Help
Getting started
Auto Prepped keeps track of the food you have put by, so it stays in date and you know how many days it would feed your household. This manual describes what the product does today. Where something is not built yet, it says so.
Create an account
- Go to Sign up. Enter your name, your email address and a password of at least twelve characters. A phrase you will remember is fine; there are no other rules.
- Check your email for a confirmation link and open it. You cannot sign in until you have.
- Sign in.
A household is created for you when you sign up, named after you. You are its owner. Members, dietary details and storage locations are set up from the household pages as they arrive; today the household exists with its name and nothing else.
You can also sign in with Google or Apple where the site offers it. A social sign-in joins an existing account only when the provider confirms your email address.
Where things are
| Page | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Account | Your name, your address, changing your password, signing out |
| Settings → Photographs | The training switch, how long photographs are kept, and what is done with them |
| Settings → Your data | Take a copy of everything, or delete your household and your account |
| Pantry → Use these next | What to use first, and where to log an item as used |
| Pantry → Your next order | The replacements queued as items are used, to review before you buy |
| Plan | A store for the people and days you name, the gap against your pantry, and a tick list for the shop. Plans |
The front page shows a demonstration household so you can see what the numbers look like before you add anything.
Your data
Everything Auto Prepped holds about your household is yours to take or remove, from Settings → Your data.
Export. Press Export my data beside the household. The export is built in the background and an email arrives with a link. The link works for you alone, while you are signed in, for 48 hours. It downloads one zip file containing export.json, which lists the household and its settings, its members and their dietary details, invitations, storage locations, every item with its date and where the date came from, the photograph records, pairing records, checks, cover history, alerts, plans, rotation cycles, your subscription, the affiliate links you followed, your own account and the audit entries about you, and images/, which holds the photographs the household still had. It contains no password and no sign-in token. See Your photographs for what the photograph records are.
Some things about you are held by the companies below rather than in our own database, so the archive names them instead of containing them, under heldElsewhere. Ask us and we will get you a copy.
Delete. Press Delete beside a household you own. The next page says what will go and asks you to type the household's name. Deleting removes the household, its members, items, storage locations, photographs, checks, cover history and alerts, all in one step. If you have subscribed, your customer record at Stripe goes too, with the address and payment history on it. If it is your only household, your account is deleted with it and every device is signed out. There is no undo. An email confirms what happened.
Deleting your account needs a recent sign-in. If you signed in more than a day ago, the page asks you to sign out and in again first, before anything is removed.
What stays after a deletion, stated plainly:
- The record that an export, a change to the photograph switch or a deletion happened. It holds no name and no address; it says what happened, when, and which of our staff did it where one of them did. It still carries the identifier your account had. The intention is to replace that with a meaningless token, so the record proves what was done without saying who it was done to. That is not true yet: the record is append-only and cannot be edited by the software, which is what makes it trustworthy, and changing that safely needs a change to the database we have not made. Until then the identifier stays, and it leads nowhere, because everything it once pointed at is gone.
- The pairing records, which are the product's record of how a barcode photograph and a date photograph were matched. The intention is to keep these with every link to a photograph or a person removed, because they are what teaches the matching to improve. Today they are deleted with the household, because the database does not yet allow them to be kept detached. When that changes, this page will say so.
- Records of the payments themselves at Stripe, where the law requires Stripe to keep them, even though your customer record is deleted.
Only the household's owner can delete it. A member can export.
Who else handles your details
We use two other companies to run Auto Prepped. This is what each holds. It is a statement of fact, not of policy; the terms explain the rest.
| Company | What it holds | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Stripe | Your name, email address, billing address, card details and every payment and invoice, if you have subscribed. We never see or store your card details | It takes the payments |
| Postmark | Your email address and the emails we have sent you: confirmation, password reset, invitations, export links, deletion confirmations and the expiry digest | It delivers our email |
We also keep server logs. They record the requests your account made, with identifiers for your account and household and, for sign-in attempts, a one-way scramble of the address you connected from, never the address itself. They are kept for a set period and then removed.
If you have not subscribed, there is nothing about you at Stripe.
Getting help
This manual is the help. It is linked from the foot of every page and from your settings, and each page of it says what the product does today.