The house rules for Staple.

Terms

Last updated: July 2026

1. What this contract is

These Terms are the agreement between you and Staple about what each of us promises when you use the app. Using Staple means accepting these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not sign in.

Browsing the marketing pages of withstaple.com does not create a contract between us — there is no sign-in, no payment, nothing to accept. The acceptable-use rules below apply to the site as well: don't scrape it for AI training, don't copy the wordmark, the design system, the photography, or the editorial voice, and don't operate a clone at a confusingly similar domain.

The short version: Staple gives you a private, shared workspace for cooking with the people you live with. You write the content. The content is yours. We host it, sync it, and keep it private. We do not promise the service will be available every minute of every day, and we limit our financial liability to what is allowed under German consumer law — which still means we are liable for any damage we cause through intent or gross negligence, and for injury to life, body, or health regardless. You can stop using Staple at any time, and we can end the relationship with reasonable notice if you misuse the service.

The short version, before the legal one. If you never sign in, you can stop here: browsing the marketing pages creates no contract. If you sign in, this is the agreement. Your content stays yours. We don't train AI on what you cook (a small number of AI features are described in the Privacy Policy). We're a one-person operation in Frankfurt. German consumer law requires the rest of this document to be written carefully, so it is.

2. Who we are

Staple is operated by Mischa Frank, Eckenheimer Landstr. 70, 60318 Frankfurt am Main, Germany (a private individual; no commercial register entry, no VAT ID). Full provider identification is in the Impressum.

In these Terms, "we" / "us" / "Staple" means that operator. "You" means the person who signs in to the app.

3. What Staple does

Staple is a household-scoped meal-planning and recipe app. The features included in the current version of the service are:

A recipe book (in the app: Book) where you can save, organize, and search recipes you write, paste, or import.
A weekly planner (Plan) where you assign recipes to days and household members.
A shopping list (List) that derives from your plan and that household-mates can edit live.
A cook mode (Cook) that guides you through a recipe with a focused, distraction-free interface.
A household model (in the German app: Küche) where two or more people share a single workspace and see each other's edits in real time.
Photographs attached to recipes.
AI-generated recipe photos — for a recipe without a photo, a duotone-style image generated on request from the recipe's title and ingredients.
A today surface (Heute) that shows what you (and the household) are cooking on a given day.

Staple does not:

Provide nutritional advice. Calorie counts and macronutrient breakdowns are not part of the service and are not generated automatically.
Sell groceries, deliver food, or arrange any commercial cooking or grocery service.
Connect to a smart oven, smart fridge, voice assistant, or any other third-party hardware in the current version.
Provide professional kitchen, allergy, or dietary advice. Recipes you save are content you author or import; they are not vetted by us.

4. Your account

4.1 How sign-in works

Staple uses passwordless authentication. To sign in you enter your email address; we send you either a clickable link or a six-digit code. There is no password.

You are responsible for keeping access to your email account secure. If someone else can read your email, they can sign in to Staple as you. We strongly recommend two-factor authentication on your email account.

If you suspect someone has accessed your Staple account without your permission, write to cook@withstaple.com and we will sign all sessions out.

4.2 One person, one account

The account is personal to you. You may not share your sign-in link or code with anyone else. If multiple people in your household want to use Staple together — that is what the household feature is for, and what we want you to do.

4.3 Age requirement

You must be at least 16 years old to create a Staple account. This matches the German age of digital consent under Art. 8 GDPR. Children under 16 are very welcome to use Staple inside a household their parents created — but the account holder must be 16 or older.

4.4 Accuracy

The information you provide at sign-up (your email, and later your display name, locale, and any photos) must be either accurate or your own creative choice. Do not impersonate someone else.

5. Household membership

A household in Staple is a shared workspace. When you invite someone to your household, or accept an invite, you are agreeing that they will see:

All recipes saved to that household.
The current and past meal plans for that household.
The current shopping list and its history.
The display name and avatar of every other member of the household.

There is no "private" content inside a shared household. If you want content that only you see, keep it in a separate household with no other members.

You may leave a household at any time. The recipes you contributed remain with the household unless every member agrees to remove them.

The person who created a household is its initial admin and may invite and remove members. We may add finer-grained roles in a future version of the service.

6. Your content stays yours

You retain all ownership and intellectual-property rights in the content you create or upload to Staple, including recipes, ingredients, method steps, notes, photos, and meal plans.

