Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 26, 2026

Zap Cooking LLC ("Zap Cooking," "we," "our," or "us") respects your privacy and is committed to transparency about how information is handled when you use our website, mobile applications, and related services (collectively, the "Service").

Zap Cooking is built on decentralized technology and is designed to minimize the collection and retention of personal data. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and your choices.

1. Information We Collect

1.1 Information You Provide or Publish

Zap Cooking does not require or collect email addresses, real names, phone numbers, or traditional account credentials for general use of the Service.

Users interact with the Service using decentralized identifiers and cryptographic key pairs provided by the Nostr protocol. Any content you choose to publish — including recipes, comments, images, profile information, marketplace listings, and product descriptions — is user-generated and controlled by you.

Most content you create is published directly to Nostr relays and is not stored on Zap Cooking servers. There are two exceptions. When you use an AI feature, the content you submit passes through our servers and is forwarded to our AI provider. And we hold a small set of records against your public key — described in "What we hold against your public key" below.

If you contact us directly (for example, via email to support@zap.cooking), we may receive and retain your email address, name, and the content of your communication for the purpose of responding to your inquiry.

1.2 Payment Information

If you purchase a membership, boost, sponsorship, promoted listing, or other paid feature, your payment is processed by a third-party payment provider. Currently, we use:

Stripe for credit card and subscription billing
Lightning payment services for Bitcoin/Lightning transactions

Zap Cooking does not directly collect or store your full credit card number, bank account number, or wallet private keys. Stripe may collect billing information, including your name, email address, card details, and billing address, in accordance with Stripe's own privacy policy. Lightning payments are processed through third-party wallets and payment infrastructure that Zap Cooking does not control.

We may receive limited transaction-related information from payment providers, such as confirmation of payment, transaction identifiers, payment method type, billing country, and subscription status, as necessary to confirm payment, fulfill features, maintain records, prevent fraud, and operate the Service.

1.3 Marketplace Activity

If you use The Market to create listings or communicate with other users about potential transactions, the following applies:

Listings are published via the Nostr protocol and are publicly accessible on decentralized relays. Listing content (product descriptions, images, pricing) is user-generated and is not stored on centralized servers operated by Zap Cooking. Market listings may include an optional location indicating where an item ships from. If you provide one, it is published publicly with the listing.
Messaging between buyers and sellers uses Nostr direct messages routed through Nostr relays. Direct messages are end-to-end encrypted. We cannot read them, and neither can the relays that carry them. Media you attach to a direct message is encrypted before it is uploaded, so the media server stores content it cannot read. Group chat messages are not encrypted and are visible to the operator of the relay hosting the group.
Payments between users are conducted directly between parties using third-party wallets and payment tools. Zap Cooking does not process, hold, or have visibility into user-to-user payments.

If you are required to provide documentation to Zap Cooking in connection with marketplace participation (such as identification, permits, or compliance documentation as described in our Terms of Service), we will retain that documentation only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purpose for which it was collected.

1.4 Technical and Analytics Information

Zap Cooking uses Cloudflare for hosting, content delivery, and analytics.

Cloudflare may process limited technical information in connection with delivering the Service, including IP addresses, browser type, device type, pages visited, referring URLs, and approximate geographic location. This information is used in aggregate for performance monitoring, security, and analytics purposes.

Zap Cooking does not use tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or third-party advertising networks. We do not build user profiles for targeted advertising.

Cloudflare may set limited technical cookies necessary for security and performance (such as bot detection and DDoS protection). For more information, see Cloudflare's privacy policy.

Cloudflare's website analytics — including pages visited, referring URLs, and browser type — apply to browsing on zap.cooking and not to the mobile applications.

Requests the mobile applications make to our servers also pass through Cloudflare, which processes IP addresses and request metadata in order to route traffic and protect against abuse. We do not use this information to determine or store your location, and the mobile applications do not request location access from your device.

1.5 On-Device Storage

The Service stores information on your device — application preferences in the mobile apps, and browser local storage on the website — to keep settings such as your theme, session state, and wallet connection details. This information stays on your device and is not sent to us.

Some settings are not only local. Your relay list and your mute and block lists are published to Nostr as events signed with your own key, which means they are stored on relays, including ours. Your private key stays on your device unless you choose to use our optional Google Drive backup, described in its own section below. Protecting your key with a passkey does not send it anywhere — see section 8.

