Privacy policy
Last updated 13 August 2026
Cut is an iPhone app for logging food and weight. This page describes what happens with your data, in plain English. It is short because not much happens.
The short version: everything you log stays on your phone. Cut has no accounts, no copy of your database, no analytics, no ads and no third-party tracking of any kind.
Data leaves your device in exactly three situations, each described below: estimating nutrition from a photo, answering a coach question, and looking up a barcode.
What Cut stores, and where
Every meal, weigh-in, activity record and fridge snapshot is stored in a local database on your iPhone, using Apple's SwiftData. There is no copy of it anywhere else: no accounts server, no cloud database, nothing on our side that holds your log. There is no account to create and no password to forget.
The one piece of infrastructure we do run is the relay described further down, which forwards requests to Anthropic so the API key need not be stored inside the app. It keeps usage counts, never content.
If you back your phone up, for example to iCloud, Cut's local data is included in that backup like any other app's, under your own backup settings and Apple's terms. Deleting the app deletes its local data.
Apple Health
With your permission, Cut reads your weight, step count, active energy, workouts and time asleep from Apple Health. It also reads the height, date of birth and biological sex already in your Health profile, so it does not have to ask you for them again. It writes back the calories and protein you log plus any weigh-ins you enter by hand, so the Health app stays the source of truth.
Health data is used for one thing: showing you your own numbers, and computing your weight trend and calorie target on the device. It is never used for advertising and never sold or shared with anyone.
One nuance worth stating plainly: if you ask the coach a question or request meal suggestions, the summary sent to Anthropic (described below) includes numbers derived from this data, such as your weight trend and daily activity. If you never use those features, no Health-derived data leaves the phone.
Meal and fridge photos
When you photograph a meal or your fridge, that photo is sent over an encrypted connection to Anthropic's Claude API, which estimates the nutrition or suggests meals. The photo is used to produce that response and is not stored by Cut. Anthropic processes API requests under its own privacy policy, and does not use API data to train its models by default.
The relay in between
Requests to Anthropic do not go straight from your phone. They pass through a small relay we run on Cloudflare Workers, which exists so the API key is not stored inside the app where anyone could extract it.
The relay never stores the contents of a request or a response. It does not keep your photos, your meals, your messages to the coach or its replies — those pass through and are gone. What it records, per request, is the usage metadata needed to keep the service running and its costs bounded: a timestamp, which app token made the call, whether it succeeded, how long it took, and the number of tokens used. That record contains nothing about you or your food.
The coach
When you ask the coach a question, Cut builds a compact summary of your own logged data on the device: daily calorie and protein totals, your weight trend, activity, your most-logged meals and the item list from your latest fridge photo. That summary is sent, via the relay described above, to Anthropic's API so the answer can be grounded in your actual history rather than generic advice.
Your full database is never uploaded, and coach conversations are not stored anywhere: the transcript exists only while the chat is open.
Barcodes
Scanning a barcode sends the barcode number to Open Food Facts, a public, non-profit food database, to fetch the product's label data. Nothing else is sent with it beyond the ordinary metadata of any internet request.
What Cut does not do
- No accounts, and no personal profile held anywhere but your phone.
- No analytics, crash-reporting or advertising SDKs. No third-party trackers of any kind.
- No ads.
- No selling, renting or sharing of your data with anyone, ever.
Changes
If any of the above changes, this page will be updated before the change ships, and the date at the top will move.
Contact
Questions about any of this: josh.salway@gmail.com.