You grant Staple a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to host, store, copy, transmit, and display your content, strictly for the purpose of operating the service for you and the members of your household. That license ends when you delete the content, except for the limited time it takes our backups to expire (see the Privacy Policy for backup retention).

We do not claim any rights to your content beyond what is strictly needed to run Staple. We do not use your content to train machine-learning models. We do not license your content to anyone. We do not sell your content. We do not display your content to anyone outside your household.

A couple of features process your content through Google's Gemini API — recipe import extraction and AI-generated recipe photos. Only the minimum text needed to perform the action you requested is sent (the recipe's title and ingredients, and for imports the source text or photo you submitted), solely to perform that action. On the paid API tier we use, Google does not use this content to train its models. See the Privacy Policy for the subprocessor details.

If you import or paste a recipe from a third-party source, you are responsible for ensuring you have the right to do so. Recipes themselves (the list of ingredients and the method) are generally not copyrightable, but accompanying text and photographs often are. If you import for personal use inside your household, that is your call to make.

7. Acceptable use

Do not use Staple to:

Upload content that infringes someone else's intellectual property, right of publicity, or other legal rights.
Upload content that is unlawful under the laws of Germany or the European Union (e.g. content that incites hatred under § 130 StGB, or constitutes prohibited representations of violence under § 131 StGB).
Upload, share, or attempt to extract child sexual abuse material. Such material will be reported to the competent authority and the account terminated immediately.
Use the service to spam, harass, threaten, or harm another person, including other members of your household.
Attempt to break, probe, scrape, or interfere with the service or with other accounts. Don't run automated load against our infrastructure. Don't try to extract another household's data.
Reverse-engineer or attempt to access the source code or non-public parts of the service, except where you have a non-waivable right to do so under § 69e UrhG or analogous law.
Resell the service or use it on behalf of someone else as a hosted offering.

We may pause or end an account that we reasonably believe is being used in any of these ways. For serious or repeated violations we will not give advance warning.

8. Term, termination, and what happens to your data

8.1 How long the relationship lasts

These Terms apply for as long as you have a Staple account. There is no minimum term.

8.2 How you end it

You can stop using Staple at any time. You can also delete your account at any time, either inside the app (Settings → Delete account) or by writing to cook@withstaple.com from the email address tied to your account.

When you delete your account, we remove your personal data within 7 days and from backups within 30 days, per the schedule in the Privacy Policy. Recipes you contributed to a shared household remain with the household unless you ask for them to be removed too.

8.3 How we can end it

We may end your access to Staple, with reasonable advance notice (typically 30 days), for any reason — for example, because we are sunsetting the service or making material changes you do not accept.

We may end your access without advance notice if:

You materially breach these Terms (e.g. the Acceptable Use rules above).
We are required to by law or by a competent authority.
Your continued access poses a real risk to other users, to us, or to a third party.

If we end your access without advance notice, we will tell you why, and you will have access to your data for export for at least 30 days after termination, except where the law forbids us from doing so.

8.4 Inactive accounts

If you do not sign in for two years, we will email the address on file to ask whether you still want your account. If we do not hear back within 90 days of that email, we will delete the account and its personal data per the same schedule as a user-requested deletion. Recipes contributed to households that still have active members are preserved with the household.

9. Pricing and payment

The current version of Staple is offered free of charge. There is no paid tier today.

If we introduce a paid tier in the future, we will offer it as an opt-in upgrade. Anything you already have at the time will remain available under the terms you signed up under, free of charge, for at least 12 months from the date the paid tier launches — including the right to export your data.

We will never auto-enroll you into a paid plan. We will never bill you without your explicit, opted-in agreement.

10. Service availability and the "no warranty" reality

We try hard to keep Staple available, but we do not promise a specific uptime in the current version. The service may be unavailable from time to time for maintenance, for incidents, or for reasons outside our control (e.g. an outage at our infrastructure provider).

To the extent permitted by German law, Staple is provided "as is" and "as available." Specifically:

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or always reach a particular performance level.
We do not warrant that it will be compatible with every device, browser, or operating-system version.
We do not warrant that any specific feature will be available indefinitely. Features may be added, changed, or removed.
We do not warrant that the marketing pages are always accurate or current. If a page says one thing and the app does another, trust the app.

