verella

Privacy policy

Verella gives you a personalised food verdict when you scan a product barcode. This is what the app handles and what happens to it.

Last updated: 6 October 2026

What changed on 6 October 2026. Verella is now free in full and is paid for by advertising, so this policy adds an advertising section and corrects the earlier statement that the app carried no ads. It also now describes the small amount of usage data the app records about itself, which the previous version did not mention. Subscriptions are no longer sold, and the payments section says what that means for anyone who already had one.

What we collect

  • Account. Your Apple ID sign-in, which gives us a verified identifier and, if you share it, your email address. Or your email address if you sign in by code.
  • The profile you provide. Height, weight, age, sex, activity level, weight goal, diet patterns, allergens and health conditions you select. Conditions and allergens are sensitive health information. You choose whether to add them, and the app works without them.
  • Scan history. Barcodes you scan and the verdicts they produced are cached to your account so a rescan is instant.
  • Crash reports. If the app crashes, a technical report with the stack trace, device model and operating system version is sent to Sentry so we can fix it. Crash reports never include your profile, your conditions, your allergens or your scans.
  • Where you heard about Verella. Onboarding asks this, from a fixed list of six answers. It is optional, it is never free text, and it is never used for scoring or advertising.
  • A small amount of usage data. The app records a short list of events to its own database so we can tell whether it is working: that a scan finished, that a session started, and that an advert was shown or tapped. These carry only a coarse label, such as whether the account is free or subscribed, and whether an advert was a banner or a full screen. They never carry a barcode, a product, a verdict, a condition, an allergen or a diet. That limit is enforced by the database itself and by a test, not by convention. There is no analytics company involved: the events go to our own Supabase database and nowhere else, and they are deleted when you delete your account.

What we do not collect

  • No location, no contacts, no photos, and no advertising identifier. The app does not ask for tracking permission and does not access the IDFA.
  • No camera images. Barcode detection runs on your device, and camera frames never leave it.
  • No third-party analytics or behavioural tracking SDK of any kind. The usage events described above are recorded by the app into its own database, which is why no analytics company ever receives them.

How your data is used

Your profile is used for exactly one thing, which is computing your food verdicts. Scoring runs on your device, or on our servers under your own account's access. Verdicts come from deterministic rules rather than a model, and your health data is never used to train anything, never sold, and never shared with advertisers.

Advertising

Verella is free in full and ads pay for it. Advertising is served by Google AdMob, and it is non-personalised only.

  • No health data is sent in an ad request. No keywords, no content URL, and no custom targeting. A test fails the build if any of those appear.
  • One profile-derived value exists anywhere in the ad path, and it is a yes or no under-16 flag passed to the advertising SDK to satisfy data protection rules for children. It restricts what may be returned, it is never sent as an age, and it is never used for targeting.
  • Ads never render on a scan result, a loading state, an error or a failed lookup, and a full-screen ad is suppressed entirely when the result you are leaving carried an allergen warning.
  • Anyone still holding a subscription from before they were withdrawn sees no ads at all. The advertising SDK is never started for them.
  • In regions that require a consent choice before advertising, such as the EEA and the UK, the advertising SDK asks for it before any ad request is made, and no ads are initialised if that step does not complete.

Payments

There is nothing to buy in Verella. The app has no purchase screen at all, and the two subscription products that existed previously are no longer offered.

Anyone who subscribed before that keeps what they paid for: the app still honours the entitlement, and Profile keeps a restore purchases action so a reinstall gets it back. Subscriptions were processed by Apple through the App Store and we never saw payment details. Our billing provider, RevenueCat, processes purchase state under a pseudonymous account identifier and never receives your profile or your health information.

Where it lives

Data is stored with Supabase, on hosted Postgres, under row-level security, so your row is readable and writable only by your authenticated account.

Product information comes from Open Food Facts, Open Beauty Facts and Open Products Facts under the Open Database License. Your barcode lookups are sent to their API without your identity attached beyond standard network metadata.

Deleting your data

In the app, go to Profile, then Account, then delete my account and data. That permanently erases your account, your profile including your conditions and allergens, your scan history, and the usage events described above. Everything keyed to your account is removed with it, in the same operation. It is immediate and irreversible.

You can also email feedback@verella.app to request deletion.

Medical disclaimer

Verella provides general informational guidance only, never medical advice. Always follow your care team.

Contact

feedback@verella.app. Verella is operated by VTECH SOLUTIONS LLC, an independent developer in the United States.

Changes

We update this page and the last updated date when the policy changes.