Who we are
Better Value is an iPhone app made by Halifax Innovation Studio ("we," "us"), based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. This policy explains what the app does and does not do with your information.
The two ways to compare
A pair of buttons at the bottom of the camera screen decides which one runs. The setting is visible before you photograph anything, and it is the whole of the difference in this policy.
- On the Phone — free, unlimited, and the app never opens a network connection for it. Apple's on-device text recognition reads the tags, you confirm each number, and your phone does the arithmetic. No photo, no text and no location leaves your device. It works in airplane mode.
- Full Read — part of Better Value Premium and its free trial. Your photos are sent to be read, so you do not have to tap in each price and size yourself. What that costs you in privacy is set out below.
What the app sends, and when
Nothing is sent while you are taking photos, in either mode. In On the Phone mode nothing is sent at all, ever.
In Full Read mode, when you tap Compare, the app sends:
- The photos you took for that comparison, as compressed JPEGs. Location metadata (EXIF) is switched off when the photo is taken, so the images carry no GPS coordinates or camera metadata.
- The question in the text field — either the default "Which is the better value?" or whatever you typed over it.
- Proof of your subscription, if you have one. This is described under Subscriptions and payment; it is issued by Apple and contains no name, email or account of ours.
Afterwards, only if you tap Find stores near me on a finished comparison and grant location permission, the app also sends your rounded coordinates and the name of the winning product, so it can look up stores near you likely to carry it.
That is the complete list. No device identifier, no account, no contact details, no advertising identifier and no usage analytics are ever attached to any of it.
Camera
Better Value uses your camera so you can photograph the products and shelf tags you are comparing. iOS asks your permission first, and you can change it any time in Settings → Better Value.
- Photos are not added to your Photos library.
- Each photo is written to the app's own temporary storage so it can appear in the strip at the bottom of the screen. Starting a new comparison discards them, and iOS clears that storage on its own schedule. Deleting the app removes them immediately.
- Photos leave the device only in Full Read mode, only when you tap Compare, and only for that comparison.
Please photograph the product and its shelf tag, not people. The app has no use for anything else in frame.
Location
Location is only ever used for the "likely available nearby" list, which is part of Better Value Premium. The app never asks for location on its own: nothing is requested until you tap Find stores near me on a finished comparison, so it is clear what it is for.
- Your position is blurred before it is sent. iOS gives the app a fix accurate to roughly 100 metres; the app rounds that to two decimal places — about a kilometre — and only the rounded value is transmitted. The precise fix never leaves your phone. A 5 km store search does not need better than that, so nothing is lost by blurring it.
- The rounded coordinates go to our server and on to Anthropic's API, which uses them to search the web for stores near you. They are used for that search and nothing else.
- The app never monitors your location in the background — only while it is open, and only when you ask for this list.
- Declining is a normal path, not an error. You still get the full verdict; the nearby section simply says location is off.
- You can revoke the permission any time in Settings → Better Value.
Subscriptions and payment
Better Value Premium is sold through Apple's In-App Purchase, on a free trial followed by a monthly or yearly subscription. We never see your payment details. The purchase happens entirely between you and Apple; we receive no card number, no billing address, and no Apple ID.
What we do receive is a receipt signed by Apple, which the app sends with each Full Read so our server can tell that a request is from a subscriber. To keep even that from identifying you, our server never stores the receipt or the identifier inside it. It stores a one-way hash of that identifier, mixed with a secret only we hold, and files two integers against it: how many comparisons you have run today and this month. That is how the fair-use limit is enforced.
The hash cannot be reversed into your Apple identifier, and the identifier was never an account of ours in the first place. Both counters expire on their own — the daily one within about two days, the monthly one within about a month.
Information stored on your device
The comparison flow stores nothing between sessions. There is no history, no saved comparisons and no account. Starting a new comparison discards the previous one. App preferences are kept only on your device and are removed when you delete the app.
What we store on our server
Nothing about the comparison itself. Our server has no database of your content: it receives a request, calls the API, returns the answer and forgets it. Your photos, your question and your coordinates are never written down.
The only things kept are the two anonymous usage counters described above, and — when a request fails — a one-line diagnostic in the host's log stream: an error name, a message and a request identifier. Your photos, your question and your coordinates are deliberately excluded from that line, so it contains nothing personal to you.
