HabitHouse
Legal

Privacy Policy

This policy explains how HabitHouse handles your information in the app and on this website. The short version: we store what the app needs to work, your coach conversations are generated by the AI provider named below, your friends see only the wins you choose to share, and we do not sell your data or run advertising trackers.

Last updated: October 2, 2026

Who we are

HabitHouse is a service of Better Human Labs LLC ("we," "us," or "our"). We make the HabitHouse app for iPhone and run the habithouse.app website. Questions about this policy? Email [email protected], or write to us at:

Better Human Labs LLC
69 Lincoln Blvd Ste A #222
Lincoln, CA 95648
United States

The HabitHouse app

Your account

You need an account to use HabitHouse. You can sign in with Apple, with Google, or with your email address, in which case we email you a 6-digit code each time you sign in. There are no passwords. We store a unique account identifier, the email address tied to your sign-in, your display name, a username that we create from your display name (you can change it), an avatar if you add one, your time zone (so reminders and each day's logs land on the right day), the coach you picked, and your confirmation that you are 13 or older.

If you open a friend's profile link before you have an account, the app keeps that link on your phone for up to 7 days so it can connect you once you sign up. When it does, we record who invited you, so both of you can receive the coins we give for an invite.

What the app stores

To run the app, we store the content you create and the information the app needs to work:

  • Habits and schedules: the habits you add, how often and when you plan to do them, and the nook (folder) you file each one in.
  • Daily logs: whether you finished or skipped a habit each day, and the count for habits you count.
  • Journal and photos: the notes you write about a habit, and the photos you take with the camera when you do one. If you turn it on in Settings, the app can also take a second photo of your face right after the habit photo. A photo stays private, visible only to you on your profile, unless you share it with friends.
  • Coach conversations: the messages you send your coach, the coach's replies, and any photo you attach to a message. Messages are kept for 30 days and then deleted, along with the photos attached to them. On the Free plan we also keep a count of the replies you have had that day, which is how the daily limit works.
  • Coach memory and coach notes: a summary of what your coach has learned about your goals and patterns, generated from your conversations so its support stays consistent over time, and the short notes your coach writes about a habit, which you can read, correct, or clear.
  • Houses, rooms, props and coins: the houses you own and the one you live in, the rooms you have opened, the objects you own, your coin balance, and a history of what you earned and spent.
  • Activity: when you last opened the app, so your coach stops sending check-ins if you have not been around for a while.
  • Preferences: your chosen coach, reminder and notification settings, your coach sharing switches, who can visit your house, and your profile colour if you have Pro.
  • Friends and sharing: your friends, pending requests, the wins you share, your reactions, anyone you have blocked, and any reports you make. See Friends and what they can see.
  • Support and feedback: messages and screenshots you send us, with the app version, platform, and device model so we can troubleshoot.
  • Diagnostics: when something in the app breaks, it records the error message, the technical trace, the app version, the platform, and the device model. This is our own error log.
  • App usage: the app contains no analytics, crash-reporting, or advertising kits from other companies. To improve HabitHouse, the app keeps its own simple usage log: which features you use and when (for example, that you opened the app, viewed a screen, or tapped a button), linked to your account. It never includes your habit names, notes, messages, photos, or location. It stays in HabitHouse's own database, is never sold, is never used for advertising, and is never shared with other companies. Usage records are deleted after 13 months, and all of them are deleted when you delete your account.
  • Safety counts: daily totals of how often the crisis card was shown and how often the safety check (below) acted, with no names, no account details, and no message text.

How the AI coaches work

Brock and Luna are artificial intelligence, not real people. Every reply you get from a coach is generated by an AI model. They are fictional characters with written personalities, and no person reads or answers your conversations. You can read more on our AI and safety page.

When you message a coach, the text you wrote is sent to an AI provider that generates the reply. We do not run the model ourselves. Coach replies, nudges, and conversation summaries are generated by Z.AI (JINGSHENG HENGXING TECHNOLOGY PTE. LTD., Singapore) using its GLM model. Under its data processing terms, Z.AI processes each request in real time to produce the reply and does not store your messages.

Alongside your message, we send the context your coach needs to be useful: the habits you have chosen to share, your recent logs, your coach's saved memory, and, if you have granted it, your Apple Health summary. The provider handles your content only to deliver the coaching feature, under data processing terms that limit what it may do with it.

