Privacy
The short version
On this website, the only thing we collect is the email address you type into the waitlist form, plus which button you clicked and which country you were in. There are no cookies, no analytics, no advertising trackers, and nothing on this page loads from anyone else's server.
The Preheat app is a separate thing, and it is now running. If you use it, it holds your shop, your orders and your customers. If you connect Instagram to it, it reads the direct messages people send you so an order can start from a message instead of a screenshot. It never posts as you and never messages anyone first.
We will never sell your email or hand it to a marketing company. Email hello@preheatapp.app and we'll delete you, no questions asked.
Who we are
Preheat is being built by a two-person team in Alberta, Canada. In this policy, "we" and "us" means that team, and "you" means anyone visiting this website.
This policy covers two things, and they are worth keeping apart in your head. There is this marketing website, where the only thing collected is a waitlist email. And there is the Preheat app at app.preheatapp.app, which bakers sign into and which holds real business data: orders, customers, allergy notes, payment records, and Instagram messages if you choose to connect them.
An earlier version of this policy said the app did not exist yet. It does now, so the sections below describe both. Where a section applies to only one of them, it says so.
What we collect
When you join the waitlist
When you submit the form, we store four things:
- Your email address, converted to lowercase so we don't end up with duplicates.
- Which form you used: the one at the top of the page or the one at the bottom. This tells us which message actually persuaded people.
- A two-letter country code, worked out by Cloudflare from your connection. We use it to see whether interest is coming from Canada or the US. We do not store your IP address, and the country code is not precise enough to identify a city, let alone a person.
- The date and time you signed up.
That is the complete list. We don't ask for your name, your business, or your phone number, and there are no hidden fields collecting anything else.
Ordinary server logs
Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, keeps short-term technical logs of requests: the usual things like IP address, browser type, and which page was requested. This is standard for any website and is used to keep the site running and to block attacks. We don't build profiles from these logs or connect them to waitlist signups. Cloudflare's retention is governed by their privacy policy.
When you use the Preheat app
Signing up for the app creates an account with your email address and a password. Everything after that is what you put in: your shop's name and details, your products, your order forms, and the orders, quotes and payment records that come out of them.
It also holds your customers' information, because that is what an order is: a name, usually an email address, sometimes a phone number or an Instagram handle, whatever your order form asks for, and any photos they upload. Some of that is sensitive. Allergy notes especially. We treat those as sensitive: they are never used for analytics, never sent to an advertising network, and never leave the app except in the emails and invoices you send your own customer.
Your customers did not sign up with us, they ordered a cake from you. We hold their information on your behalf, we do not market to them, and we will delete any of it on request. See "Your rights" below.
When you connect Instagram
Connecting Instagram is entirely optional, it is off until you turn it on, and the rest of the app works exactly the same without it.
When you connect an account, Instagram asks you to approve three things: viewing your profile, which it requires, access to your messages, which is the part we actually need, and access to comments, which is only used for the keyword reply described below. We never ask to post anything, and we never ask for your insights or analytics. Once approved we store:
- Which Instagram account is connected: its username and the account identifiers Instagram gives us.
- An access token, which is what lets us read messages on your behalf. It is encrypted in our database and never shown in the app or sent anywhere else.
- The direct messages sent to that account from the point you connect onward: who the conversation is with, as the per-account identifier and handle Instagram provides, the text of each message, when it was sent, and a note of any attachments. We do not download or store the images themselves.
We store the message exactly as Instagram sends it before reading it, because a message we fail to understand is one Instagram will not send again, and losing a customer's order is worse than holding the text a little longer. That raw copy is deleted on a much shorter clock than the message itself; see "How long we keep it".
The people who message you have not agreed to any of this. They messaged a bakery. So we keep the minimum needed to turn a message into an order, we never use it for anything else, and it expires on its own. If one of them asks you to delete their information, that request covers their messages too, and we will carry it out.
Comments on your posts. If you set up a keyword reply, Instagram also tells us when someone comments on one of your posts. We look at the text only to see whether it contains your keyword, and we do not store the comment: not its text, not the post it was on. If the keyword is there we send that person one private message with your order form link, and what we keep is the same thing we would keep for any conversation, which is who it is with and the reply we sent. A comment without your keyword leaves nothing behind at all. Comments are public on Instagram either way, and we never reply in public.
You can disconnect Instagram at any time from your shop settings, which stops us reading anything new. That does not revoke our access at Instagram's end: to do that as well, remove Preheat from Settings, then Apps and websites, inside Instagram.
When you sign in with Instagram
If you have connected Instagram, you can also use it to sign in. All that stores is the Instagram account identifier alongside your Preheat account, so we can tell it is you.
It is never the only way into your account. Every Preheat account keeps an email address and a password, and they keep working whether or not Instagram does. That is deliberate: we are not willing to build a product where losing access to Meta means a baker is locked out of her own calendar.
What we don't do
- No cookies. This site sets none. That's why you weren't nagged by a consent banner.
- No analytics. No Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no session recording, no heatmaps.
- No third-party requests. The fonts are served from our own domain rather than Google Fonts, so loading this page tells no one but us that you visited.
