Family Table is a private, invite-only recipe app run by Chad Gustafson for his family. It is not a commercial service. There is no advertising, no analytics, and nothing is sold or shared for marketing.
One cookie, ft_session, which keeps you signed in. It is strictly necessary for
the app to work. There are no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies of any kind.
Only the people in your household, and the service providers below, each used only to run the app:
Worth knowing: when you import a recipe by photo, URL or pasted text, that content is sent to Anthropic's Claude API to be read and turned into structured ingredients and steps. So a photo of a recipe card, or of a cookbook page, leaves our servers to be processed. Photos you attach to a saved recipe are not sent anywhere — only what you explicitly submit for import.
Family Table is run by one person in the family, not a company. There is an operator screen, and it is worth being exact about what it does and does not show.
One honest caveat: the operator administers the database and the servers, so they have technical access to what is stored there, as the operator of any self-hosted app does. The distinction is that the app itself does not put your recipes in front of them, and this policy will change if that ever stops being true.
If you create a share link for a recipe, anyone with that link can view that one recipe without signing in. The link is a long random string, it is not listed or indexed anywhere, and you can revoke it at any time. Revoking a link stops the recipe page loading, but any photo someone has already opened may remain reachable at its own address.
Households here are separate: being in one does not let you see inside another. A recipe can be sent to another kitchen in one of two ways, and they differ in a way worth understanding.
Either way, only the one recipe you chose is shared. Neither makes the rest of your cookbook visible.
Recipes and photos are kept until you or a household owner delete them. Sign-in records are kept for one year. Expired sign-in links and ended sessions are purged automatically.
Ask Chad and he will export everything associated with you, correct it, or delete your account and its contents. There is no form and no waiting period — it is a family app.
Family members under 13 may be given accounts by a household owner, who is their parent or guardian. The app collects nothing from a child beyond what any member adds: a name, an email address if one is used to invite them, and whatever recipes or notes they choose to write.
Traffic is encrypted in transit (HTTPS only — the .app domain enforces it).
Photos and database contents are encrypted at rest. Sign-in tokens are stored only as hashes,
never in a form that could be replayed.
If this policy changes materially, everyone with an account will be emailed.
Chad Gustafson — chadgus@gmail.com