1.6 What we hold against your public key

We maintain a small set of records keyed to your Nostr public key:

Your membership status and tier, including Cook+
Your AI credit balance and usage counts
A reference to any payment you have made, so we can activate your membership

These contain no name, email address, phone number, card number, or billing address, because we do not collect those. You can request deletion of all of them at any time — see our Account and Data Deletion page.

2. How We Use Information

Information is used only to:

Provide, operate, and maintain the Service
Process payments and fulfill paid features, memberships, sponsorships, and promoted listings
Enable community interaction, content sharing, and marketplace features
Maintain performance, reliability, security, and fraud prevention
Respond to user inquiries and support requests
Enforce our Terms of Service and other policies
Comply with applicable legal obligations
Improve the Service based on aggregated, non-identifying usage data

Zap Cooking does not sell personal data. We do not use personal data for targeted advertising, behavioral profiling, or user tracking across third-party websites or services.

3. Decentralized Data and Public Content

Zap Cooking leverages the Nostr protocol, which means:

Content you choose to publish — including recipes, comments, profile information, and marketplace listings — may be publicly accessible on decentralized relays operated by Zap Cooking and by independent third parties.
Once published to decentralized infrastructure, content may be copied, cached, indexed, archived, or retained by third-party relays, clients, search engines, and other systems beyond Zap Cooking's control. Complete deletion may not be possible.
Marketplace listings are inherently public and commercial in nature. Product descriptions, images, and pricing published via the Nostr protocol may be indexed or cached by third-party services.
Zap Cooking does not control third-party relays or their data retention, moderation, or privacy practices.

You are responsible for managing your cryptographic keys and for the content you choose to make public.

4. Community-Managed Relays

Zap Cooking operates certain community-managed relays, including:

The Pantry (pantry.zap.cooking) — a NIP-29 group relay for public group chats

Content published to these relays is transmitted by users and stored on relay infrastructure operated or supported by Zap Cooking. This content is generally public (or group-public in the case of NIP-29 groups) and is subject to community moderation.

Zap Cooking may access, review, moderate, preserve, or remove content on relays we operate where necessary to enforce our Terms of Service, respond to reports, address safety or legal concerns, or comply with applicable law.

For relays we do not operate, we have no ability to access, moderate, or remove content.

5. Sharing of Information

Zap Cooking does not sell, rent, or trade personal information to third parties.

Third-party services that receive information in connection with the Service:

Nostr relays. Content you publish — recipes, posts, comments, reactions, profile information, group messages, and Market listings — is transmitted to Nostr relays. Some are operated by us; most are not. The application connects by default to independently operated relays including nos.lol, purplepag.es, relay.primal.net, and nostr.wine. Recipes and longform posts are also mirrored to pantry.zap.cooking, which we operate, as is anything you publish from the members tab. You can change your general relay list in the application's relay settings, but that list is not the whole picture. Some relays are built into the application and stay in use whichever list you set — currently including purplepag.es, nos.lol, and nostr.wine — to look up where other people publish and to fetch their profile information. The application then connects to the relays those people have chosen, and to any relay named in a profile link inside content you open. Which relays those are depends on whose recipes and posts you view, not on your settings. Publishing to third-party relays is the normal operation of the service, not an exception, and content sent to a relay we do not operate is outside our control.
Feature-specific relays. Some features connect to additional relays that are not part of your relay list and are not user-configurable. Longform articles are published to and discovered through eden.nostr.land, relay.noswhere.com, and antiprimal.net. Encrypted drafts are stored on eden.nostr.land unless your account publishes its own draft relay list. Zap totals and top-zapper lists are read from offchain.pub and relay.snort.social. Market listings are published to relay.nostr.net. If you use the follow-list recovery tool, it searches archival relays including nostr.mom and relay.noswhere.com, and republishes your restored follow list to them.
What relays learn when you read. Reading and searching send requests to relays, not only publishing. Opening a recipe asks a set of relays built into the app — currently including nos.lol, relay.primal.net, nostr.wine, offchain.pub, and relay.snort.social — for that recipe's zaps, whether or not you are signed in. Searching sends the text you type to a third party: recipe search goes to search.nostrarchives.com, and people search goes to Primal's cache service at cache1.primal.net and cache2.primal.net, which also serves the main feed, longform reads, and profile pages. If our own counting service is unavailable, your browser asks relays directly for likes and comment counts. The built-in relays used to look up where other people publish also receive the accounts whose posts you are viewing, whether or not you are signed in. None of these are changed by your relay settings. Mention autocomplete works differently — it searches whichever relays you have configured. Requests for zaps, counts, and cached feed data are not signed and do not include your public key. Some relays require sign-in before they will answer; where that happens and you are signed in, the app authenticates with your public key. Our servers also query relays on your behalf, for example to build engagement counts; in those cases the relay sees our server rather than you.
Blossom media servers. Images and video you upload are stored on Blossom servers, which are operated independently of Zap Cooking. The default is blossom.primal.net; you can change it in settings. We do not host your media.
OpenAI. Content you submit to our AI features is sent to OpenAI for processing. See "AI features" below.
Giphy. When you search for a GIF, your typed search term is sent to api.giphy.com. We do not send your search terms anywhere else.
Google. Optional, only if you use the encrypted key backup feature. See "Google Sign-In and Drive backup" below.
Stripe. Card payment processing.
Cloudflare. Hosting, content delivery, security, and website analytics for zap.cooking.