Who else receives your information
| Who | What they receive | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Inc. | Your purchase and payment details, directly — never through us | Sells and renews the subscription |
| Vercel Inc. | The request as it passes through, in transit | Hosts the server that forwards your request |
| Anthropic, PBC (United States) | Your photos, your question, your rounded coordinates, the winning product name | Reads the photos and runs the store search |
| Upstash, Inc. | The one-way hash and the two counters — no content of any kind | Holds the fair-use counters |
Every connection uses HTTPS. We have no advertising, analytics, attribution or tracking partners, and we do not sell or share your information with anyone else.
Anthropic does not keep your data. Our account operates under a zero data retention agreement, which means Anthropic does not retain your photos, your question or your coordinates after returning the answer. Anthropic does not use data submitted through its API to train its models.
International transfers
We are based in Canada and Anthropic processes this data in the United States, so your information leaves your country to be processed — including if you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area.
Where UK or EU data protection law applies, we rely on the UK and European Commission Standard Contractual Clauses, which form part of our data processing agreement with Anthropic, as the safeguard for that transfer. Because of the zero data retention agreement above, the data is processed and discarded rather than stored abroad.
Legal bases for using your information
Where UK or EU data protection law applies, we rely on:
| What | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Sending your photos and question to produce a comparison | Performance of a contract — it is the service you asked for by tapping Compare. Without it, Full Read cannot work. |
| Sending your rounded location to find nearby stores | Consent, given through the iOS location prompt. You can withdraw it at any time in Settings, with no effect on the comparison. |
| Counting comparisons against the fair-use limit | Legitimate interests — keeping a paid service affordable and available, using the least identifying method we could find. |
We do not use your information for automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects. A product comparison is a shopping suggestion; you decide what to buy.
Your rights
If you are in the UK or EEA you have rights to access, correct, delete, restrict, object to and port your personal data. If you are in Canada, PIPEDA gives you comparable rights of access and correction. Residents of some other regions have similar rights.
In practice there is very little for those rights to operate on, and that is by design: there is no account and no profile, we hold no copy of your photos or questions, and Anthropic retains nothing. The one thing we do hold — two counters against a one-way hash — cannot be traced back to you by us, which also means we cannot look it up on your behalf.
To exercise a right or ask how any of this works, email us at the address below. If you are in the UK or EEA you also have the right to complain to your local supervisory authority; in Canada, to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Children
The app is not directed at children and has no accounts, ads, tracking or social features. It does not knowingly collect information from children, and it asks for nothing that would identify anyone.
Security
Everything sent by the app travels over HTTPS. Our server holds no stored copy of your information to secure, because it keeps none. The API key used to reach Anthropic is held only on the server, in an environment variable, and is never included in the app.
This website
Separately from the app: these pages use Vercel Web Analytics, which works without cookies and without building a profile of you. As well as counting page views, it records a small number of anonymous interaction counts — which sections of this page were reached, which button was pressed, and where a slider was left. No name, email address or message text is ever attached to any of it, and there is nothing in it that could identify you or follow you to another site.
If you send us a question through the form on the home page, that form does send data — your name, your email address and your message. It goes to our server, which checks a Cloudflare Turnstile token to confirm you are not a bot, and then hands the message to Resend, our email provider, to deliver to us. Cloudflare receives the anti-spam check (including your IP address, as any web request carries); Resend receives the message in order to deliver it. We keep your message the way anyone keeps an email — in the inbox, until we no longer need it — and we use it only to answer you. None of this is connected to the app or to anything described above.
Changes to this policy
If we change how the app handles information, we will update this policy and the date at the top before the change ships.
What changed, and when
Earlier versions of this policy described a fully on-device app that made no network calls. That was accurate for the original design, in which the camera fed Apple's on-device text recognition and nothing was transmitted. It is no longer accurate for the whole app, and saying so plainly matters more to us than the older claim did.
As of August 2026 the app can also compare products by sending photos to be read, and can find nearby stores by sending a rounded location. That mode is optional, is not the free tier, and is chosen on the screen before any photo is taken. The behaviour the old policy described still exists exactly as written — it is now called On the Phone. If you are running an older build, the older policy applies to it.
Contact
Questions about privacy? Email info@halifaxinnovationstudio.ca.
Halifax Innovation Studio, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.