PanScale
Privacy Policy
Last updated 10 November 2026
PanScale rescales a recipe to the pan you actually own. It does that arithmetic on your device. Most people will use it without ever sending us anything at all.
The short version
- No account, no data. Without signing in, your recipes and pans are stored only on your device. We never receive them.
- No analytics, no advertising, no trackers. Not "anonymised analytics" — none. There is no third-party tracking code in the app or on this site.
- Photos of recipes never leave your device. Text recognition runs locally.
- Signing in is only for keeping things. If you sign in, your saved recipes and custom pans sync so they survive a new phone.
- We never see your card. Payment is handled entirely by Apple, Google or Stripe.
- Deletion is immediate and in-app. Settings → Account → Delete my account. It is a real delete, not a flag on a row.
Who we are
PanScale is an independent app. For anything in this policy — including a request to see, correct or delete your data — write to privacy@panscale.app. We are the data controller for the information described below.
What we collect, and only when
The honest answer is that it depends entirely on whether you sign in, and almost nothing is collected if you do not.
| What | When | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your recipes, your custom pans, your settings | Always — but stored on your device only unless you sign in | It is your recipe box. The app is built to work with no network at all. |
| An account identifier, the sign-in provider you used (Apple or Google), that provider's stable ID for you, and your email address if the provider gives us one | Only if you sign in | To know which recipe box is yours when you open the app on a second device. |
| Copies of the recipes and custom pans you have saved | Only if you sign in | So they survive a lost phone and appear on your tablet. This is the entire reason accounts exist in PanScale. |
| Subscription status: which provider sold it, which plan, whether it is active, and when the current period ends | Only if you subscribe | To know whether to unlock the paid features. See "Payment" below. |
| Ordinary web server logs: IP address, timestamp, which endpoint was called | On any request to our server | Keeping the service running and stopping abuse. Rotated and discarded within 30 days. |
What we deliberately do not collect
- Analytics of any kind. No page views, no feature usage, no session recording, no crash reporting SDK, no "anonymous" telemetry.
- Advertising identifiers. We do not advertise and do not track.
- Your location, contacts, calendar, microphone, or health data. The app never asks for them.
- Photographs. See the next section — these are processed on your device and never uploaded.
Photographs of recipes
If you photograph a recipe, the text recognition happens on your device, in the app. The image is never uploaded, never sent to a third-party vision service, and not retained by us in any form. The app needs camera and photo-library permission to let you choose a picture; it uses that access for nothing else.
One honest detail: the text-recognition engine itself is a few megabytes, so the web app downloads it from a public software mirror (jsDelivr and the Tesseract project) the first time you scan something, rather than making everyone download it who never will. That request tells the mirror your IP address, as any download does. It carries no identifier of you and no part of your photograph, and it happens once. We would rather serve those files ourselves and will.
Importing a recipe from a link
When you paste a recipe link, that URL is sent to our server, which fetches the page and reads the ingredient list out of it. We do not store the URL, keep a copy of the page, or build any record of what you have looked at. The fetch is discarded as soon as the ingredient list has been returned to your app.
Our server identifies itself honestly as PanScaleBot and obeys each site's
robots.txt. Some publishers do not permit automated reading, and for those
the app will tell you so and offer to let you paste the ingredient list in yourself
instead.
Payment
We never see your card details. Purchases on iPhone and iPad go through Apple, purchases on Android through Google Play, and purchases on the web through Stripe. Each of those is responsible for the payment itself and handles your card under its own privacy policy — Apple, Google, Stripe.
What reaches us is only the result: that a subscription exists, which plan it is, and when it next renews.
Who we share it with
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. We have no advertising partners. The only third parties involved at all are:
- Apple or Google, if you choose to sign in with them — they tell us an identifier and, where available, an email address.
- Apple, Google or Stripe, for taking payment.
- Our hosting provider, which runs the server the data sits on.
We may also disclose information where the law genuinely requires it. If that ever happens we will tell you, unless we are forbidden from doing so.
Where it is stored, and for how long
Our server is in the United States. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, that means your data is transferred outside your region; we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum and the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses for that transfer.
We keep your account and its contents for as long as the account exists. When you delete your account the recipes, custom pans, subscription record and the account row itself are deleted immediately — not marked hidden. Server logs age out within 30 days. Backups are retained for 30 days, after which a deleted account is gone from those too.
Your rights
If you are in the UK or the EEA, the UK GDPR and the GDPR give you the right to access a copy of your data, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how it is used, and to have it sent to you in a portable form. If you are in California, the CCPA gives you comparable rights, including the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them — and note that we have nothing to opt out of, because we do not sell or share personal information.
Deletion is built into the app, and it is the fastest route: Settings → Account → Delete my account, two taps, no email required and no retention period. For anything else, write to privacy@panscale.app and we will answer within 30 days.
Our legal bases for processing are: contract, for running the account and the subscription you asked for; and legitimate interests, for keeping the service secure and working. We do not rely on consent for anything, because we do not do the things consent would be needed for.
If you think we have got this wrong you can complain to your data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office. We would rather you told us first so we can fix it.
Children
PanScale is a baking tool for a general audience. It is not directed at children under 13, we do not knowingly collect anything from them, and there is nothing in the app aimed at them. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will delete it.
Security
Traffic to our server is encrypted in transit with TLS. Sign-in uses tokens from Apple or Google verified against their published keys; we never handle or store a password, because the app has none. Access to the server is restricted to key-based administrative login.
No system is perfect. If you find a security problem, please write to security@panscale.app rather than posting it, and we will deal with it promptly.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change actually affects what we collect or what we do with it — as opposed to fixing a typo — we will tell you in the app before it takes effect, not quietly.