We may also share limited information in the following circumstances:

Legal compliance. We may disclose information if required by law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request, or if we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of Zap Cooking, our users, or the public.
Safety and enforcement. We may share information with law enforcement, regulators, or other third parties where we believe it is necessary to address fraud, abuse, safety concerns, child safety concerns, or violations of our Terms of Service.
Business transfers. If Zap Cooking is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale of assets, information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will provide notice if your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

6. AI features

Zap Cooking offers AI-assisted features including Cheffy, Sous Chef recipe extraction, note review, and Nourish scoring. They are optional. If you do not use them, none of your content is sent to OpenAI.

What is sent. When you use one of these features, the content you submit — recipe text, a URL, an image, or your message to Cheffy — is transmitted to our servers and forwarded to OpenAI for processing. Your Nostr public key is associated with the request so we can apply your membership entitlement and credit balance.

Nourish results are published publicly. When a recipe is scored, the resulting scores, suggested improvements, and ingredient signals are published to Nostr relays, including relays we do not operate. This is how Nourish scores appear across the network. Like anything published to Nostr, these results are public and permanent, and we cannot retract them from relays we do not control.

Cheffy conversations are not stored on our servers. Your conversation history is held on your device and sent with each request. We do not keep a copy.

What we retain. Your AI credit balance and usage counts, keyed to your public key.

Error logs. When an AI request fails to process correctly, our systems log the response so we can diagnose the failure. These logs can contain the content of that response. They are held in our infrastructure logging for a limited period and then deleted automatically.

OpenAI's handling. OpenAI processes this content under its API terms. As of the date of this policy, OpenAI states that data submitted through its API is not used to train its models, and that API inputs and outputs are deleted after 30 days unless it is legally required to retain them.

7. Google Sign-In and Drive backup

Zap Cooking offers an optional encrypted backup of your Nostr private key to your own Google Drive.

If you choose to use it, you sign in with Google. We read a single value from the sign-in response — the stable identifier Google assigns to your account — which is used only as input to the encryption of your backup. We do not receive, store, or transmit your Google email address, name, or profile information.

The backup is written to an application-specific folder in your own Google Drive. It is encrypted before it leaves your device. We cannot read it, and we cannot see any other content in your Drive. The file belongs to you, and deleting it is done through Google Drive — see our Account and Data Deletion page.

If you do not use this feature, no Google integration occurs.

8. Passkey protection

On the Zap Cooking website you can optionally protect your Nostr private key with a passkey — Face ID, Touch ID, or your device's screen lock. The key is encrypted on your device, and the encrypted copy stays on your device.

Turning this on does not send your key to us. The encrypted copy is written to your browser's local storage and nowhere else.

There is no recovery through us. If you lose access to your passkey and have no other copy of your key, the key is gone. Keep a separate copy — the backup file or the key you saved when you created your account.

9. Crash reports

The Android application can send a crash report when it encounters an error.

This is off unless you allow it. Each report requires your explicit confirmation before it is sent — nothing is transmitted automatically.

Reports are sent as encrypted Nostr direct messages to our development team, routed through the relays relay.0xchat.com and relay.utxo.one/chat. A report contains diagnostic information about the failure and is associated with your public key.

10. Data Security

We take reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect the Service and the limited information we process. These measures include encryption in transit (HTTPS), access controls, and security features provided by our infrastructure providers.

