Privacy Policy
YardScout keeps your lawn on your phone. Three things leave it: photos you choose to scan, your location, and, only if you sign in, your records.
Who runs this
YardScout is an independently developed app. There is no advertising business behind it, no analytics SDK in the build, and no third party is paid for or sold your data. Those are the three things most lawn and garden apps do, so they are worth stating first. The app does record which steps of its own setup you completed, and only that; see "How setup is measured" below.
What stays on your phone
By default, everything. Your zones and their boundaries, soil test results, treatment and mowing logs, observations, scan results, equipment, product prices, the recommendations you have set aside, and every preference are stored in the app's own storage on the device and are not sent anywhere.
Scan photos are always local. They are copied into the app so they survive your camera roll being cleared, and they are never uploaded to the sync service, not even when you sign in. A photo leaves the phone only at the moment you run a scan, and only to be analyzed.
Photos you scan
When you scan, the photo and a short description of the lawn it came from (grass type, zone soil, recent soil temperature) are sent to OpenAI's API to be analyzed, and the result comes back to your phone.
The request passes through a server run for this app, which holds the API credential and counts your scans against a monthly limit. That server does not store the photo.
YardScout takes part in a data sharing arrangement with OpenAI. In exchange for a daily allowance of analysis capacity, the photos you scan and the results they produce may be used by OpenAI to improve their models. This is a deliberate choice and it is what keeps scanning free to use, but it is a real trade and you should know about it before you make it.
For that reason the app asks you to agree before your first scan, and will not send anything until you do. What it cannot do is judge what is in the frame, so treat a scan as public: avoid faces, license plates, house numbers and property that is not yours.
If you never scan, no photo ever leaves the device.
Products you look up
A pesticide label is federal law and it gets revised, so the app reads labels from the source rather than from a list packed inside it. When you add a product, its EPA registration number goes to the EPA public registry, which returns what the product is, what it is registered to be used on, and a link to its current label.
- EPA Pesticide Product Label System: a registration number, to fetch the product record and its label
Where you are
Lawn advice that does not know where the lawn is is fiction, so the app asks for a zip code and, if you map a yard, an address or coordinates. That location is sent to the public data services below to answer specific questions.
- NOAA / weather.gov: coordinates, for forecast and current conditions
- OpenWeatherMap: zip or coordinates, for conditions and to turn a zip into a point
- Open-Meteo: coordinates, for soil temperature, rainfall history, and the historical temperatures growing-degree-day tracking needs
- US Census geocoder: the street address you enter, to turn it into coordinates
- US Census TIGERweb: coordinates, for boundary lookup
- USDA NRCS Soil Survey: coordinates, to look up the mapped soil under the yard
- USGS National Map: coordinates, for ground elevation
- County parcel GIS: coordinates or address, to find your property outline
- Regrid: coordinates, for parcel lookup, only in builds configured with it
- Mapbox: the map area you are viewing, to draw the map
If you sign in
Sync is optional and off until you create an account. The app works completely without one.
You can sign in with an email address and password, or with Google or Apple. When you use a provider, the app receives your email address and a token proving you signed in; it never sees your password, and it does not ask either provider for contacts, calendar, files, or anything else.
Once signed in, syncing copies your lawns, zones, soil tests, treatments, mowing log, scan results, observations and the recommendations you have set aside to a database hosted on Supabase, so a new phone can get them back. Rows are readable only by the account that wrote them, enforced by the database rather than by the app. Scan photos are not included.
A count of how many scans you have run this month is kept so the monthly limit can be enforced. It records a number and a month, nothing about what was scanned.
How setup is measured
Most people who open YardScout never finish setting it up, and until recently there was no way to tell where they stopped. The app now records the moment it first showed you each step of setup and the moment you completed it: opened the app, saw the sign-in screen, signed in or skipped it, saw the tutorial, entered a location, chose a grass type, gave a lawn size, reached the app.
That is the whole of it. Timestamps for named setup steps and nothing else - no screen contents, no taps, no time spent, no device identifier, and no record of anything you do once setup is finished. It is stored on the lawn record itself rather than anywhere new, so if you have not signed in it never leaves your phone, and if you have, it travels with the lawn it belongs to and is readable only by your account.
It exists so that a step people abandon can be found and fixed, and it is the only behavioural measurement in the app.
If you subscribe
Payment is handled entirely by Apple or Google. The app never sees your card, your billing address or your name, and no payment detail is stored on your device or on our servers.
Whether a subscription is active is tracked through RevenueCat, which receives an anonymous purchase identifier from the store and, once you have signed in, your account identifier so the purchase can follow you to a new phone. It does not receive your email address, your lawns or anything you have recorded in the app.
The result of that - active or not, which product, and when it runs out - is stored against your account so the parts of the app that cost money to run can check it. It is written only by the payment system and is readable only by you.
Cancelling is done in the App Store or Play Store, not here. Deleting your account removes the record of what you bought; it does not cancel the subscription, which has to be cancelled with whichever store you bought it from.
Services you connect yourself
If you connect an irrigation controller, the app talks to that vendor's API, Rachio today, using a key you provide. The key is stored on your device and is not sent to the sync service. Disconnecting removes it.
Children
YardScout is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 13.
Deleting your data
Settings has a Delete Account button. It removes your account and every row belonging to it from the server, then erases the app's data from the phone: records, settings, and the scan photos. It cannot be undone and there is no grace period, so export your journal first if you want to keep anything.
Deleting the app without deleting the account leaves the synced copy in place, which is what makes a restore possible. Use Delete Account if you want it gone.
Requesting deletion of an account you can no longer sign in to, or a copy of what is held, is possible by email.
Changes
This policy is versioned in the app's source alongside the code it describes, and the effective date above changes when the substance does.