Privacy Policy

Who’s responsible for your data

Verdalia is operated by Artyom Balamutyuk, who is the data controller for the information described here; you can reach us at support@verdalia.app. Paid subscriptions are sold by Fundacja Rozwoju Przedsiębiorczości "Twój StartUp" as merchant of record — the foundation issues your invoice and is the controller for the billing and accounting records it is legally required to keep. If your question is about an invoice, we’ll route it to them.

What we collect

Your account email and, optionally, a display name — plus the basic profile Google or Apple confirms to us, if you choose to sign in that way. The plants, locations, photos, notes and care history you add. Subscription and payment records: which plan you’re on, when it renews, and the amount, currency and status of each payment — card numbers never reach us, they go straight to the payment provider. A device push token and a unique install id for this app, if you turn on push notifications in the mobile app. And basic technical data — request logs, error reports and product-analytics events — needed to run, secure and debug the service. That includes your IP address, the approximate location our analytics and error-monitoring providers derive from it, and the country your payment provider reports for your purchase. When you ask us to fill in a plant location from your device, we use only the latitude — your device also reports the longitude, but the app discards it on the device, before anything reaches us.

How we use it

To provide the app: show your plants, work out care reminders, sync across your devices and keep the service running. To manage your subscription and payments, and to send transactional email such as billing notices and password resets, plus — only if you’ve opted in — the weekly digest and occasional product emails about news and announcements; every product email includes an unsubscribe link and both can be turned off in Settings at any time. To keep the service secure and diagnose faults. And, in aggregate, to see which features get used so we can improve them. We don’t use your plant data or photos for advertising, we don’t sell them, and we don’t use them to train AI models.

Our legal basis

Where the GDPR applies: we process your account, plant and care data to perform our contract with you (Article 6(1)(b)). We keep billing and invoice records to meet legal accounting and tax obligations (Article 6(1)(c)). We use technical logs, error reports and aggregate analytics under our legitimate interest in a secure, working and improving service (Article 6(1)(f)) — you can object to this, see “Your rights and choices” below. Where we ask for your consent, such as push notifications, the weekly digest or product emails, that’s Article 6(1)(a), and you can withdraw it at any time in Settings.

Where it’s stored

Verdalia runs in the EU: the application is hosted in Frankfurt, the database is in the EU (eu-central-1), and product analytics go to an EU-region service. Your photos are kept in S3-compatible object storage; everything else lives in the database. Encrypted nightly database backups are kept with the same object-storage provider, also in the EU (Frankfurt), and are deleted after 30 days. Some providers listed below are companies established outside the EEA, or may store or access limited data outside it — where that happens, the transfer relies on that provider’s data-processing terms and on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.

Who else processes your data

We use a small set of service providers (“subprocessors”) to run Verdalia. Each one only processes what its job requires, acts on our instructions, and may not use your data for its own purposes. As of the date at the top of this page, they are:

• Fly.io — application hosting in Frankfurt (EU), including the server that runs our own plant-recognition model.
• Neon — the managed PostgreSQL database holding your account, plants and care history (EU, eu-central-1).
• Tigris — S3-compatible object storage for your plant photos and our encrypted database backups (kept in the EU, Frankfurt).
• GitHub (Microsoft) — runs our nightly database backup job; the backup is encrypted before it is stored, and the job’s working copy is discarded when the run ends.
• Resend — delivery of our email: transactional messages such as billing notices and password resets, plus the weekly digest and product emails if you’ve opted in.
• Porkbun — our domain registrar, which forwards email you send to our contact address on to the mailbox we read.
• PostHog (EU Cloud) — product analytics. Events are tied to your account identifier rather than your email, and session recording is switched off.
• Better Stack — error monitoring and uptime checks. Our error reporting is configured not to attach personal data.
• Stripe — card payment processing, if you pay by card. Stripe receives your card details directly; we never see them.
• RevenueCat, Inc. — in-app purchase and subscription management for the mobile apps, if you subscribe through the App Store or Google Play.
• Google and Apple — if you choose to sign in with them, to verify that sign-in.
• Expo, and through it Apple’s and Google’s push services — delivery of push notifications to your device, if you turn them on in the mobile app. A notification can name the plant it is about.

Photos and plant identification

Your plant photos are stored privately and shown to you through short-lived links. Search-by-photo runs on our own server inside our own infrastructure — your photo is not sent to any third-party AI service, and it is not used to train anything. Your photos are not sent to an AI assistant you connect either: it can see whether a plant has a photo, never the photo itself. The reference pictures in the species library are a separate, public set of images of species; they are not your photos.