To keep conversations safe, the text of the messages you send, your coach's replies, check-in texts, and coach notes is also checked by an automated safety service, Typesafe (Typesafe AI, Inc., United States). We send only the text, never your name, account, or photos. Typesafe's terms say it does not use what we send to train AI models. A reply that fails the check is replaced before you see it, and a message that breaks our rules gets a notice instead of a coaching reply. No person reads the result. We keep daily totals of what the check did, with no names and no text.

You decide how much your coach sees. There is a sharing switch for your account and a separate switch on each habit, and the coach can see a habit only when both are on. Turning a switch off stops that habit's details from being sent from then on. It does not erase what the coach already remembered: those memories are hidden while sharing is off and come back if you turn it on again. Deleting your account erases them. Messages you send to the coach are always processed by the AI, because that is how it replies.

If you ask your coach to add a calendar event or a reminder, the app writes it on your phone with your permission. If you ask your coach to find places nearby, the app uses your location once, with your permission, to search Apple Maps, and does not store it. The coach never claims to have done something it did not do.

Friends and what they can see

Friendships in HabitHouse are mutual: both people have to accept. You can find someone by their username or share your profile link. There is no public profile, no follower count, no contact sync, and no way to look someone up by email or phone number.

Your friends can see your display name, username, and avatar, who else you are friends with, the wins you choose to share, and the reactions you leave on their posts. A shared win shows the photo (and the face photo, if you took one), the name of the habit and its result, the day, and your name. You can make a shared photo private again at any time.

You choose who can visit your house: only you, your friends, or anyone who has your username or your profile link. New accounts start with friends. A visitor sees your rooms and the objects you bought, never your habits or your progress. Only your house can be opened to people who are not your friends; your posts, your friends list, and your profile photos stay friends-only.

Your friends never see your habit list, your logs, your notes, your Journal, your private photos, or your coach conversations. Sharing a photo with friends never shares it with your coach, and your coach never sees what your friends do.

You can hide a post, block a person, or report a post or a person. When you block someone, they can no longer see your posts and you no longer see theirs. Reports are read by a person on our team. To review a report we keep a copy of the reported content and the details of the report, even if the post or the account is deleted in the meantime, for up to 90 days. We keep it longer only where a documented safety or legal obligation requires it. If you change your username, we keep a record of the old one for the same period.

Device permissions

The app asks for a permission only when you use the feature that needs it, and you can change or withdraw any of them at any time in your iPhone's Settings:

  • Microphone and speech recognition: to dictate a message or a note instead of typing it. Dictation runs on your phone. The audio never leaves your device, and only the text you dictated goes anywhere, if you choose to send it.
  • Camera and photos: the camera when you take a photo of a habit; your photo library only when you attach a photo to a coach message or a feedback report, or set an avatar.
  • Location: only when you ask your coach to find places nearby, and only while you use the app. Your location is sent once, through our server, to Apple Maps to run that search, and is not stored. You can type a neighborhood instead.
  • Apple Health: read-only access to a small set of activity figures so your coach can confirm a habit without asking. See Apple Health data below.
  • Calendar and Reminders: write-only access, used only when you ask your coach to add an event or a reminder. We do not read your existing entries.
  • Notifications: for habit reminders, messages from your coach, and friend activity you have turned on. You can switch any of these off in the app or in your iPhone's Settings.

The app never tracks your location in the background.

Apple Health data

If you grant Apple Health access, HabitHouse reads a limited, read-only summary from HealthKit: step count, workouts (type and duration), last night's sleep duration, and mindful minutes. We use it for one purpose: letting your coach confirm a habit was done and talk to you about it accurately. We never write to Apple Health.

You should know that this health summary is included in the context sent to our AI provider when it generates your coach's reply, in the same way your habit data is. It is sent with the message and is not stored on our servers. If you turn off sharing with your coach, the app does not read your health data at all, so none of it leaves your device.

In line with Apple's requirements for health data, we never use Apple Health data for advertising or marketing, never use it for data mining unrelated to your coaching, never sell or rent it, and never disclose it to anyone other than the AI provider described above, which processes it solely to generate your coach's response. Your Apple Health permission is managed by iOS, and the coach's access to the summary ends when you delete your account.

