Frequently Asked Questions

V-Pal is free to use! We are also currently deliberately avoiding advertising banners.

If you like the app and want to support the project, you can upgrade your account with a subscription. This is primarily intended to cover our ongoing costs and enable further development of the app. We don't want to hide any features behind paywalls! You can read about the benefits of a subscription in the app.

We plan to make our app available for everyone to download in the app stores by the end of summer 2025. We are currently in a testing phase to find bugs and address user feedback. If you'd like to test the app in advance, you can join our waiting list!

Initially, V-Pal will be available primarily in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. You can already check out about 1 million products in drugstores and supermarkets world wide, and also find over 1,700 restaurants and cafes in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
We have also already covered several hundred locations in other countries (e.g., London). However, widespread coverage in other countries will follow in the future. Our long-term goal is to support vegans worldwide, no matter where they live or where they travel.

V-Pal was developed for Android smartphones and iPhones. After release, the app will be available in both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store.

You can use V-Pal in English and German. Further languages will follow in the future.

Check out our Roadmap to see what we plan next.

You can check out about 1 million products in drugstores and supermarkets. Besides that you can search directly for over 40.000 ingredients, like 'E 120' or 'SODIUM CHONDROITIN SULFATE'.

Our database currently contains approximately 1 million products. We obtain our raw data directly from manufacturers and retailers, as well as from large product databases. To correctly classify which ingredients are in a product and which of them are vegan, we then further process the data. For example, we have built a database of over 40,000 ingredients, which you can also search directly.

Reviews displayed in the app are 100 percent independent and come from our users.

No, we deliberately avoid using AI such as ChatGPT for our analyses. AI offers a wonderful approach to describing ingredients, and we have also tested how reliably an AI model can help us enriching our database. However, in our opinion, the error rate is still too high given the current state of the art. Ingredients are often confused (especially with cosmetic ingredients) or new ingredients are hallucinated.

A certain error rate can never be ruled out, but we found the error rate when using AI to be too irresponsibly high to use it in good conscience. Instead, we use classic and proven methods of data engineering and data analysis.

If you're a manufacturer of a vegan product, we'd love to help you get discovered by more people. You can contact us via email at hello@v-pal, and we can give you dedicated access to manage your product. This allows you to write your own text or upload images.

To show you the best vegan places, we read and ranked the menus of over 1,700 restaurants and cafés one by one. - That was really exhausting.

Reviews displayed in the app are 100 percent independent and come from our users.

If you own a restaurant, café, or other business that offers vegan products or services, we'd love to help you get discovered by more people. You can contact us via email at hello@v-pal, and we can give you dedicated access to manage your business. This allows you to write texts or upload images yourself.