turn it off in Settings, and turning it off deletes the copy. Backup has a size limit; if your pantry outgrows it the app tells you.Export saves a copy as a file you keep yourself. It works whether or not backup is on, and it's the copy that survives changing phones, changing platforms, or anything happening to us.Because there are no accounts, we can't recover data for you. If backup is off and you have no export, a lost or wiped phone takes your pantry with it. We can't guarantee that any copy will always be available, so keep an export if your data matters to you.

8. Household sharing

If you share a household, everyone in it can see and change the same pantry, shopping lists and settings. Anyone can leave at any time. We have no way to tell who in a household did what, and we do not try to.Content synced in a household is stored on our servers unencrypted. It is anonymous — there is no name or account attached — but it is not secret.

9. Subscriptions

PantryBucks offers two subscription options:- $39.99 per year, with a 14-day free trial
- $4.99 per month, with no trialOne subscription covers a household through Apple Family Sharing, up to six people.Payment is charged to your Apple ID. Subscriptions renew automatically unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends. Cancel through your Apple ID settings, not through us — we cannot cancel or refund on your behalf. Refunds are handled by Apple under their policies.If you cancel during a free trial, you keep access until the trial ends and are not charged.We may change prices. A change will not affect a period you've already paid for, and Apple will tell you before a renewal at a new price.

10. What you may not do

Don't use PantryBucks to break the law. Don't try to pull apart, reverse engineer or resell the app. Don't feed it other people's data without their say-so. Don't use it to make decisions about anyone's medical care.

11. No warranty

PantryBucks is provided "as is." To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement, and we can't guarantee that the app will be uninterrupted or error-free.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Prickly Pear Software LLC is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost profits, or illness — however caused and on any theory of liability — arising from your use of PantryBucks.Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or $50, whichever is greater.Some places don't allow these limits. Where that's true, they apply as far as the law permits.

13. Disputes

Please contact us first. Email [email protected] and describe the problem. Before filing any claim, you agree to try to resolve it with us informally for at least 30 days. Most things can be sorted out this way.Small claims. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small claims court, if it qualifies.Time limit. Any claim arising out of these Terms must be filed within one year after it arises, or it is permanently barred, except where the law does not allow a shortened period.Governing law and venue. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Arizona, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply. The exclusive venue for any dispute is the state or federal courts in Maricopa County, Arizona, and you consent to personal jurisdiction there.

14. Changes

To these Terms. We may revise them. If a change is material, we'll ask you to accept the new version in the app before you continue using it, and we'll update the effective date. Continuing to use PantryBucks after a non-material change means you accept it. Changes don't apply retroactively to a dispute that arose before the change took effect.To the app. We may add, change or remove features at any time. Features described in marketing, in release notes, or in these Terms may change or be withdrawn.

15. General

Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and Prickly Pear about PantryBucks, and replace anything said before.Severability. If any provision is held unenforceable, it's modified to the minimum extent needed to be enforceable, and the rest stays in effect.No waiver. Our not enforcing a provision doesn't waive it.Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.Things outside our control. We're not liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including outages at services we depend on.Notices. We may give notice through the app or at the URL where these Terms are posted. Notices to us go to [email protected].

16. Apple

These Terms are between you and Prickly Pear Software LLC, not Apple. Apple is not responsible for PantryBucks or its content, and has no obligation to provide support for it. Apple is a third-party beneficiary of these Terms and may enforce them against you.

17. Contact

Prickly Pear Software LLC Scottsdale, Arizona [email protected]