Privacy Policy

The short version

GrowSpot helps you care for your plants. We only collect what we need to do that, we never sell your data, and there are no ads. Everything you add is yours — you can edit or delete it any time, including deleting your whole account from Settings.

This policy covers both the GrowSpot app and this website, including the free spot checker. The website part is further down — it collects far less, because there's no account.

What we collect

• Your account email, through Google or Apple Sign-In.
• The plants, spots, photos, notes, and care history you add.
• A rough home area you set — we round it before saving — used only to fetch local weather.
• A device token and basic device info, such as your device model, so we can send the reminders you turn on.
• If you send us feedback, your message along with your app version and platform, so we can look into it.
• Your subscription status, handled by our payments provider.

How we use it

To match plants to your spots, show local weather, send the care reminders you've enabled, and keep your garden in sync across sessions. That's it — we don't use your data for advertising and we don't sell or rent it to anyone.

Where it's stored

Your data and photos are stored securely with our backend provider (Supabase). Weather is fetched through our own server so your location is never shared directly with the weather provider. Our providers may process and store this data on servers outside your country.

Photos you take

When you scan a plant to identify it, the photo is sent once to our plant-identification provider, Google Gemini, and we don't keep it. If you tell us that guess wasn't right, we may send the same photo once more to a second identification provider, Pl@ntNet, to try again. We do save the identification result — the plant names we matched and the date — so your scan history works. We only keep the photo itself if you choose to add that plant to your garden. When you take a photo to check how a plant is doing, that photo is sent once to our plant-analysis provider, Google Gemini, to analyze it, and we don't keep it.

Services we rely on

Each handles only what's needed for its part, under its own privacy terms:

• Google or Apple Sign-In (login)
• Google Gemini (plant identification, and analyzing the photo when you check how a plant is doing)
• Pl@ntNet (backup plant identification, used only if Gemini's first guess isn't right)
• OpenWeather (weather, via our server)
• Expo push (notifications — the reminder text we send may include your plant's name)
• Our payments provider (subscriptions)
• Cloudflare (hosting for this website and the server that relays weather)

This website, and the free spot checker

The website has no accounts and no sign-in, so almost none of the above applies to it. Specifically:

• No cookies, no analytics, no ad trackers. Nothing is stored in your browser and nothing follows you off the site.
• Location is optional, and it's rounded before it leaves your browser. If you tap "Use my location" in the spot checker, your browser hands us your position and we immediately round it to roughly an 11 km area. We use that rounded area to look up local weather and to work out where the sun sits at your latitude. We don't save it, and we never put it in a link.
• Weather comes through our own server, so the weather provider only ever sees that rounded area — never a precise position, and never anything that identifies you.
• The compass is optional too. If you use it, the reading becomes a single direction — the same value you'd get by dragging the needle yourself — and it travels with your check.
• What a shared link contains: the plant, and how you described the spot (indoor or out, the light, distance from a window, airflow, direction), plus the verdict. It never contains your location.
• Plant photos are loaded by your browser from our image storage (Supabase), which sees your IP address as it would for any image on the web.
• Server logs. Our host, Cloudflare, keeps the usual short-lived request logs (IP address, page, time) for reliability and abuse protection. We don't build profiles from them.

The spot checker doesn't ask for your name, your email, or anything else about you — and there's nowhere on this website to give us any of it.

Your choices

You can edit or remove any plant, spot, or photo in the app. Deleting your account from Settings permanently removes your account and all of its data — your spots, plants, photos, and history. There's no undo.

On the website there's nothing to delete: closing the tab is the end of it. If you'd rather not share your location with the spot checker, just don't tap the button — you'll still get a light-only read, labelled as one.

Children

GrowSpot isn't directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect data from them.

Changes & contact

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, we'll update it here. Questions? Reach us at [email protected].