The website

This website is a set of static pages. It does not set cookies and does not run analytics. Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, keeps standard server logs, including your IP address and browser details, to keep the site running and secure. The pages load their typefaces from Google Fonts, which means Google receives your IP address and browser details when a page loads.

The site no longer takes email signups. If you joined our email list in the past, we hold your email address, the date and time you joined, and the IP address and browser recorded at signup, and we use the address to send occasional HabitHouse news. Every email includes a one-click unsubscribe link, and you can email us to have your address removed.

How we use your information

  • Provide and run the app, including coaching, rooms, reminders, and sharing with friends.
  • Personalize your coach's support and remember what matters to you.
  • Show your shared wins and reactions to the friends you have chosen.
  • Review reports, enforce our Terms of Use, and keep people safe.
  • Respond to your support requests and feedback.
  • Send the emails you signed up for.
  • Keep the service secure and prevent abuse.
  • Understand and improve how the app works.

Subscriptions and purchases

HabitHouse offers one paid subscription, HabitHouse Pro. If you buy it, the purchase is processed by Apple through the App Store, and our subscription-management provider, RevenueCat, tells us your subscription status so we can unlock features. We never receive or store your payment-card details; those stay with Apple. You can manage or cancel a subscription any time in your iPhone's Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions.

A free trial of Pro is an App Store introductory offer, so it is handled by Apple like any other subscription purchase, and it becomes a paid subscription unless you cancel. RevenueCat tells us that you are in a trial and when it ends, which is how the app shows your trial's end date.

Who we share information with

We do not sell or rent your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We use a small set of service providers to run HabitHouse, each handling only what its job requires:

  • Supabase: our database, account authentication, and private file storage.
  • Z.AI: AI coaching, as described above. Z.AI is based in Singapore and processes coach requests there.
  • Expo and Apple: app build infrastructure and delivery of push notifications. Messages from your coach and friend activity reach your phone through Expo's push service and Apple's. By default a notification carries its full text, so it can include a habit name or your coach's message; you can switch that off in Settings, and your iPhone keeps a locked screen private by default.
  • Typesafe: the automated safety check of coach chat text, as described above.
  • Apple Maps: nearby-place searches you ask your coach for, as described above.
  • Apple and RevenueCat: processing subscriptions, if you purchase one.
  • Resend: sending our emails, including your sign-in codes.
  • Instagram (Meta): only if you tap Share to Instagram Stories. The picture you chose, with your profile link, goes from your phone straight to the Instagram app, under Instagram's own terms.
  • Cloudflare and Google: hosting and typefaces for this website, as described above.

Your friends see what you choose to share with them, as described under Friends and what they can see. We may also disclose information if required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, and security of our users and HabitHouse.

What we don't do

To be clear about what HabitHouse does not do:

  • We don't sell or rent your personal information.
  • We don't run third-party advertising or analytics trackers, and we don't show ads.
  • We don't use advertising identifiers or track you across other apps and websites.
  • We don't track your location. The app uses it only for a nearby-places search you ask for, and doesn't store it.
  • We don't make anything you post public. Your posts are visible only to friends you have accepted.

Data storage and security

Your information is stored on cloud infrastructure provided by Supabase, hosted in the United States. Access is protected by row-level security, so no other user can read your data. Photos are kept in private storage that is never on a public address, and they are served through signed links that expire. When you pick or take a photo, the app asks your phone to leave out location metadata, and it re-encodes the image before upload. Data is encrypted in transit.

Data retention and deletion

You can delete your account at any time from the app: open Profile, tap the gear to open Settings, and choose Delete account. Deleting your account permanently removes your profile, habits, logs, notes, Journal and Moments, coach conversations and attached photos, coach memory, rooms, props and in-app currency, friendships, posts, reactions, avatar, and the support feedback tied to your account, and then it deletes your login. Your posts disappear from your friends' feeds. We cannot recall a photo that someone has already saved or screenshotted. You can also email [email protected] to request deletion.

While your account is open, we keep the content you create for as long as you keep it, because it is the app: your habits, logs, notes, and posts stay until you delete them. Coach chat messages are kept for 30 days and then deleted, along with the photos attached to them. You can delete a message you sent sooner by holding it and choosing Delete. Before a day's chat leaves, your coach keeps a short summary as memory; that memory and your coach notes stay until you delete your account. Usage records are deleted after 13 months. Deleting a single post removes it from HabitHouse and does not touch your habit log or your rooms.

