Privacy Policy

The app stores your email address, the plants you add, their photos, and when you last watered, fed or fertilised them. It shares that with the other people in your household, because that is the point of a household. It does not track you, does not know where you are, and contains no analytics or advertising of any kind. You can delete everything from inside the app, immediately, without asking us.

The rest of this explains that properly.

Your email address and password. Needed to sign in. Passwords are handled by our authentication provider and stored hashed; nobody at Barely Thriving can see or recover yours.

Your plants. The name you give a plant, its species, which room it lives in, its care intervals, and any care notes.

Photos of your plants, if you add them. Optional — the app works without.

Your care history. Each time you record watering, feeding or fertilising: what you did, when, and which member of the household did it.

Your display name and household membership. The name you chose when you created or joined a household, and which household you belong to.

An account identifier. A random identifier that links the above to your account.

We collect this because the app cannot do its job without it. There is no secondary use: we do not analyse it, profile you with it, sell it, or use it for advertising.

• Location. The app never asks for location permission. Photos are re-encoded when you crop them, which removes the GPS data cameras normally embed. We have checked this on the photos in the system and found no location data in any of them.
• Contacts, calendar, health data, financial data, or your address book.
• Analytics, crash-reporting, advertising or attribution. There are no third-party tracking tools in the app. Nothing about your usage is measured or reported anywhere.
• A tracking identifier. Nothing about you is linked with data from other apps or websites, so the app does not ask for tracking permission.

Other members of your household. Everyone in a household can see its plants, photos, rooms, care history and the display names of the other members. Care history shows who did what. This is deliberate — a shared plant list that hides who last watered something would be useless.

Anyone with your household's invite code can join it. You can generate a new code at any time from Settings, which stops the old one working.

If you leave a household, or delete your account while others remain, your care history stays so the record makes sense — but it stops carrying your name.

We use three services to run the app. We do not sell your data to anyone, and none of these are advertising companies.

Supabase hosts the database, file storage and sign-in. Everything above is stored there. Supabase processes it on our instructions and for no other purpose.

Perenual provides plant species information. When you search for a species, the text you typed is sent to Perenual to get results back. Nothing else goes with it — not your account, not your plant's name, not your device address. The request is made by our server, not your phone.

Google (Gemini) provides care intervals. When a species is added, its common and botanical names are sent to Google to ask how often that kind of plant needs watering and feeding. For example: "Swiss cheese plant (Monstera deliciosa)". The name you gave your plant is never sent, nor is anything identifying you. As with Perenual, the request comes from our server rather than your device.

Neither Perenual nor Google receives anything that identifies you, and neither sees your IP address.

Your account data and photos are stored in West Europe (London).

Perenual and Google operate in the United States, so the species and search text described above are transferred there. That transfer is covered by the standard safeguards those providers offer for international transfers. No personal data is included in either request.

Care reminders are scheduled on your device by your device. Nothing about your plants or your schedule is sent to us, to Apple, or to anyone else in order to deliver them. If you turn reminders off in Settings, they stop entirely.

Until you delete it. We do not automatically delete inactive accounts.

You can delete your account from Settings → Account → Delete account. It happens immediately: no grace period, no need to email us.

• If you are the last person in your household, the household goes too — every plant, photo and care log in it.
• If other people remain, they keep the plants and the history, but your name is removed from it. Your account, email and password are deleted.

Deleted data cannot be recovered. Backups are overwritten on our provider's normal cycle.

If you enter your email address on the waitlist form, we store that address so we can tell you when the app opens up. It is used for that and nothing else, and you can ask us to remove it at any time by emailing [email protected].

The website does not use advertising or analytics cookies.

If you are in the UK or the EU, you have the right to ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive it in a portable format. The quickest route to deletion is the button in the app. For anything else, email [email protected] and we will respond within one month.

Our lawful basis for processing is the performance of our contract with you — that is, providing the app you signed up for.

If you think we have handled your data badly, please tell us first so we can put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Barely Thriving is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will remove it.

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who we share it with, we will update this page and change the date at the top. During the beta, we will also mention it in the release notes.

[email protected]