Privacy Policy

MealCircle — last updated 22 September 2026

MealCircle helps a household plan meals together. This policy explains what stays on your device, what we keep on our servers, what leaves your device when you ask the app to do something, and what we never collect at all.

1. What stays on your device

Your meal plans, grocery lists, everyday items and app settings are stored on your device. We do not hold copies of them.

So are your grocery list, your everyday items and your app settings. Your city and state are chosen on the device and stay there.

Your food profile is different, and we should be plain about it. Your dietary preference, fasting practice, allergies, dislikes, spice level, cuisine interests and the dishes you eat at each meal are saved on our servers, under your email address. They have to be: a circle is shared across phones, and a plan built for the household cannot respect what you cannot eat unless the people building it can see it. Section 2 lists what that record holds.

2. What we keep on our servers

Two things a single device cannot do alone — sharing a circle across phones, and a public feed — mean some information has to live with us:

Your sign-in. Your email address, the name on the account, and your password stored only as a one-way PBKDF2 hash. We cannot read your password, and a hash cannot be turned back into one.
Your signed-in devices. One record per device you sign in on, holding a hash of that device’s session token, a plain label such as “iPhone”, and when it was last used. The token itself never leaves your device, and we do not store any device identifier.
Your Mealgram profile. Your username, display name, bio and profile picture, and the date you joined. A username is public by design — it is how people find and follow you.
What you post to Mealgram. Your photos and captions, the channel a post belongs to, and who liked or commented. Also who you follow, who follows you, the accounts you have blocked, and the channels you follow.
Reports and moderation. Reports you file, and reports filed about you, with the outcome. This is the record that lets us act on abuse, so it is kept even when the reported content is removed.
Your circles. Each circle’s name and Circle Key, and for every member their name, email address and whether they are the admin. Requests to join carry the same, for the admin to approve or decline. A member list can only be read by someone already in that circle.
Email verification codes. Your address and a one-way hash of the six-digit code — never the code itself. They expire after ten minutes and are deleted once used.
Subscription receipts. The store’s identifier for the purchase — Apple’s transaction id, or Google Play’s purchase token — along with the product and when it expires. If you were signed in when you bought it, your email address is kept against it. That is what lets everyone in a circle you pay for see it unlocked without their phones having to ask yours, so if you are paying for a circle we also keep which circle that is.
Support messages. Anything you send from Help & Support, with your address so we can reply.
Your food profile. Your allergies, dietary preference, fasting practice, dislikes, spice level, cuisine interests and the dishes you eat at each meal, stored against your email address. Members of a circle you join can see what the plan must avoid for you — that is the point of it.
Your circle’s meal plans. The plan itself, including which dishes were chosen for which day and meal, so that everyone in the circle opens the same week.
Notifications and devices. The notifications sent to you, and one record per device you allowed notifications on, so we can reach that phone.

Your grocery list and your everyday items stay on your phone. Your food profile and your circle’s plans do not — they are listed above because they are held by us.

3. What leaves your device

Your email address, to prove it is yours. Signing up or resetting a password sends your address and name to us so we can email you a code.
Invitations you send. If you invite someone by email, we receive their address and name, your name, and the circle's name, so we can send them your Circle Key. We use the address to send that one email; we do not add it to any list.
What a meal plan or recipe is built from. When the app works out what a dish is made of, or generates a recipe or a meal plan, it sends the request to our server, which passes it to OpenAI to produce the result. For a meal plan that request includes the circle’s name, the first names of its members and the dishes each of them likes, together with the allergies to exclude, the dietary preference to respect (which may name a religious diet such as Jain), the community cuisine tradition, dislikes and spice level — the plan cannot be built without them. It does not include your email address, phone number, date of birth or account credentials. Neither we nor OpenAI use any of it to train a model, and our server does not keep a copy of the request.
Restaurant lookups. If you search for a restaurant, the search text is sent to the relevant maps provider to return results.
Support messages. If you write to us from Help & Support, we receive what you send, including your email address so we can reply.

4. Payments

MealCircle Plus and Pro are handled by the store you bought them from. On iOS that is Apple; on Android it is Google Play. Either way the store takes the payment and tells us only which subscription was bought and when it runs out — we never see your card details. On the web, payments run through Razorpay under their own privacy policy. We do not store card numbers anywhere.

5. Notifications

Meal reminders, plan updates, guest alerts and the daily summary are scheduled on your device. Turning any of them off in Profile → Notification Preferences stops them, and you can revoke notification permission entirely in iOS Settings.

6. Permissions, and what we do not do

MealCircle asks for two permissions, both only at the moment you use the feature, and both refusable without losing anything else:

Photo library — to choose a dish photo or a profile picture. We receive only the image you pick, never a listing of your library.
Camera — to take that photo instead. Nothing is captured unless you press the shutter.

It does not ask for your location, your contacts, your microphone, or the health data your phone keeps, and it has no access to any of them. The one health-related thing we hold is what you type in: your allergies, which a meal plan has to avoid.

Beyond that:

We do not sell or rent your information to anyone.
We do not show advertising, and we share nothing with advertisers or data brokers.
We use no third-party analytics or tracking SDKs, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.
Nothing you write or photograph is used to train an AI model, by us or by anyone we send it to.

7. Deleting your account and data

You can delete your account at any time from Profile → Delete Account. Deletion is held for thirty days before anything is destroyed.

Immediately: every device is signed out, your posts, comments and profile stop being served, and sign-in is refused. To anyone else, the account is gone. A week before the end we email to say the purge is about to run. At any point in those thirty days you can sign in and tap Reactivate, and everything comes back.

The delay exists because “Delete my account” is pressed in anger, by children, and by people who meant “sign out”. A month is the difference between a mistake and a loss.

After thirty days we erase, permanently: your sign-in record including your email address, name and password hash; your Mealgram profile and profile picture; your posts and their photos; your comments and likes; who you followed and who followed you; your blocks and channel follows; the reports you filed; your circle memberships and join requests; your verification codes; every device session; your food profile, including your allergies; your notifications; the device records used to reach your phone; and the link to your Apple or Google sign-in.

Some things remain, deliberately: reports filed about you, which are the moderation record and belong to the people who filed them; a channel you created, which is deactivated and detached from your name because the posts inside it are other people’s; subscription receipts, which we keep for tax and legal purposes and which keep your email address against them — deleting your account does not cancel a subscription, and a circle you were paying for is still being paid for; the support messages you exchanged with us, which are the record of what was asked and answered; and a circle’s meal plans, which belong to the circle and are still being used by the people left in it.

Deleting the app removes what is on your device, but does not start this process — use Delete Account for that.

Subscriptions are separate. Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription bought through the App Store or Google Play. Cancel it in your Apple or Google account settings, or it keeps renewing.

8. Children

MealCircle is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has given us information, write to us and we will remove it.

9. Changes and contact

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app. Questions, requests or concerns: info@mealcircle.in.