- No selling or sharing. We will not sell, rent, or trade your email address, and we won't pass it to advertisers or data brokers.
- No unrelated email. Joining the waitlist means we may email you about Preheat. It does not subscribe you to anything else.
- No posting as you. Preheat never publishes to your Instagram, never comments, and never edits your profile. We do not ask Instagram for permission to do any of it.
- No messaging anyone first. Preheat only ever reads conversations a customer started. There is no cold outreach in this product and no way to make it do that.
- No reading your feed. Instagram requires profile access before it will grant message access, so we hold that permission. We use it to confirm which account is connected and to show you its handle. We do not store your posts.
- No AI reading your messages. Nothing in Preheat currently sends a message to an AI model. We intend to add a feature that drafts an order from a conversation for you to approve, and when it exists we will say so here, before it ships, and never use your messages to train anyone's model.
Why we collect it
The waitlist email: to tell you when Preheat opens up, and to understand demand (how many bakers are interested, and roughly where they are) so we know whether to keep building. That's it.
Everything in the app: to run the thing you are paying us to run. Orders exist so you can fill them, allergy notes so nobody gets hurt, payment records so you know who has paid. We do not have a second use for any of it.
Instagram messages: so a custom order can start from the message a customer already sent you, instead of you copying it into a form by hand. That is the entire purpose, and it is the reason we ask for the narrowest message permission Instagram offers rather than a broader one that would be easier to build against.
By submitting the form you're consenting to us contacting you about Preheat. You can withdraw that consent at any time; see below.
Where your data lives
Waitlist entries are stored in a Cloudflare D1 database, and the site runs on Cloudflare's network. If we've switched on signup notifications, a copy of your email address also arrives in our own inbox.
App data lives in a database on our own server, hosted by Railway, with a continuously replicated backup copy held in object storage so a failure does not lose your orders. Photos your customers upload are stored separately in object storage. Emails the app sends, such as receipts and quote links, go out through Postmark, which necessarily sees the address and the contents of that email.
Instagram messages are read from Meta and stored in that same database. Meta keeps its own copy of your conversations under its own policy, which we have no control over. Disconnecting Preheat has no effect on what Instagram itself keeps.
Cloudflare operates worldwide, so your data may be stored or processed outside Canada, including in the United States. While it's in another country it can be accessed by that country's courts and law enforcement under their laws. We're telling you this because Canadian privacy law says you should be able to make an informed choice, and because an email address is a small thing to entrust to us but it's still yours.
How long we keep it
Waitlist emails: until Preheat opens up and we've told you about it, or until you ask us to delete it, whichever comes first. If we decide not to build Preheat, we'll email the list to say so and then delete it. We're not going to sit on your address indefinitely for a product that never shipped.
Your shop's data: for as long as you have an account. Orders are kept as history, because a baker's own records of what she sold and when should not disappear when someone tidies up.
Instagram messages expire on their own, whether or not anyone asks. We are storing other people's conversations, so keeping them forever is not something we are willing to default to:
- The raw copy of what Instagram sent us is deleted 30 days after we have read it, and in every case within 90 days.
- Messages themselves are deleted after 180 days, and a conversation with nothing left in it is deleted with them, so no handle is left behind on its own.
Those windows are ours, not a legal minimum, and we may shorten them. If we ever lengthen them we will say so here first.
Your rights
Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) gives you the right to:
- Ask what we hold about you. We'll send you every row we have.
- Correct it if it's wrong.
- Withdraw your consent and have it deleted. We'll remove your entry and confirm when it's done.
This covers your customers too. If someone who ordered from a Preheat shop asks to be deleted, we carry it out properly rather than hiding the row: their inquiries and uploaded photos are destroyed, their Instagram conversation and every message in it is destroyed, and their name, email, phone, handle and allergy notes are erased. The order's date and total survive, because a baker's books should not change when someone exercises a right, but nothing identifying them remains attached to it.
One email to hello@preheatapp.app covers any of these. We aim to reply within a few days and, as the law requires, within 30 days at the outside. It's two people reading that inbox, so you'll get a human.
If you're not happy with how we've handled it, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
Keeping it safe
Both the site and the app are served over HTTPS, and their databases are reachable only by our own code. There's no public interface to either.
Inside the app, your Instagram access token is encrypted at rest, so a copy of the database on its own does not hand someone the ability to read your messages. Everything Instagram sends us is checked against a cryptographic signature before we store it, so nobody who guesses the address can feed us messages that never happened. We never see or store card numbers: card payments go through Stripe's own hosted pages.
We take reasonable precautions, but no one can promise perfect security, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. If we ever discover a breach affecting your data, we'll tell you and the Privacy Commissioner as the law requires.
Children
This site is aimed at people running a food business. It isn't directed at children, and we don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.
Changes to this policy
If we change it, we'll update the date at the top. If the change is significant (collecting something new, or using your email for a new purpose), we'll email the waitlist rather than quietly editing the page and hoping you don't notice.
Contact
hello@preheatapp.app. Real people, usually within a day or two.