AI assistants you connect

You can connect Verdalia to an AI assistant you already use, such as Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Le Chat. Once you approve the connection, the assistant can ask Verdalia for your data while you talk to it, and we send it what it asks for — because you asked us to, as part of providing the service to you (Article 6(1)(b)). What reaches the assistant is received by the company that provides it — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral or another — as an independent controller, not as our subprocessor: it handles that data under its own terms and privacy policy, which also decide how long your conversations are kept and whether they are used to improve its models. Depending on what it asks for, the assistant can receive:

• Your account: display name, email address, plan and trial end date, time zone, language, reminder, misting and quiet-hours preferences, and how many of today’s assistant requests are left.
• Your plants: name, species, location (with the room’s spot and light exposure, and how many plants it holds), notes, the date you got each one, its care settings, upcoming and overdue care, and whether it has a photo — never the photo itself. For a plant in Past plants: when and why it left, and who you passed it on to, if you wrote that down.
• Plants someone shares with you, in the same detail as your own apart from their location — including that person’s notes, care settings and care history for the plant — and that person’s display name.
• Care history and reminders: each care entry with its date, note, skip reason and soil reading, whether a person, the assistant or a device logged it, and why each reminder falls due when it does.
• Alerts about your plants and your account, with the names of the plants and devices they concern.
• Collection statistics: how many plants and species you have by location, genus and rarity, your rarest species, your oldest and newest plants and their average age, how many are thriving or need attention, care streaks and badges.
• Species-library data, including any private species you’ve added and your own changes to a species’ care settings and notes.

What we keep, and disconnecting an assistant

We see only the requests your AI assistant makes — never your conversation with it. While your account exists, we keep a record of each connection — the app’s name and web address, the access it was given, and when it was approved, last used and revoked — and approving or revoking a connection is also written to our security log. Your active connections are listed in your data export. For each request we record the tool used, whether it worked, how long it took and which app made it — not what was asked or returned. Care the assistant logs is marked “Logged by assistant” in Verdalia, and you can correct or remove it in the app. Care schedules it adjusts can be changed back there too, and a reminder it postponed is cleared as soon as you log that care; other care settings it changes, such as light needs or care notes, can currently only be changed back through the assistant. Plants and rooms it adds or changes carry no “Logged by assistant” marker in the app, but we record each such change — which change it was, naming the plant or room, when it happened and which app made it — against your account, and delete those records when your account is deleted. You can edit those plants and rooms again in the app — notes it replaced aren’t kept — and restore a retired plant from Past plants. The assistant can retire a plant (it moves to Past plants with its history) but can never delete a plant, a room or a photo. Whether the assistant asks you before it makes a change depends on the AI app, not on us: some apps, ChatGPT in particular, have been seen making changes without asking first. You can disconnect an assistant at any time in Settings › Connected apps, and it loses access on its very next request. Disconnecting doesn’t reach data the assistant has already received — that stays with its provider, under its terms.

Sharing with other people

We don’t sell your data and we don’t share it with third parties for their own marketing; we disclose data to authorities only where the law requires it. Inside the app, you control sharing: if you invite someone to help care for a plant, they can see and log care for that plant while the invitation is active, and you can revoke it at any time. If you switch on a public collection link, anyone holding that link can see what it shows until you switch it off. If a Verdalia user enters your email address to invite you to help care for their plants, we use that address only to send and manage that invitation — our legitimate interest in providing the sharing feature — and the invitation email itself tells you this. If you don’t accept, you won’t receive any further email from us unless that user invites you again, though the address remains part of their sharing history. If you connect an AI assistant, we send it the data it asks for on your behalf — see “AI assistants you connect” above. Someone you share a plant with can do the same: if they connect an AI assistant, it can receive your display name and the same details about that plant as about one of their own, apart from its location — its notes, care settings and care history included, and its Past-plants details if you move it to Past plants while it’s shared.

How long we keep it

We keep your account and its content for as long as your account exists, so your care history stays useful to you. Billing and invoice records are kept for as long as accounting and tax law requires the seller to keep them, even after an account is closed. Technical logs, error reports and analytics events are kept only for the retention window each provider applies, which is far shorter than the life of an account. If you stop using Verdalia for a while we pause the weekly digest rather than keep emailing you. We also keep encrypted nightly backups of the database, used only to recover the service after an accident. Each backup is deleted automatically after 30 days, so anything you delete is gone from our backups within 30 days too.

Your rights and choices

You can edit or delete any plant, photo or note at any time — deleting a plant also deletes its stored photo files; if our storage doesn’t confirm a deletion right away, which is rare, the file is no longer reachable from the app immediately — we automatically keep retrying behind the scenes until the deletion is confirmed. Notification and language preferences are in Settings. Where the GDPR applies you also have the right to access your data, correct it, have it erased, restrict or object to how we use it, and receive a copy in a portable form. You can download a copy of your data or delete your account any time in Settings → Account — deletion is immediate and permanent, and we keep only the billing records the law requires (plus encrypted backups that roll off within 30 days). Prefer email? Write to support@verdalia.app instead and we’ll action it within 30 days. If you think we’ve handled your data badly, you’re entitled to complain to your local data-protection authority.

Changes

We may update this policy as the service grows. Changes are reflected in the “Last updated” date above, and where a change materially affects how we use your data we’ll tell you by email.

Contact

Privacy questions, or want your data exported or deleted? Reach us at support@verdalia.app.