Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 7, 2026

Simmernook is a hands-free voice cooking companion. There’s no account and no sign-in. This policy explains what data the app handles and your choices. Questions or deletion requests: support@simmernook.com. Simmernook is operated from, and processes your information in, the United States.

What we collect, and why

• Microphone audio (only while you’re cooking). When you start a cook and grant microphone access, the app streams your voice over an encrypted real-time connection to OpenAI — a third-party AI service — which generates the live voice guidance you hear. Our server sets up and supervises that session, but the audio itself travels directly between your phone and OpenAI: we don’t receive, record, or store your audio, and the conversation transcript is kept on your device, not on our servers.
• A minimal session record. To resume a dropped cook and enforce cost/abuse limits, we store a small record: a random device ID (generated on your device; it persists across reinstalls so free-tier limits work), which recipe you’re cooking, and timestamps. It holds no recording or transcript of your conversation, and no name, email, or account. While a timer is running it also holds that timer’s short label (for example “pasta”) so the timer survives a dropped connection; it’s cleared when the timer ends. During a cook it likewise holds a short list of the cooking milestones you’ve completed (for example “pasta drained”) so a dropped connection can pick up where you left off; it’s deleted with the rest of the record when the cook ends.
• Purchases, if you subscribe. We store your subscription status, when it renews, how many cooking minutes you have left, and the transaction identifiers Apple gives us — kept for as long as needed to run your subscription and handle refunds. We never receive your name, email, or payment-card details: Apple processes the payment.

We do not store your IP address, sell your data, use it for advertising or cross-app tracking, or use your audio to train AI models without your permission.

Who processes your data

• OpenAI (OpenAI, L.L.C.) generates the voice guidance from your audio in real time. We use OpenAI’s paid API tier, under which your audio and the companion’s replies are not used to train OpenAI’s models. OpenAI may retain API data for up to 30 days to monitor for abuse and misuse, after which it is deleted; we additionally keep OpenAI’s session-tracing feature disabled.
• Our cloud hosting provider runs our relay server and stores the minimal session record, in the United States.

Retention

The session record is kept while a cook is in progress and deleted when it ends; an abandoned cook’s record expires on its own. We don’t retain your audio or a conversation transcript. Purchase records (subscription status, minutes, Apple transaction identifiers) are kept for as long as needed to run your subscription and handle refunds; the count of free cooks used is kept against your random device ID.

Your choices

• In the app’s Settings you can delete your session records and unlink your device, and turn off AI processing (this disables the companion). We keep the count of free cooks used (a number under your random device ID) and, if you subscribed, the Apple transaction records needed for refunds and renewals; deleting your data does not cancel an Apple subscription — do that in your Apple Account’s subscription settings.
• You can revoke microphone access anytime in your device’s system Settings.
• To request deletion by email, contact support@simmernook.com with the random device ID shown in Settings.

Changes

We may update this policy as the app evolves; we’ll revise the effective date above and, for material changes, give notice in the app.

Contact

Simmernook — support@simmernook.com