Terms, privacy and contact

Plant Bud is a personal plant care tracker with an AI co-pilot, run by Igor from Helsinki, Finland as a one-person side project. It is free to use. These terms apply to everyone who uses it, and they are the rules Igor is held to as much as you are.

What you may not do

Anything illegal under Finnish or EU law is not allowed here, and neither are these. The list is short on purpose — these are the things that actually go wrong on a small social product, and there is nothing else hiding in a longer document elsewhere.

• No impersonation. Don't pick a handle, avatar or display name meant to make people think you are someone else.
• No handle squatting. Handles are for using, not for hoarding or reselling. Claiming names you have no intention of using is not allowed.
• No harassment. A friend request carries a short note. Using it to abuse, threaten or repeatedly contact someone who has declined you is not allowed.
• No spam. Don't use handles, notes or profiles to advertise, to recruit, or to send the same unwanted message to lots of people.
• Don't abuse the report button. Reports are read by one person. Filing reports you know to be groundless, or using them to harass someone, is itself a breach of these terms.

What happens if a rule is broken

Anyone can report content or an account, including people without an account. Reports are read by a person. Depending on what happened and how serious it is, the response is a warning, removing the content, suspending the account — in that order, and no further than the situation calls for.

• A person decides. There is no automated decision-making, no scoring and no profiling behind any of these actions.
• You are told why. If your content or account is actioned you get a statement of reasons — in the app, and by email — saying what was done, on what grounds, and what you can do about it.
• You never lose your own plants. A suspension takes you off the public side of Plant Bud. Your collection, your photos and your care history stay yours and stay reachable.

If you disagree with a decision

There is no internal complaint-handling system for this service, and no certified out-of-court dispute settlement body. Plant Bud is run by one person as a micro enterprise, and Articles 20 and 21 of the Digital Services Act do not apply to it.

You can bring this decision before a Finnish court. That is the formal route, and it stays open regardless of anything else you do.

You can also reply to contact@plant-bud.com and ask for the decision to be looked at again. A person reads that inbox and will look at it again. This is informal — it is not an appeal procedure, no deadline is promised, and using it takes nothing away from your right to go to court.

Changes

If these terms change, this page changes and the date at the top moves with it. Plant Bud is one person's project, so it comes with no warranty and no uptime promise.

Your plant data

Plants, care events, waterings, issues, photos, and supplies you enter are yours. They are:

• Stored on a server in the EU.
• Never sold, never licensed, and never aggregated across users.
• Never shown to advertisers, because there are none.
• Exportable and deletable — see your rights, below.

What other people can see

Plant Bud has a public side: profiles, a keeper leaderboard, and a way to find and add friends. Some of that is always visible and some of it you control.

Always visible to anyone, with no way to hide it: your handle, your avatar, and your keeper level and score. That is the whole of it. Everything else — your plants, your photos, your country, your stats, your friend count — has a setting, and you choose between private, friends, and public for each.

Never visible to anyone but you, at any setting:anything you have written in your own words — notes, nicknames, care journals — and your plants' health problems.

Your handle can appear in Google

Said plainly, because it is the part people do not expect: the leaderboard is indexed by search engines. If you are in the top 100 keepers, your handle, avatar and score can show up in search results for as long as the page stays in the index.

Individual profile pages are notindexed — they carry a "noindex" instruction and search engines are asked to keep them out. The leaderboard is the exception, and it is the one that puts a handle in public. If you would rather not be on it, see objecting below.

Why Plant Bud is allowed to publish that

The lawful basis for the public side is legitimate interests — Article 6(1)(f) GDPR — not consent. The interest is running a social plant-keeping product where people can find each other, compare notes and see who else is nearby.

The balancing test is easier than it sounds, because the always-visible part is pseudonymous by design: a handle you picked yourself and an emoji. No real name, no photograph of you, nothing you wrote. It identifies you only if you choose to make it do so. Being told about it clearly, and being able to object and be taken off, is the other half of that balance. A written assessment of it is kept in the repository and is available on request.

Objecting to the public side (Article 21)

You have the right to object to processing based on legitimate interests. Email contact@plant-bud.com and say so. Plant Bud will take your collection out of the leaderboard, out of the directory, and out of handle search.

Your account, your plants and everything private stay exactly as they are — objecting removes you from the public side, it does not close anything down. There is no toggle for this in the app on purpose: it is a request a person acts on, not a setting, and asking is the whole procedure.

