Privacy Policy

Overview

This Privacy Policy explains what Homeful collects, why, and how it's used. Homeful is a household-management app for couples and households: groceries, to-dos, a shared calendar, expenses, pets, and an optional AI assistant ("Homeful AI"). This is not legal advice — it's a plain-language description of our actual data practices.

Who runs Homeful

Homeful is run by Tamas Ortenszky, Rainlihöhe 31, 6048 Horw, Switzerland. Under the GDPR and the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, that is the "controller" responsible for the personal data described here — where this policy says "we", that is who it means.

For anything about your data, including the rights set out below, write to homeful.app@outlook.com or to the postal address above.

Data we collect

Account & profile: your email address and authentication data, the nickname you set for your household, and — if you sign in with Apple or Google instead of a password — the sign-in details described under "Signing in with Apple or Google" below.

Household data: the content you and the people you invite create — grocery items, to-dos/chores, calendar events, expense entries (amount, currency, category, description, who paid and how it's split) and the balances calculated from them, and pet records: profile details, feeding/walk/toilet logs, medications and doses, vet appointments, weight entries, training notes, emergency contact details you enter, and a pet photo if you choose to add one.

AI chatbot messages: text (or voice, transcribed to text) you send to Homeful AI, and the household data needed to answer it (e.g. your open grocery list when you ask for meal ideas). We also record one content-free row per request — the type of request, which data lookups ran, how many tokens it used, and any 👍/👎 you give — to keep the feature working and within its usage limits.

Subscription status: whether your household has an active subscription, and when it expires. Payment itself happens in the App Store or Google Play; we never see your card details.

Device & app data: technical data needed to operate the app, such as your device's push-notification token (if you enable notifications) and basic diagnostic data.

We do not sell your data.

Waitlist sign-ups

If you enter your email address in the "get early access" form on our website, we store that address (plus your browser's language setting, so we can write to you in the right language) purely to email you about the Homeful launch. Nothing else is collected — no account is created, and the address is not linked to any app data.

We send at most a couple of emails before launch, and one when we launch. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and you can ask us to delete your address at any time by writing to homeful.app@outlook.com. The list is never sold or shared with anyone other than the email provider that delivers the message.

Signing in with Apple or Google

You can create an account or sign in with a password, with Apple, or with Google. If you choose Apple or Google, that provider confirms who you are and passes a limited set of details to Homeful:

• Sign in with Apple: your email address and an Apple account identifier. If you choose Apple's "Hide My Email" option, Apple gives us a private relay address instead of your real one and forwards our messages to you — we never see the underlying address. Apple may also pass your name to the app the first time you sign in; Homeful does not store it or send it to our servers. • Sign in with Google: your email address, your name, your profile picture, and a Google account identifier.

That is the whole of it. We do not receive, and never ask for, your password, your contacts, your calendar, your photos, your files, or anything else in your Apple or Google account, and we cannot post or act on your behalf there.

If the email address from Apple or Google already has a Homeful account, the two sign-in methods are linked to that same account, so you keep your household and your data instead of getting a second, empty one. An Apple private relay address cannot be matched to an existing account, because it is a different address — signing in that way creates a separate account.

Signing in this way tells Apple or Google that you use Homeful. What they do with that is governed by their own privacy policies, not this one. You can revoke Homeful's access at any time in your Apple ID or Google account settings — do that and you will need another way in, so set a password first if it is your only method.

Homeful AI and OpenAI

AI features send your messages and household data to OpenAI, which may process the data in the United States, to generate suggestions and responses.

So that it can answer without asking follow-up questions, every message is accompanied by a summary of your household as it stands: your members' nicknames, your open grocery items and to-dos, upcoming calendar events, your current balances and any bills due, and your pets and when they were last walked. That summary is sent whatever you ask, so it goes to OpenAI even when your question does not need all of it. If you ask about something outside that summary — older expenses, past events — the relevant records are looked up and sent too. Everything is scoped to your own household, and earlier messages in the current chat are included so the conversation makes sense.

