Terms of Service

ChefsBook ("ChefsBook", "we", "us") operates this service. You can reach us at support@chefsbk.app.

By creating an account or using ChefsBook, you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you don't agree, please don't use ChefsBook.

• You must be 13 or older. ChefsBook is not for children under 13.
• If you are between 13 and the age of majority where you live, a parent or guardian must agree to these terms on your behalf.
• On a Family plan, the account holder is responsible for everyone they add — including any minors — and for what those people do here.
• One account per person. Use a real email address you can access, keep your password to yourself, and tell us promptly if someone else gets into your account.

We decide who cooks here. We may decline to open an account, and we may end someone's access, at our discretion — including where we believe a person is here to cause harm, has been removed before, or is trying to get around an earlier removal. We are not obliged to explain that decision in advance.

• ChefsBook has a free tier and paid plans (Chef, Family, Pro). What each includes — how many recipes, cookbooks, shopping lists and photos, and whether importing, AI, sharing, meal planning, PDF export and cookbook printing are available — is shown on the pricing page and enforced in the app.
• Paid plans renew automatically until you cancel. You can cancel any time in Settings, and you keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for.
• Payments are handled by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.
• We may change prices or what a plan includes. We will tell you before a change affects a renewal.
• Any free trial is one per person. Creating extra accounts or abusing promotional codes to extend a trial is a breach of these terms.

Refunds

• We do not refund time you have paid for but not used, except where the law requires it.
• If we suspend or close your account because you broke these terms, you lose the remaining paid time and are not entitled to a refund.
• If we close your account for our own reasons, and you have not broken these terms, we refund the unused portion of what you paid.

Your recipes, photos, notes, cookbooks, meal plans and shopping lists belong to you. We don't claim ownership of any of it, and we don't sell it.

To run the app for you, you give us permission to store, back up, display, resize, translate and process your content — including sending it to the AI providers listed in our Privacy Policy when you use an AI feature, and laying it out for PDF export or printing when you ask for that. This permission exists so the features work, and for nothing else.

You confirm you have the right to upload what you upload. Private content stays private, with one exception we state plainly in the Privacy Policy: administrators can access data, including cooking notes, where that is needed to operate and support the app.

Making a recipe public — or sharing it by link — lets other ChefsBook users view it, save it to their own collection, scale it, cook it, print it for their own use, and create their own versions of it. That is the point of a shared recipe box, and it is what you are allowing when you publish.

You keep ownership, and credit travels with the recipe.

If you later make a public recipe private, it stops being available to new users — but copies and saves other people made while it was public may remain with them. Please don't publish anything you would not be comfortable having kept.

ChefsBook can import a recipe from a link, a photograph, a video or a bookmarks file. You are responsible for what you bring in, and for what you then do with it.

• A list of ingredients generally isn't protected by copyright. The write-up, the wording of the steps, and the photographs usually are.
• Keeping an imported recipe in your own collection is fine. Publishing someone else's writing or photographs publicly through ChefsBook is not.
• Leave credit intact. Don't remove a source author, and don't put your own name on someone else's work.

If you think something here is yours. Send a notice to our copyright agent at support@chefsbk.app (subject line: Copyright notice). Please include:

• your name, address, phone number and email;
• what the work is — a link to it, or enough description to identify it;
• where it appears on ChefsBook, with the page address;
• a statement that you believe in good faith that this use was not authorised by you, your agent, or the law;
• a statement, under penalty of perjury, that your notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorised to act for the owner;
• your signature, typed or written.

We act on complete notices promptly — usually by making the recipe private or removing it — and we tell the person who posted it. If you are that person and you think the notice was wrong, reply to us with a counter-notice saying so, under penalty of perjury, and we will pass it on; the material can be restored if the complainant does not take the matter to court. Accounts that infringe repeatedly are closed, and a copyright removal against you counts as a strike under section 8.

[Placeholder pending review: the designated agent is currently the support@chefsbk.app address above. A named agent has not yet been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, and that registration is what safe-harbour protection actually depends on.]