In the Android application, unencrypted connections are blocked at the operating-system level. All connections to relays, media servers, and our own services use encrypted transport, and the application cannot be configured to use a plaintext connection.

However, no method of transmission or storage is completely secure. Decentralized systems rely on user-controlled cryptographic keys, and the security of your identity and content ultimately depends on how you manage your keys, devices, and wallet credentials.

11. Data Retention

Except where described in "AI features" and "What we hold against your public key," we do not retain your user-generated content on our servers. Content published through the Nostr protocol is stored on decentralized relays and may persist on those relays even if you stop using the Service.

For content on relays we operate (The Pantry), we retain content in accordance with our relay operations and moderation practices. We may remove content from our relays, but we cannot remove content from third-party relays.

Payment-related records (transaction confirmations, subscription status, billing metadata) are retained for as long as reasonably necessary for accounting, fraud prevention, legal compliance, and dispute resolution purposes.

Support communications are retained for as long as reasonably necessary to resolve the inquiry and for our records.

12. Children's Privacy

The Service is available to users aged 13 and older. The Market (marketplace features) is restricted to users aged 18 and older. The Service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13.

If we become aware that a user under 13 has accessed the Service, we will take reasonable steps to restrict that user's access to Zap Cooking-operated components and delete any personal information we may have inadvertently collected.

If you believe a child under 13 has used the Service, please contact us at support@zap.cooking.

For our policies on child sexual abuse and exploitation, including how to report it and how we respond, see our Child Safety Standards.

13. Third-Party Wallets and Payment Services

The Service may integrate with or reference third-party wallet providers (such as Spark by Breez) and payment infrastructure for Bitcoin and Lightning transactions. Zap Cooking does not operate, control, or take responsibility for any third-party wallet or payment service.

Your use of any third-party wallet or payment service is governed by that provider's own terms of service and privacy policy. We encourage you to review the privacy practices of any wallet or payment provider you use.

Zap Cooking does not have access to your wallet private keys, seed phrases, or the content of your Lightning or Bitcoin transactions conducted through third-party tools.

14. Sponsored Placements and Boosted Content

Zap Cooking may offer paid partnerships, sponsored placements, featured listings, boosted recipes, promoted marketplace listings, and other promotional features within the Service.

These features allow creators, brands, sellers, and other participants to pay for increased visibility within Zap Cooking-operated components.

Zap Cooking does not use personal data for targeted advertising or user profiling in connection with these features. Sponsored and promoted placements are based on purchased placement, timing, platform design, content category, and other non-personal factors.

If a payment is made for a promotional feature, Zap Cooking may process limited transaction-related information necessary to confirm payment, fulfill placement, maintain records, prevent abuse, resolve disputes, and support operation of the Service.

Promotional content will be labeled with clear disclosure language such as "Promoted," "Boosted," "Sponsored," or similar wording.

Zap Cooking does not provide sponsors or advertisers with users' personal information.

15. International Use

The Service is operated from the United States. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you do so at your own initiative and are responsible for compliance with applicable local laws. By using the Service, you acknowledge that information may be processed and stored in the United States and other jurisdictions where our service providers operate.

You can request deletion of the records we hold against your public key at any time — see our Account and Data Deletion page. We do not currently offer a full suite of data subject access tools under non-U.S. privacy laws (such as GDPR access or portability requests), but we are committed to handling privacy inquiries in good faith. For other privacy-related requests, contact us at support@zap.cooking.

16. Your Choices

Content. You control what content you publish through the Service. Once published to decentralized relays, complete deletion may not be possible.
Local storage. You can clear on-device storage and cookies through your browser or device settings.
Wallet connections. You can disconnect or change wallet providers at any time.
Memberships. You can cancel paid memberships through the account settings we provide.
Communications. If you contact us via email, you can request deletion of your support communications.
Relay connections. You can choose which relays to connect to in the Zap Cooking application's relay settings.
Account and data deletion. You can request deletion of the records we hold against your public key — see our Account and Data Deletion page.

17. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will post the updated policy and revise the "Last updated" date. We may also provide notice through the Service or by other reasonable electronic means.

Your continued use of the Service after the effective date of any changes constitutes acceptance of the updated Privacy Policy.

18. Contact

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or Zap Cooking's privacy practices, contact us at:

Website: https://zap.cooking
Email: support@zap.cooking