Homeful AI is a convenience feature, not a professional service. Do not rely on it for emergencies, or for medical, legal, or financial advice, or any other critical decision. Always review what it proposes — adding groceries, to-dos, events, expenses, or pet logs — before confirming.

Voice input and speech

You can dictate to Homeful AI instead of typing. When you do, the app asks for microphone and speech-recognition permission and hands the audio to your device's own speech-recognition service — Apple's on iOS, Google's on Android — which converts it to text. Depending on your device, its settings, and the language, that service may process the audio on the device or send it to Apple's or Google's servers; that processing is governed by their privacy policies, not this one. Homeful does not record, store, or upload the audio itself. Only the resulting text is sent to Homeful AI, and only when you send the message.

Homeful can also read AI answers back to you using your device's built-in text-to-speech. That happens locally on your device.

Microphone and speech recognition are used only for this feature, only while you are holding the dictation control, and only after you grant permission. You can revoke it at any time in your device settings and keep using the app by typing.

Usage analytics

Homeful collects privacy-safe product-usage events (for example: app opened, a grocery item added, a to-do completed, Homeful AI used) to understand which features are used, improve the app, and spot where people get stuck or stop using it. These events record categories, counts, and yes/no flags only — never the actual content of your lists, tasks, events, expense amounts or descriptions, AI messages, pet names, or photos. In-app analytics are stored first-party in our Supabase backend, are not sold, and are never used for advertising or cross-app tracking. We do not use advertising identifiers or device fingerprinting. To ask about or delete your analytics data, contact homeful.app@outlook.com.

Website analytics

Our website uses Vercel Web Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights to count page views and measure how quickly pages load. These are cookieless: they set no cookies, store nothing on your device, and cannot follow you to other websites. They record the page visited, the referring site, an approximate country, and basic device and browser type, plus a temporary one-way hash used to estimate unique visits, which is discarded within 24 hours and cannot be reversed to identify you. No advertising, profiling, or cross-site tracking is involved, and this data is never sold.

Because these measurements use no cookies and no device storage, the website does not ask for cookie consent for them. (The separate staff-only admin area sets a strictly necessary sign-in cookie, which is exempt from consent requirements.)

This applies to the website only — the Homeful mobile app does not use Vercel analytics.

Who we share data with

We use a small number of service providers ("sub-processors") to run Homeful:

• Supabase — authentication, database, file storage, and backend infrastructure. This is where your household's data lives. • OpenAI — generating Homeful AI's chatbot responses and suggestions. Receives your message and the household data needed to answer it. • Apple / Google — converting your voice to text when you dictate, via your device's own speech-recognition service. See "Voice input and speech" above. • Apple (App Store) and Google (Google Play) — taking the payment for a subscription, depending on which store you installed from. Apple or Google, not us, holds your payment details. • RevenueCat — managing subscription and payment entitlements. Receives your household's identifier and its purchase history from Apple or Google, not your name, email, or household content. • Expo push notification services — delivering push notifications, where notifications are enabled. Receives your device's push token and the notification text. • Sentry — crash and error reporting, so we can find and fix bugs. Crash reports carry technical data: device model, OS version, stack traces, and a trail of what the app was doing. We do not send household content to Sentry, and the app strips email addresses and account identifiers from these reports before they leave your device. We cannot promise it is never present: an error message produced deep inside the app can quote text you typed. We do not use it, and you can ask us to delete a report. • Apple / Google (sign-in) — confirming your identity when you use Sign in with Apple or Continue with Google, and passing us the details listed under "Signing in with Apple or Google" above. They do not receive your household content. • Vercel — hosting our website, and the cookieless website analytics described above. Vercel processes website visits only; it does not receive your household data.

Each provider only receives the data needed to perform its function. We do not share your data with advertisers.

Data sharing within your household

Homeful is built for shared use, so everything in a household is visible to everyone in it. Anyone who joins with your invite code can see and change that household's content — lists, tasks, calendar events, expenses (including amounts, descriptions and who paid), pet records, and each member's nickname. Homeful AI answers their questions from the same shared data.