ChefsBook is meant to feel like a kitchen, not a comment section. The rules are short.

• Keep it family-friendly. Assume a child is reading over someone's shoulder. No sexual content, nudity, graphic violence or shock content — in recipes, photos, usernames, tags, comments or messages.
• Be decent to people. No harassment, hate, threats or pile-ons. Disagree about pineapple on pizza all you like; don't go after the person.
• Give credit. Don't pass someone else's recipe off as your own, and don't strip their name from it.
• No spam or selling. No ads, affiliate links, promo codes, phone numbers or link-dropping in recipes, comments, tags or messages.
• Be yourself. Don't impersonate another person, another cook, or ChefsBook staff.
• Leave the messages and the mail alone. Don't send unsolicited bulk or repeated messages, don't use comments, direct messages or notification emails to reach people who haven't asked to hear from you, and don't use any part of ChefsBook to send anything you wouldn't want to receive yourself.
• Nothing illegal or genuinely dangerous — including presenting an unsafe food practice as though it were safe.
• Don't misuse the AI. This one has three parts:
  • Don't use it to produce content that breaks any of the rules above. Something generated by AI is still yours, and it is judged exactly as if you had typed it.
  • Don't try to talk it into ignoring these rules or its own instructions, and don't try to extract prompts, keys or other users' content from it.
  • Don't use it for work that has nothing to do with cooking. The AI here is for recipes, kitchens and food. It is not a general-purpose assistant, and using it as one — including automating it, running it at volume, or reselling access — costs us real money per request and is a breach of these terms.
• Don't game the place. No fake likes or follows, no scraping or bulk-downloading other people's content, and no account abuse — creating extra accounts, free or paid, to get past plan limits, to claim another trial or promotional code, or to return after a suspension or removal.

Reports reach us from people using the app and from automated screening. A report from another user is a report, not a verdict — flagging something does not by itself change it. Automated screening may flag content and, in serious cases, hide it straight away pending review.

Depending on what happened, we may:

• issue a warning;
• hide a recipe, comment or tag, or remove it permanently;
• make a recipe private — for example after a copyright complaint;
• suspend commenting while the rest of the account keeps working;
• suspend the account — it drops to the free tier and paid features stop, while your content stays;
• expel the account — access ends and the account's content is hidden from everyone else;
• delete the account and its data entirely.

We may act without notice where we believe there is a risk of harm, and we can go straight to the last steps for serious behaviour. Suspension and expulsion can be reversed if we conclude we got it wrong.

If you think we made a mistake, email support@chefsbk.app and a person will look at it. As set out in section 3, an account suspended or closed for breaking these terms is not refunded.

Recipes on ChefsBook are written by people, imported from other places, and sometimes generated or completed by AI. We do not test or verify them. ChefsBook is a kitchen companion, not a food safety authority.

• Allergies and intolerances: never rely on a ChefsBook label. Dietary tags such as gluten-free, dairy-free, vegetarian or vegan are generated automatically and can be wrong. Read the full ingredient list yourself, check the original source, and check the packaging of what you actually buy.
• Cooking times and temperatures — including the timings and schedules that Cook Mode and the Sous Chef produce — are guidance, not food safety instructions. Use a thermometer, and follow your local food safety authority for safe temperatures.
• Nutrition figures are automated estimates. They are not dietary or medical advice.
• Higher-risk cooking — raw or undercooked ingredients, home canning and preserving, fermenting, curing, or foraged ingredients — should follow tested guidance from a recognised authority. ChefsBook is not one.

You are responsible for what you cook, and for what you serve to other people.

AI helps read recipes from photos and links, translate them, suggest tags, generate illustrative images and nutrition estimates, and answer questions while you cook. Doing that means sending the relevant content to AI providers outside ChefsBook — our Privacy Policy lists who they are and what each one receives. We choose providers whose terms say they do not use your content to train their models.

AI output can be wrong, incomplete or plainly odd. Treat it as a first draft and check it before you rely on it — particularly anything covered by section 9.