Report evidence is kept for up to 90 days, as described above. Daily totals that carry no names or account details, such as the safety counts, are not tied to you and are not part of your account. After you delete your account, we may retain a limited amount of information, such as purchase records, for as long as the law requires us to keep it for tax, accounting, security, or fraud-prevention reasons, after which it is deleted. Deleted data may persist briefly in routine encrypted backups until those backups age out on their normal cycle. Our email list is separate from your app account: deleting the app account does not remove you from the list, and unsubscribing does not delete your app account.

Where your data is stored and sent

Better Human Labs LLC is based in the United States, and your information is stored and processed there. Our service providers may process it in the United States and other countries: in particular, your coach messages and the context sent with them are processed by Z.AI in Singapore, and the safety check runs at Typesafe in the United States. If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, this means your information is transferred outside your home country. Where that transfer requires a safeguard, we put one in place with the provider in question, such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.

Your privacy rights

Wherever you live, you can reach every one of these controls by emailing [email protected], and most of them are built directly into the app. We answer within 30 days. We will not charge you or degrade your service for exercising a right.

If you are in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland (GDPR)

Better Human Labs LLC is the controller of your information. You have the right to access your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, withdraw consent at any time (without affecting what we did before you withdrew it), and receive a portable copy. You also have the right to complain to your national data-protection authority.

We rely on these legal bases:

  • Performance of a contract: running your account, storing your habits and logs, delivering coaching, showing your shared wins to your friends, and processing a subscription.
  • Consent: Apple Health data, location for a nearby-places search, notifications, camera and photo access, and marketing email. Health data is a special category of data under the GDPR, and we process it only on your explicit consent, which you can withdraw at any time in your device settings or by turning off sharing with your coach.
  • Legitimate interests: keeping the service secure, preventing abuse, reviewing reports, and understanding how the app is used so we can improve it. We balance these against your rights.
  • Legal obligation: keeping limited records we are required to keep.

We do not make decisions about you by purely automated means that produce a legal or similarly significant effect. Your coach's suggestions are guidance only, and you decide what to act on.

If you are in California (CCPA/CPRA)

In the last 12 months we have collected these categories of personal information: identifiers (account identifier, email address, username, and IP address); commercial information (subscription and trial status, and what you earned and spent with the in-app currency); internet or network activity (app version, platform, and device model in diagnostics and support reports, when you last opened the app, and the app usage log); geolocation (your location, used once and not stored, only when you ask for a nearby-places search); visual information (photos you capture or attach); health and exercise information (your Apple Health summary, if you grant it); and other content you create (habits, logs, notes, posts, reactions, and coach conversations). Before this version of the app, HabitHouse also offered coach voice calls and collected voice-call audio and minutes used. That feature has been retired, and we no longer collect either. We collect information from you directly and from your device with your permission, for the purposes described in this policy, and we keep it as described under "Data retention and deletion."

You have the right to know what we collect and how we use it, to delete it, to correct it, and to not be discriminated against for exercising those rights. You may use an authorized agent; we will ask for proof of their authority and verify your identity against the account before we act.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We have not done so in the preceding 12 months, and we do not sell or share the personal information of anyone we know to be under 16. Some of what we collect (health data and the contents of your messages) is sensitive personal information under California law. We use it only to provide the service you asked for and never to infer characteristics about you, so the right to limit its use does not change how we handle it. You can still turn health sharing off or delete your account at any time.

Other US states

If you live in a state with its own consumer-privacy law (such as Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, Oregon, or Montana), you have comparable rights to access, correct, delete, and obtain a copy of your information, and to appeal if we decline a request. Email us and we will honor them. We do not process personal data for targeted advertising, sale, or profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects.

Children and younger users

HabitHouse is for people 13 and older. You confirm your age when you create an account, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us information, email [email protected] and we'll delete it. If you are in the EEA or the UK and your country sets a higher age for consenting to online services (up to 16), you need a parent or guardian's consent below that age.

Companion chatbots may not be suitable for some minors. Brock and Luna hold open-ended conversations, and a younger user may not always keep in mind that they are talking to software rather than a person. If you are a parent or guardian, we'd encourage you to look at the app with your teenager before they use the coach. See our AI and safety page for how the coaches handle sensitive conversations.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we'll revise the "Last updated" date above. Significant changes may also be communicated in the app or by email.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data? Email us at [email protected].