This section does not exclude warranties or rights that you have as a consumer under mandatory German law (in particular the statutory warranty for digital content under §§ 327 ff. BGB, which implements the Digitale-Inhalte-Richtlinie).

11. Liability

This section limits what we owe you if something goes wrong. It is drafted to match the limits that German consumer law actually permits — read carefully.

Unlimited liability. We are liable without limit for:
- injury to life, body, or health caused by us, our employees, or our agents;
- any damage caused by our intent (Vorsatz) or gross negligence (grobe Fahrlässigkeit);
- any damage covered by a warranty (Garantie) we have given;
- liability under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz);
- liability for the fraudulent concealment of a defect (arglistiges Verschweigen).
Liability for simple negligence (einfache Fahrlässigkeit). For damage caused by our simple negligence, we are liable only for the breach of a material contractual obligation — that is, an obligation whose fulfillment is essential to the proper performance of this contract and on whose fulfillment you, as our contractual partner, may regularly rely (a so-called Kardinalpflicht). In that case, our liability is limited to the foreseeable, contract-typical damage.
No liability for the rest. Any liability beyond what is described in paragraphs 1 and 2 is excluded.
Liability of employees and agents. The above limits apply equally to our employees, representatives, and agents (Erfüllungsgehilfen).
Force majeure. We are not liable for delay or non-performance caused by events outside our reasonable control (acts of god, war, civil unrest, government action, cyberattacks of unusual scope, failures of public infrastructure or of our upstream providers despite reasonable diligence).
Content liability. We do not pre-screen content you upload. We are not liable for the content you or your household-mates create. We will remove unlawful content when we obtain knowledge of it, in line with our obligations as a hosting service provider under Art. 6 of the EU Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065).
Backups. While we operate backups (see the Privacy Policy), you remain responsible for keeping your own copy of any content that is critical to you. You can request a JSON export of your recipes, plans, and lists at any time by emailing cook@withstaple.com (an in-app export button is on the roadmap). Treat Staple as your primary tool but not your sole archive.

12. Your statutory rights

This section is not a limitation. It is a reminder.

As a consumer based in the EU (and especially in Germany), you have rights under mandatory law that no contract can take away. In particular:

The statutory warranty rights for digital content under §§ 327 ff. BGB. If the service is defective, you can require us to bring it into conformity. Where that fails or is unreasonable, you may have a right to a reduced fee (in the current free version, that is moot) or to terminate.
The right of withdrawal for distance contracts under §§ 312g, 355 BGB. Because the current version of Staple is free, there is no payment to refund, but the right to withdraw still applies and is exercised by simply not signing in any more (or deleting your account).
The right to lodge a complaint with a competent supervisory authority for any data-protection matter — see the Privacy Policy.

Nothing in these Terms removes or limits any of those rights.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes — anything that affects what you owe, what we owe, what data we collect, how we end the relationship, or how disputes are resolved — will be announced by email to your registered account address at least 30 days before they take effect. The email will summarize what is changing and link to the new version.

If you do not accept a material change, you can delete your account before the change takes effect. By continuing to use Staple after the effective date, you accept the new terms.

Non-material changes (typo fixes, clarifications, restructuring without changing meaning) are made silently and reflected in the "Last updated" date at the top.

A version history of material changes is maintained at the bottom of this page.

14. Governing law and place of jurisdiction

These Terms are governed by the law of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG).

If you are a consumer with habitual residence in another EU member state, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your habitual residence (Art. 6(2) Rome I Regulation).

The exclusive place of jurisdiction for any dispute arising out of or in connection with these Terms is Frankfurt am Main, where this is legally possible — i.e. for merchants (Kaufleute), legal persons under public law, and special funds under public law within the meaning of § 38 ZPO. Consumers may sue and be sued in the courts of their habitual residence.

We are not obliged and not willing to participate in dispute-resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board (Verbraucherschlichtungsstelle) within the meaning of the Verbraucherstreitbeilegungsgesetz (§ 36 VSBG).

15. Contact

For any question about these Terms:

Email: cook@withstaple.com Post: Mischa Frank, Eckenheimer Landstr. 70, 60318 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

A real human reads every message sent to that address. We aim to reply within five working days.

Version history

July 2026. Initial published version.
August 2026. Added Google Gemini API as a subprocessor (recipe import extraction, AI-generated recipe photos).