What we collect
When you use Achoo, we collect the following information:
- ─ Email address — to create and manage your account.
- ─ Name — the name you provide when you create your account, which we display in your account and use to address you in emails.
- ─ Location data — your GPS coordinates (rounded for privacy) or city search queries, used to fetch local pollen data. We do not store precise GPS coordinates.
- ─ Allergen profile — the allergens you choose to track and your sensitivity settings.
- ─ Symptom logs — daily symptom entries you choose to record.
- ─ Treatment logs — medications, remedies, and avoidance behaviors you choose to record, including timing.
- ─ Notification preferences — your email and push notification settings (opt-in/opt-out, alert types, and, if you set one, your preferred morning delivery window).
- ─ Email engagement data — when we send you an email, we record that it was sent. Resend, our email provider, then reports back whether it was delivered, opened, or clicked, and we store that report.
- ─ Push subscription data — if you enable browser push notifications, we store a push endpoint URL and encryption keys provided by your browser. This data identifies your browser for push delivery but does not contain personally identifiable information beyond what your browser shares.
- ─ Apple push notification tokens — if you turn on notifications in the Achoo iOS app, we store the device token Apple assigns to your device, which push environment it belongs to, and the app version, so we can deliver notifications through the Apple Push Notification service. The token identifies your device for push delivery only.
- ─ Timezone — auto-detected on first login, used for timezone-aware email delivery.
- ─ iPhone beta participation — if you join the iPhone beta with an invite code, we record the date and time you joined. We use it only to determine whether your account receives beta access to Plus features.
- ─ Founding price reservation — if you choose to reserve the founding price in the iPhone app, we record that you did and the date and time. We use it to send you the founding-price offer by email and to count how many people reserved.
- ─ Payment information — processed by our payment provider, Polar. We do not store your credit card details.
- ─ Subscription lifecycle records — when a subscription or order of yours is created, updated, cancelled, paid, or refunded, Polar sends us an event notification and we store a record of it. Each record contains the event type and date, the product and subscription identifiers, the subscription or order status, whether the subscription is set to end at the close of the current billing period, that period's end date, and, if you selected a cancellation reason or entered a cancellation comment in Polar's billing portal, that reason and comment. Your email address is stored in these records in partially masked form (for example,
har***@example.com). We do not ask you for a cancellation reason inside Achoo; we store only what Polar collects.
How we use your data
- ─ To provide real-time pollen and allergen tracking based on your location.
- ─ To send you in-app notifications when allergen levels exceed your thresholds.
- ─ To store your symptom history so you can track patterns over time.
- ─ To compare your treatment logs against symptom and allergen data.
- ─ To generate personal allergy patterns (allergen-symptom matching, personal scores, pattern spotting) from your logged data.
- ─ To record, at fixed logging milestones (7, 14, and 30 days), whether the personal-pattern analysis found a match for your account — an internal, aggregate measurement of how well that feature performs, used to improve it and not shown to you or any other user.
- ─ To send you alert emails (daily pollen reports, spike alerts) if you opt in.
- ─ To send you an optional season-start reminder email or push notification for allergens you track, if you turn it on.
- ─ To send you a monthly recap email of your own check-ins, if you logged that month.
- ─ To send you browser push notifications about pollen alerts if you opt in. Push messages are delivered through your browser vendor's push service (e.g., Google for Chrome, Mozilla for Firefox, Apple for Safari).
- ─ To send you push notifications through the Apple Push Notification service if you turn them on in the iOS app.
- ─ To send you transactional emails related to your account (welcome, trial reminders). These are sent automatically and do not require opt-in, but you can unsubscribe.
- ─ To provide a 7-day free trial of premium features.
- ─ To provide iPhone beta participants with access to Plus features at no charge until the beta ends.
- ─ To process your subscription payments.
- ─ To maintain a record of subscription and order events, including any cancellation reason and comment you provide to Polar, for accounting purposes, for support, and to measure why customers cancel.
Third-party services
Achoo relies on the following third-party services:
- ─ Convex — our database and backend infrastructure.
- ─ Google Pollen API — provides the pollen and allergen data we display.
- ─ Polar — handles subscription billing and payment processing.
- ─ Resend — sends transactional emails (pollen alerts, welcome emails, trial reminders) on our behalf, and reports back delivery, open, and click events for those emails.
- ─ OpenStreetMap Nominatim — provides city search and geocoding for the travel planning feature on the website.
