Privacy Policy
Costara ("we," "us") provides vendor price intelligence software for restaurants and food distributors. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have. The short version: we collect what we need to run the service, we don't sell your data, and your price sheets are yours.
Information we collect
- Account information — name, email, phone number, business name, and plan details you provide at signup.
- Price sheet data — PDFs, photos, and text you upload so our AI can extract items and prices. This includes vendor names, item names, pack sizes, and prices.
- Order data — items, quantities, locations, and approval history created when your team uses Costara to order.
- Usage data — device type, app version, and feature usage that help us fix bugs and improve the product.
How we use it
- To operate the service: parsing price sheets, running comparisons, sending order notifications, and calculating savings.
- To process uploads with AI. Price sheets are sent to our AI provider (Anthropic) solely to extract structured price data; they are not used to train models.
- To communicate with you about your account, orders, and service updates.
- To improve Costara using aggregated, de-identified usage patterns.
What we don't do
- We do not sell your personal information or your pricing data.
- We do not share one restaurant's negotiated prices with another restaurant, or one distributor's sheet with a competing distributor, except as the marketplace product inherently requires (a distributor's listed marketplace prices are visible to restaurants by design).
- We do not run ads or share data with ad networks.
Sharing
We share data only with service providers that run the product — cloud hosting, database, AI processing, and SMS/email delivery — each bound by contract to use it solely to provide the service to us. We may disclose information if required by law.
Security & retention
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. We retain account and order data while your account is active and for a reasonable period afterward for accounting and legal purposes. You can request deletion at any time.
Your choices
- Access, correct, or export your data by contacting us.
- Delete your account and associated data by emailing hello@getcostara.com.
- Opt out of non-essential communications via the unsubscribe link in any email.
Children
Costara is a business tool and is not directed to anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect data from children.
Changes
If we materially change this policy we will notify you by email or in-app before the change takes effect.
Contact
Questions about privacy: hello@getcostara.com