Content you generate with AI is still your content. You are responsible for it, and it is judged against the house rules exactly as if you had written it yourself.

These features are optional and you can switch them off in Settings at any time. Switching them off does not switch off the safety checks in section 11 — those are a different thing, and section 11 explains why.

Anything you make visible to other people is checked automatically before and after it appears — recipes you publish, comments, tags, usernames and messages. Some of those checks are simple pattern matching for spam; others use AI. They also look for misuse of the AI features themselves, and we keep operational records — usage, cost and rate limits — that let us spot abuse.

These checks are not one of the AI features you can turn off. The features in section 10 exist to help you, so they are yours to decline. The safety checks exist to protect everyone else, and asking an author's permission to check that author's own content would mean anyone could opt out of being checked simply by saying no.

So if you turn AI features off, or would rather no automated system looked at your content at all, here is exactly what that means:

• You can still use ChefsBook privately. Keep your recipes, plan meals, build shopping lists, cook, and print your own cookbooks. None of that is affected.
• You cannot use the parts other people can see — publishing recipes publicly or by link, commenting, liking, following, direct messages, or sharing with other users. We will not put unchecked content in front of other people, so those features are unavailable rather than unmoderated.

What the checks actually do is limited: they flag content for a person to look at, and in serious cases hide it immediately pending that review. They do not decide anything final on their own — a human makes the call on anything contested, and section 8 covers what can follow. Automated checking is part of how ChefsBook works, and by using the social parts of it you accept that your content there is checked this way.

You can have a cookbook printed and shipped to you. Each book is made to order by a printing partner, and the price covers printing and delivery.

• Because a book is made specifically for you, an order cannot be cancelled once it has gone into production.
• When you order, you confirm you have the right to print everything in the book — including any recipes, text and photographs that came from other people.
• If a book arrives damaged, defective or wrong, email us within 30 days with photographs and we will arrange a replacement or a refund.
• Delivery dates are estimates, not guarantees.

ChefsBook runs on our own hardware and is built by a small team. We work to keep it available, but we don't promise uninterrupted service, and we may change, pause or retire features as the app develops.

Keep your own copy of anything you would hate to lose — you can export your recipes from Settings at any time.

You can delete your account at any time in Settings, which removes your data as described in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or close your account for the reasons in section 8, or — if you have done nothing wrong and we simply need to stop providing the service to you — with reasonable notice and a refund of unused paid time. Sections that by their nature should outlast the account, such as licences already granted to other users under section 5 and the limits in section 15, continue to apply.

ChefsBook is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows. We do not warrant that recipes are accurate, that the app will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that it will meet any particular need.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential loss, for lost profits, or for lost or corrupted data — including anything arising from food prepared using a recipe found here. Where we are liable, our total liability is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot legally be limited — including death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or fraud. Some places do not allow certain exclusions; there, these limits apply only as far as the law permits, and you may have rights these terms cannot take away.

We may update these terms. Changes are posted here with a new date, and we will notify registered users by email when a change is significant. Continuing to use ChefsBook after a change means you accept the updated terms.

Talk to us first. Most problems turn out to be a misunderstanding, and support@chefsbk.app reaches a person. Please give us 30 days to sort something out before taking it further — we will do the same for you.

ChefsBook is operated from the United States and our servers are located there, so these terms are governed by the law of the state in which ChefsBook is established, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and any dispute that cannot be settled informally belongs in the state or federal courts for that place. Each of us agrees to that court's jurisdiction.

If you live somewhere with stronger consumer protection, you keep it. Nothing above takes away a right your own country's consumer law gives you, or stops you bringing a claim where that law says you may — including the courts where you live, if you are in the UK, EU or EEA.

[Placeholder pending review: the governing state and the named court are written generically above because the operating entity and its home state are not yet settled. Both need to be stated by name, and the choice interacts with the consumer carve-out in the previous paragraph.]

Email support@chefsbk.app · Website chefsbk.app