What Palate Does
Palate builds your dining profile by finding reservations, orders, and receipts across platforms like OpenTable, Resy, DoorDash, Toast, Uber Eats, and others. We use read-only access to your Gmail account to discover dining confirmation emails — we never modify, delete, or send emails on your behalf.
What We Access
When you sign in with Google, we request read-only access to your Gmail. We only search for emails from known dining platforms (OpenTable, Resy, DoorDash, etc.) using specific sender queries. We do not read personal emails, attachments, or any messages unrelated to dining.
From dining emails, we extract:
- Restaurant name and location
- Date, time, and party size
- Order items and amounts (when available)
- Confirmation numbers
Connected Cards (Optional)
You can choose to connect a credit card or checking account so Palate can find dining you paid for directly, like walk-ins, bars, and cafés that never send a confirmation. The connection is made through Plaid. You sign in to your card issuer inside Plaid's window and choose which accounts to share; Palate never sees your login details. Plaid's handling of your information is described in the Plaid End User Privacy Policy.
Palate receives the purchases on the accounts you selected and keeps only the ones at restaurants, bars, and cafés. Everything else is discarded as soon as it is checked and is never stored. For each dining purchase we keep:
- The merchant name as it appears on the card, and the restaurant we matched it to
- Date, amount, and city
- The merchant category supplied by the card network and Plaid
- An identifier for the purchase, so the same purchase is never counted twice
We also keep the card issuer's name and each shared account's name and last four digits, so you can see what is connected in Settings. We never receive or store full card or account numbers, and we do not store balances or non-dining purchases.
The credential Plaid gives us to fetch new purchases is encrypted (AES-256-GCM), stored server-side, and never sent to your browser. When you disconnect a card in Settings, Palate revokes that credential with Plaid and deletes it; dining occasions already found stay in your history until you delete them. Deleting your account revokes every connected card and deletes all dining data.
How We Use Your Data
Your dining data is used to:
- Build your personal dining profile and timeline
- Identify cuisine preferences, favorite restaurants, and dining patterns
- Provide personalized dining recommendations (coming soon)
Data Storage & Security
Your data is stored in our database with row-level security, so each account can reach only its own records. The only Google credential we keep is the refresh token that lets Palate keep finding new dining occasions; it is encrypted (AES-256-GCM) and stored server-side, and is never sent to your browser. We do not store Google access tokens.
We do not keep the text of your emails. Once a dining email is processed we keep only the details listed above and the email's Gmail message ID, which stops the same email being counted twice.
We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with the service providers listed below, and only to run Palate, plus the two places you can choose to send it yourself: an AI assistant you connect Palate to, and a public profile page if you turn one on (off by default). Neither receives email content, only your dining history and profile.
Google API Services Usage Disclosure
Palate's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Specifically, Palate:
- Only uses Gmail data to build your personal dining profile — the core functionality you see in the app
- Does not sell, rent, or provide Gmail data to third parties for advertising, marketing, or any unrelated purpose
- Does not use Gmail data to serve ads or build advertising profiles
- Only allows humans to read Gmail data if you explicitly consent, or as required for security, legal compliance, or to investigate abuse
Third-Party Services
We use the following services to operate Palate:
- Google Gmail API — to discover dining emails (read-only)
- Vercel AI Gateway — carries Palate's requests to the AI models below. Every request asks for zero data retention: the gateway does not keep requests, and it sends them only to model providers that have agreed not to keep the content or use it to train models.
- Google Gemini (through Vercel AI Gateway) — to read the details out of dining emails. For each email from a dining platform we send the subject, sender, date, and up to 2,000 characters of its text, and Gemini returns the structured details (restaurant, date, items). For a connected card, only purchases that already look like dining are sent: the merchant name, category, city, date, and amount, to get a clean restaurant name. Receipt photos you add are read the same way.
- Anthropic Claude (through Vercel AI Gateway) — to write the portrait on your profile from a summary of your dining history (restaurants, cuisines, and how often and when you go). Palate also uses Claude to keep up with changes in dining platforms' emails: when Palate cannot read one, Claude may see up to 4,000 characters of it to fix how that platform's emails are read.
- Restaurant lookups (Google Gemini with Perplexity web search, through Vercel AI Gateway) — when Palate knows too little about a restaurant, such as its cuisine or city, it sends the restaurant's name, city, and address, and nothing about you, to look the restaurant up on the web.
- Supabase — for authentication and database hosting
- Vercel — for application hosting, and anonymous usage analytics
- Google Analytics — anonymous usage analytics (pages visited, sign-up steps); no dining or email data
- Plaid — only if you connect a card, to find dining purchases on it
Your Controls
You can at any time, from Settings:
- Disconnect Google — Palate revokes its Gmail access with Google and deletes the stored token. Your existing profile stays.
- Delete All Data — deletes every dining occasion, restaurant match, and profile signal, and disconnects Google so nothing is rebuilt.
- Delete Account — deletes your account and all associated data, and revokes Palate's access to Google, any connected cards, and any AI apps you connected Palate to.
You can also revoke access from your Google Account permissions page; Palate will then ask you to reconnect.
Where You Can Send Your Data
- Connected AI assistants. If you connect Palate to an assistant such as Claude, that assistant can ask Palate for your dining history, profile and preferences to answer you. It never receives email content. Disconnect it from Settings → Delete Account, or from the assistant's own settings.
- Public profile. Off by default. If you turn it on in Settings, anyone with your profile link sees your display name, top cuisines and favorite restaurants. Turn it off any time.
Retention
We keep your dining data until you delete it or your account. Deletions take effect immediately in our database; encrypted backups roll off within 7 days. Operational logs, which contain account IDs but not email content, are kept for up to 30 days.