Legal

PlateMe — Disclaimers & Terms of Service

Anchor jumps below to navigate between Disclaimers and Terms. PlateMe surfaces probable fits, not medical determinations — confirm anything that matters for a medical condition with a clinician before relying on it.

Disclaimers

PlateMe surfaces likely fits, not medical determinations

PlateMe is a recipe and meal-planning assistant, not a medical or clinical tool. Every match we surface — a recipe labelled "good fit", a shopping item flagged "avoid", a substitution we recommend — is a probable fit based on the household rules, the ingredient dataset, and the model behaviour described below. None of it is a diagnosis, a treatment plan, or a verdict that a given meal is safe or unsafe for you. Use PlateMe as a starting point for what to cook, not as the final word on what you should eat.

Confirm with professionals for medical conditions

If you or someone you cook for manages a medical condition — food allergies, celiac disease, diabetes, kidney disease, FODMAP sensitivity, phenylketonuria, eosinophilic disorders, or any other condition where a single ingredient or cross-contact event matters — always confirm PlateMe suggestions with your treating clinician, registered dietitian, or allergist before relying on them. Probable fits can be wrong. Ingredient lists change without notice. Manufacturers reformulate. A recipe that read as a likely fit yesterday may not be a likely fit tomorrow.

How household rules are applied

Each household on PlateMe sets its own avoid-and-prefer list — allergens to exclude, ingredients to skip, cuisines you love, ingredients you want more of. We combine that rule set with our ingredient dataset, which draws on a curated mix of open recipe corpora, manufacturer-published ingredient decks, and crowdsourced contributions, and then run the combined input through our model. The model reasons over the recipe, the household rules, and the ingredient provenance; what comes back is, again, a probable fit. Rule conflicts (a household avoids an ingredient the recipe uses; a label reports "may contain") are surfaced as flags, not as hard guarantees.

Limits of barcode, menu, and OCR scans

PlateMe offers three ways to read a product into your meal plan: barcode scans, menu-photo reads, and OCR scans of packaged-food labels. Each has real limits. Barcode scans rely on the product being in our ingredient dataset and on the manufacturer having filed a current ingredient list — stale entries return stale answers. Menu scans are OCR over a photo; handwriting, foreign scripts, kitchen stains, low light, and stylized fonts all degrade accuracy, and OCR can misread "almond" as "salmon". Packaged-label OCR is bounded by the resolution of the photo you take, the language of the label, and whether the ingredient list is complete on the visible side of the package. Treat every scan result as a probable fit, then confirm.

Terms of Service

Your account

You are responsible for keeping your PlateMe account credentials safe. Choose a strong password, do not share it, and let us know right away if you suspect someone else has used it. You are responsible for everything that happens under your account, including the accuracy of the household rules you set and the recipes and scans you save. If you stop using PlateMe, you can ask us to delete your household, recipes, and rule history at any time.

Acceptable use

Use PlateMe for its intended purpose — to plan meals, build shopping lists, and check whether a recipe or scanned product is a probable fit for your household. Do not use PlateMe to make clinical, medical, or legal determinations about a food. Do not try to reverse-engineer, scrape at scale, or interfere with the service. Do not upload content you do not have the right to share, and do not use PlateMe to harass, impersonate, or harm anyone.

Intellectual property

PlateMe, the logo, the underlying recipe-matching technology, and the design of the app are owned by us or our licensors. Recipes you save to a household remain yours — you can export them at any time. Aggregate, de-identified insights drawn from your household (for example, "households with this avoid-list tend to substitute X") may inform future model improvements, and you consent to that use when you save recipes or scans. Brand marks and copyrighted recipe text you paste in stay yours; you give us a limited licence to host them so the service can render them for you.

Limitation of liability

PlateMe is provided "as is", without warranties of any kind, express or implied. We do our best to surface probable fits, but we cannot guarantee that a recipe labelled "good fit" is safe for you, that a scanned product contains exactly what the label says, or that an ingredient dataset entry is current. To the maximum extent permitted by law, PlateMe and its contributors are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of the service, including any allergic reaction, dietary harm, or meal-planning decision made on the basis of a probable fit. If a jurisdiction does not allow this limitation, our liability is capped at the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

Billing terms

Subscription billing terms will take effect once Stripe is connected to PlateMe. Until those terms are posted here, no paid plan is offered and no payment instrument is processed. When paid plans go live, this section will be replaced with the full terms — what you are buying, how renewals and cancellations work, refunds, and how disputes are handled — and the date below will be updated.