Shelfy — Privacy Policy
Last updated: 8 September 2026
Shelfy is published by Appsolute Solutions. This policy describes what the app does with your data.
Accounts
Shelfy has email-and-password accounts. Email addresses and hashed passwords are stored by Supabase Auth on behalf of Appsolute Solutions. There is one library per account.
What Shelfy stores, and where
Your library — the books you have saved, your ratings and your notes — is stored in Appsolute’s Supabase project, visible only to the signed-in account through row-level security. A copy of the last synced shelf stays on your device so you can browse it offline. Signing out or uninstalling the app does not delete the cloud library.
Photos
When you photograph a shelf, the image is sent over HTTPS to Shelfy’s backend, which forwards it to OpenRouter, which routes it to a vision model (currently Google Gemini) to read the book titles from the spines.
- The photo is used for that one request and is not stored by Shelfy — neither the image nor the text extracted from it is written to any database we operate.
- OpenRouter and the model provider process the image under their own terms — see the OpenRouter Privacy Policy and the Google Privacy Policy.
- Only the photos you explicitly capture or select are sent. Shelfy does not read your photo library in the background.
Book information
To fill in covers, authors, editions and prices, Shelfy queries Open Library and the Google Books API directly from your device. Those requests carry the book title you are looking up and your device’s IP address, as any web request does. They do not carry your library, your ratings, or any identifier we assign.
Device identifier
Shelfy generates a random identifier on first launch and sends it with scan requests. It exists solely to cap how many scans one installation can run per hour, so the service is not run up as a bill by abuse. It is random, is not derived from your device or from you, is not linked to any other data, and is destroyed when you uninstall the app.
What Shelfy does not do
No advertising. No analytics or tracking SDKs. No selling or sharing of personal information. No location, contacts, or device-identifier collection beyond the random scan identifier described above.
Children
Shelfy is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from them.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top will change and the updated text will be published at this URL.
Contact
Questions about this policy: privacy@appsolute.co.za