- ─ Vercel — hosts the Achoo website and provides privacy-friendly web analytics (page view counts and performance metrics). Vercel Analytics does not use cookies, does not collect personal data, and does not track individual users.
- ─ Apple — delivers push notifications to the iOS app (Apple Push Notification service); in the iOS app, provides your device location (Location Services), the name of the place at your location, and city search (Apple Maps), so your device's coordinates and the text you type into the city search are sent to Apple for those lookups; and distributes the app through TestFlight and the App Store. TestFlight may collect crash and usage data under Apple's own privacy policy.
Each of these services has their own privacy policy. We encourage you to review them.
Email communications
- ─ Alert emails (daily pollen reports, spike alerts) are opt-in only. The master switch defaults to off.
- ─ Season-start reminders are opt-in, sent at most once per allergen season, and covered by every unsubscribe link.
- ─ A monthly recap of your own check-ins is sent once a month, only if you logged that month, and is covered by every unsubscribe link.
- ─ If you reserve the founding price in the iPhone app, we will email you the offer before the beta ends. We send it because you asked for it, and it is covered by every unsubscribe link.
- ─ Transactional emails (welcome, trial reminders) are sent automatically as part of your account. You can unsubscribe from these separately.
- ─ We send a maximum of one alert email per user per day.
- ─ Every email includes a one-click unsubscribe link. Email clients that support RFC 8058 (such as Gmail and Outlook) can also unsubscribe directly via a native button without opening a browser.
- ─ Unsubscribe tokens are generated per user. No login is required to unsubscribe.
- ─ Emails we send include delivery, open, and click tracking through Resend. We use this data to see whether an email was useful to you (for example, whether it's worth continuing to send) and to improve what we send. We do not sell this data or share it with anyone other than Resend, who processes it on our behalf.
Automated analysis
When you log symptoms and treatments, Achoo automatically compares your data against local allergen levels to spot patterns.
This analysis is performed using statistical correlation only. No AI or machine learning models are used.
Insights (allergen-symptom patterns, treatment comparisons, detected patterns) are derived solely from your own data and are not shared with other users.
Data retention
Your data is kept as long as your account is active. You can delete your account and all associated data at any time from your account section in the Achoo iOS app, or by emailing us at the address below. Deletion removes your account, sign-in credentials and sessions, symptom and treatment logs, allergen profile, notifications, insights (including the milestone records described above), notification preferences, push and device registrations, and email delivery records. Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone.
If you have an active subscription, it is cancelled as part of deletion. Billing records held by Polar are retained by Polar under its own policy.
Subscription lifecycle records are an exception. Because they are required for accounting and tax records, they are retained after an account is deleted. These records identify you only by a partially masked email address and the identifiers assigned by Polar.
Cookies & local storage
Achoo uses local storage to remember your text size, dashboard table sort order, and, when your device's location service is unavailable or you have declined location access, the city you selected by search, so that it can be restored on your next visit. The saved city is stored on your device; when you have declined location access or your browser does not support location, it is also saved to your account, like a location detected by GPS, so that email alerts can reference the correct area (see "Location data" above). A city remembered only because of a temporary location failure stays on your device and is not saved to your account. We do not use tracking cookies or third-party analytics cookies. A legacy first-party cookie named thememay remain in your browser from the app's earlier theme switcher; it is no longer read, contains no personal information, and is deleted automatically the next time you visit. We use Vercel Web Analytics, which collects anonymous page view data (pages visited, referrer, country) without cookies and without identifying individual users.
The Achoo iOS app stores your sign-in session in your device's Keychain. It also saves a copy of the pollen summary it last displayed for the current day (the location coordinates and city name it was shown for, the pollen level, the headline and advice text, and the top allergens) in storage on your device that is shared with the Achoo home-screen widget, so the widget can display it. This copy stays on your device and is deleted when you sign out. The app also remembers on your device whether you dismissed the "Getting started" checklist.
Your rights
You have the right to access, correct, or delete your personal data. You can delete your account and its data yourself from your account section in the Achoo iOS app. To make any other request, or to delete your account without using the iOS app, email us at the address below.
AI systems & content signals
Our robots.txt declares the following content-use preferences for AI systems:
- ─ Real-time AI answers (search, ai-input): YES — AI assistants may read and cite our public pages when answering user questions.
- ─ AI training (ai-train): NO — we do not consent to our content being harvested as training data for AI models.
No user data is exposed to AI systems; these preferences apply only to the public pages of the site.
Contact
If you have questions about this privacy policy, reach out to us at hello@achoo.life.