Terms of Service
These Terms govern your use of the Chompanion app and chompanion.com. By creating an account or using Chompanion, you agree to them.
1. The service
Chompanion is a nutrition tracking app and web companion. It lets you log meals, get AI-powered nutrition estimates from photos and text, save recipes, and share recipes with the community.
2. Your account
- You must be at least 13 years old (or the minimum digital-consent age in your country, whichever is higher).
- You're responsible for keeping your password safe and for activity that happens under your account.
- One person, one account. Don't impersonate someone else.
- If you suspect your account has been compromised, contact us and change your password immediately.
3. Acceptable use
Don't:
- Reverse-engineer, scrape, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to our backend or other users' data.
- Try to bypass rate limits, subscription checks, or security controls.
- Use Chompanion to send spam, harass other users, or post sexual, hateful, or illegal content in the recipe community.
- Submit content you don't have the right to use.
- Use the AI features to generate or seek medical, dietary, or therapeutic instructions for someone else.
We may suspend or terminate accounts that breach these rules.
4. Subscriptions and billing (beta)
During the closed beta, Chompanion is free. We do not sell subscriptions or accept payments in the app today. The app may show placeholder UI for a future paid tier; it cannot charge you in this build.
If we add paid plans later, we expect to use Apple App Store and Google Play in-app purchases (the standard store billing systems). When that happens we will update these Terms and the Privacy Policy before purchases go live. In general:
- Prices, currency, and renewal terms will be shown in the store purchase flow.
- Subscriptions would auto-renew until you cancel in your Apple or Google account settings — not by deleting the app.
- Refunds would be handled by Apple or Google under their policies; we cannot issue store refunds directly.
- If you have a statutory right of withdrawal (e.g. EU consumers), it applies as required by law when paid plans are offered.
5. AI features and accuracy
Chompanion's AI estimates calories and macros from photos and text. These are estimates. Numbers may be wrong, especially for unusual portions, mixed dishes, or low-light photos. You can edit any value before saving. Chompanion is not a medical device and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or prevent any health condition. If you have a medical condition, allergy, or specific dietary requirement, consult a qualified professional.
Nutrition numbers may also come from third-party reference databases (see §6 Nutrition and product data). Packaged-product data from Open Food Facts is crowd-sourced and may be incomplete or outdated. Values from USDA FoodData Central and BLS describe generic foods, not necessarily the exact brand you ate.
6. Nutrition and product data
Chompanion displays nutrition information from the following sources. By using the relevant features you agree to respect their licences and our in-app attributions.
6.1 Open Food Facts (barcode scanning)
- Use: barcode scans query the Open Food Facts API from your device.
- Licence: the database is under the Open Database Licence (ODbL); individual contents under the Database Contents Licence; product images under CC BY-SA where applicable.
- Attribution: we credit Open Food Facts in the app and link to openfoodfacts.org or the relevant product page. You must not remove those attributions from screens that show OFF data.
- Their terms: Open Food Facts terms of use.
6.2 USDA FoodData Central (food search & matching)
- Use: we import and host SR Legacy and Foundation Foods datasets on our servers for search and ingredient matching. We do not expose USDA's full branded-products catalogue or barcode/GTIN data in the current app.
- Licence: public domain (CC0 1.0). USDA requests that users list FoodData Central as the source.
- Citation: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central. https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/
6.3 Bundeslebensmittelschlüssel — BLS (food search & matching)
- Use: we import and host BLS 4.0 nutrient data on our servers alongside USDA data.
- Licence: provided free of charge without licence barriers by the Max Rubner-Institut; scientific citation is appreciated.
- Citation: Max Rubner-Institut (2025): Bundeslebensmittelschlüssel (BLS), Version 4.0. https://blsdb.de/
Feature summary: barcode → Open Food Facts only; text search → USDA + BLS via our database; photo recognition → AI (Gemini) plus USDA/BLS matching when ingredients resolve in our database. Saved meals and manual entries you create are your content, not third-party database rows.
7. Your content
You keep ownership of the meals, recipes, photos, and other content you create in Chompanion ("Your Content"). By posting Your Content to public surfaces (e.g. the recipe community feed), you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, display, and distribute it as needed to run the service. We do not sell Your Content and we do not use it to train public AI models.
You are responsible for Your Content. Don't post things you don't have the right to post.
8. Community feed
- Recipes you publish to the community are visible to other users.
- We may remove content that violates these Terms or applicable law.
- Likes, saves, and comments aren't a substitute for professional dietary advice.
9. Third-party services
Chompanion relies on third parties to operate the service, including:
- Supabase — authentication and account data (EU-hosted).
- Google Gemini — AI photo and text analysis.
- Open Food Facts — barcode product lookup (client-side API calls).
- USDA FoodData Central & BLS — reference nutrition data hosted on our servers (see §6).
- Apple App Store / Google Play — app distribution (and future in-app purchases, when enabled).
Each provider's terms and privacy policies apply to the data they process. We are not responsible for outages or actions of third parties beyond our reasonable control.
10. Termination
- You can delete your account from inside the app at any time.
- We can suspend or terminate accounts for breach of these Terms or to protect the service. Where reasonable, we'll let you know first.
- Sections that by nature should survive termination (ownership, disclaimers, liability, governing law) survive.
11. Disclaimers
Chompanion is provided "as is" and "as available". We don't promise that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that nutrition data will be accurate for every food. Use it as a tracking aid, not as the basis for medical decisions.
12. Liability
To the maximum extent allowed by law, Chompanion is not liable for indirect or consequential losses, lost data, or lost profits. Our total liability for any claim is capped at the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or USD 50, whichever is greater. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that can't be limited under applicable law (e.g. consumer rights, gross negligence).
13. Governing law & disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction where Chompanion is operated. EU/EEA consumers keep the protection of the mandatory consumer-protection laws of their country of residence. Disputes can be brought in the competent courts of your country of residence where law requires.
14. Changes to the Terms
We may update these Terms occasionally. If a change is material, we'll update the date above and notify you in-app or by email. Continued use after the change means you accept the new Terms.
15. Contact
Questions about these Terms: [email protected]. Privacy matters: [email protected].