Plant sitting

You can ask someone to water your plants while you are away — a friend directly, or anyone through a sitting link. Doing that processes:

• The dates of the sitting window, and whether it was accepted or ended.
• Both handles — yours and the sitter's.
• The waterings the sitter logs on your plants. They become part of your plants' history, like any watering you log yourself.

Who sees what:while the sitting is active, and only then, the sitter sees your plants as one of your friends would — at your "friends" settings, never more. Before it starts and after it ends, they see nothing beyond what they already could.

How long:the sitting itself is deleted 30 days after it ends. The waterings stay in your plants' history. If the sitter deletes their account, the waterings stay with you and the link to the sitter is removed.

Why Plant Bud is allowed to: the lawful basis is performance of the service — Article 6(1)(b) GDPR, the same as the friend graph. Sitting only happens because both of you asked for it: the owner asks, and the sitter accepts or claims the link.

Usage analytics (opt-in)

During sign-up you were offered the option to share anonymous usage data with Igor to help improve Plant Bud. This is strictly opt-in and off unless you turned it on. When it is on, the following is collected:

• Feature views (which screens you open) and button clicks.
• Which AI (MCP) tool was called and whether it succeeded or failed.
• Funnel steps — where you progress or drop off in a flow.
• Error categories (a short code, never the underlying content).
• Basic session timing.

The following is never collected, even by accident — the analytics pipeline drops anything outside a fixed allowlist of codes:

• Plant data, photos, prompts, or chat content.
• The arguments you pass to an AI tool or the payloads it returns.

Events are tagged with a one-way hashed identifier (HMAC-SHA256 of your user id with a server-side secret), not your email — so the analytics store cannot be mapped back to you without both the auth database and that secret.

You can turn analytics on or off at any time from your account page. Turning it off does more than pause collection — it permanently erases all of your past usage events from the analytics backend.

No tracking, no ads

Plant Bud loads no advertising, no tracking pixels, no embedded social media widgets and no third-party font CDNs. Nothing here follows you to another site, and there is no advertising business behind the product — selling or licensing your data is ruled out, not deferred.

Two measurement scripts from the host, Vercel, do run on every page: Web Analytics and Speed Insights. They are cookieless, they record page views and load timings rather than people, and they are not used to build a profile of you. They are separate from the opt-in analytics above.

Who else the data touches

Plant Bud is not built from scratch, so a short list of services handle parts of it on Igor's behalf:

• Vercel — hosting, plus the two measurement scripts above.
• Neon — the database. Stored in the EU.
• Cloudflare R2 — your plant photos.
• Google — if you sign in with a Google account.
• Resend — sign-in links and the emails Plant Bud has to send you.
• Telegram — only if you connect it for reminders.
• Anthropic — only if you connect Claude. Then what you ask Claude, and the plant data it reads to answer, pass through it.

Signing in

Sign-in uses your Google account, or a magic link sent to your email. No passwords are stored. Session cookies are HttpOnly and signed with a server-side secret. They expire after 7 days of inactivity.

How long things are kept

• Your plant data — for as long as your account exists.
• Reports — deleted 12 months after they are resolved.
• Handles — permanently, and this is the one thing that outlives a deleted account. A handle that has been used is never given to anyone else, so nobody can take your name and be mistaken for you. Nothing else about you survives.

Your rights

Igor operates Plant Bud from Helsinki, Finland, in the EU, and is the controller for your data. Your GDPR rights apply: access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection. To exercise any of them, email contact@plant-bud.com.

Deleting your account is immediate and final — there is no grace period and nothing to restore afterwards, other than the reserved handle described above. You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority; in Finland that is the Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman (Tietosuojavaltuutetun toimisto).

Plant Bud is run by Igor, in Helsinki, Finland. One person, no company behind it.

Everything goes to one address, read by a person: contact@plant-bud.com. Questions, data requests, objections, replies to a moderation decision, and contact from authorities all land in the same inbox.

Point of contact for users — DSA Article 12

contact@plant-bud.com. A person reads this inbox; it is not an automated system, and you will not be answered by a bot.

Käyttäjien yhteyspiste (DSA 12 artikla): contact@plant-bud.com. Viestit lukee ihminen, ei automaattinen järjestelmä.

Point of contact for authorities — DSA Article 11

contact@plant-bud.com is also the single electronic point of contact for Member State authorities, the European Commission and the European Board for Digital Services. Communications are accepted in Finnish and English.

Viranomaisten yhteyspiste (DSA 11 artikla): contact@plant-bud.com. Yhteyspiste ottaa vastaan viestejä suomi ja englanti.