There is no private area within a household. Only invite people you trust, treat the invite code as a key, and don't put anything in the app you wouldn't want another member to read. If someone should no longer have access, remove them in Settings; you can also regenerate the invite code, which stops the old one working.

Administrative access

A small number of authorized Homeful administrators (the founders operating the service) can access limited account and household data through an internal admin system, for support, security, subscription management, and fraud-prevention purposes. This is restricted to: email addresses; your household's name and the nicknames its members chose; account and household creation dates; membership and subscription/premium status; aggregate usage statistics such as feature-usage counts and last-active dates; app version and platform; and system logs (notifications, background jobs, AI usage counts and ratings).

Administrators do not see the content of your grocery lists, to-dos, calendar events, expense descriptions, AI conversation text, or pet names and photos — that data remains visible only to your household's members.

Where access is granted, administrators can take limited support actions: granting or revoking temporary premium access, disabling an account that violates our Terms, and sending service-wide announcements. Every administrative action is recorded in an audit log (who, what, and when).

International data transfers

Homeful is used internationally. Some of our service providers, including OpenAI, may process data outside Switzerland or the European Economic Area, including in the United States. Where this happens, we rely on the safeguards required by applicable law (such as standard contractual clauses) to protect your data.

Storage & security

Data is stored with Supabase and protected by access rules so that only members of a household can read or change that household's data. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable technical measures to protect your information.

Account & data deletion

You can delete your account at any time from Settings → Delete Account. This removes your login and your membership of the household immediately.

Because a household is shared, its content belongs to everyone in it: leaving does not delete the lists, expenses or pet records the household created together, and the remaining members keep them. Once the last member leaves or deletes their account, the household and everything in it — including pet photos in file storage — is deleted.

Deleting the app from your phone does not delete your account, and neither does revoking Sign in with Apple or Google in your device or account settings — that removes a way of signing in, not the account itself. The data lives on our servers, not only on the device. Use Settings → Delete Account, or email homeful.app@outlook.com to request deletion or ask what data we hold.

How long we keep data

Household content — lists, to-dos, calendar events, expenses, pet records — is kept for as long as the household exists, because it is the app: your expense history is what the balances are calculated from, and your pet's weight log is only useful over years. You can delete any individual entry at any time, and deleting it in the app deletes it from our database.

Homeful AI conversations are not stored on our servers. The chat is held in the app for your current session and is gone when the app restarts. What we do keep is the content-free usage row described under "Data we collect" — no message text.

When a household is deleted, its data is removed from the live database straight away. Encrypted backups taken by our database provider before that point roll off on their own schedule, so a deleted household can persist in backups for a short period afterwards before ageing out; we do not restore from backups to recover deleted data.

Operational records are deleted automatically on a daily schedule: privacy-safe usage analytics and the content-free AI usage rows after 12 months, notification delivery receipts and background-job records after 90 days, and invite-code attempt counters after 7 days. Records of administrative actions are kept longer, because they are how we can show what an administrator did to an account. If you want your analytics removed sooner, email homeful.app@outlook.com.

Children

Homeful is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 13 (or the minimum age for consent to data processing where you live, if that is higher). We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has created an account, contact homeful.app@outlook.com and we will delete it.

Your rights (GDPR / Swiss data protection)

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to: access the personal data we hold about you; correct inaccurate data; request deletion; object to or request restriction of certain processing; and receive a copy of your data in a portable format, where applicable. To exercise any of these rights, email homeful.app@outlook.com and we'll respond as required by applicable law.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as Homeful evolves. We'll update the "last updated" date below when we do. Continued use of the app after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data?

Tamas Ortenszky Rainlihöhe 31, 6048 Horw, Switzerland homeful.app@outlook.com

If you are in the EU or EEA and think we have not handled your data properly, you also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority. In Switzerland, that is the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC).

This policy is provided for transparency and is not a substitute for formal legal advice.