Terms of Service

Effective date: [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: effective date]

Last updated: [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: date this version is published]

Version: 1.0 (draft — not yet attorney-reviewed)

These Terms are a contract between you and [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: full legal entity name] ("ChuEok", "we", "us"), covering the ChuEok website at [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: production domain(s)], the ChuEok iOS app, and the guest recording pages (together, the "Service").

By creating an account, or by recording and sending a message, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Our Privacy Policy and Acceptable Use Policy are part of these Terms.

1. Words we use

2. Who may use ChuEok

• You must be at least [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: minimum age] years old to create a Host account.
• You must give accurate account information and keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
• Guests do not need an account. Recording a Message still means agreeing to these Terms and the Acceptable Use Policy.
• You may not use the Service if we have previously banned you, or where the law where you are prohibits it.

[PLACEHOLDER — confirm: minimum guest age, and whether the guest recording page needs an age statement. The current build has no age gate for guests at all.]

3. Accounts

You can sign in with an email address and password, or with Sign in with Apple.

You can change your display name and notification settings at any time in Settings. You can sign out at any time.

Deleting your account. [PLACEHOLDER — engineering + product, blocking for both app stores: there is currently no in-app account deletion. Apple requires in-app account deletion for any app that supports account creation; Google Play requires an in-app route plus a web request route.] Until that ships, you can ask us to delete your account by emailing [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: contact email], and we will delete your profile, Events, and their Messages, subject to the deletion limits described in the Privacy Policy §8.2 and to any records we must keep by law.

4. The deal on Content — who owns what

4.1 Guests keep their Messages

If you record a Message, you own it. We do not claim ownership of your voice, your likeness, or what you say.

By sending a Message you give:

• the Host and their Co-Hosts permission to store, view, download, keep, and share your Message for the purposes of that Event — including in a compilation video, a slideshow, or a keepsake — for as long as they keep the Event; and
• us a limited, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, encode, transcode, create a thumbnail from, and transmit your Message, purely so we can deliver it to that Host. This licence exists only to run the Service. It ends when the Message is deleted, except for copies that have not yet cycled out of backups or a content delivery network.

We will not use your Message to advertise or promote ChuEok, or license it to anyone else, or use it to train any machine-learning model, without asking you first.

You can ask for your Message to be removed at any time — see §9 and the Acceptable Use Policy.

4.2 Hosts control their Event

The Host of an Event controls the Messages in it: they can hide them, pin them, download them, and permanently delete them. The Host decides who else sees them. As between the Host and ChuEok, the Host is responsible for that Content and for what they do with it after downloading.

4.3 Host intro media is publicly readable

If you record or upload an intro for your Event, the file is stored in a publicly readable location so that Guests can play it before recording. Treat your intro as public-facing content.

4.4 Our stuff

The ChuEok software, design, brand, and everything else that is not user Content belongs to us. You get a personal, revocable, non-transferable right to use the Service. You may not copy it, resell it, reverse engineer it, scrape it, or build a competing product from it.

5. Recording people — the Host's obligations

This is the most important section of these Terms.

ChuEok records identifiable people. Guests often did not sign up for anything and may not have read a word of this document. So, if you are a Host, you agree that:

1. You will tell people they are being recorded before they record, and you will make sure they agree to it.
2. You will obtain every consent the law requires in the place your Event happens and where your Guests are. Recording and wiretapping laws differ by country and by US state. Several US states require the consent of all parties to a recording. Some places have specific rules about recording a person's face or voice, including biometric-privacy statutes with statutory damages.
3. Children: you will not collect a Message from or featuring a child without the verifiable permission of that child's parent or guardian.
4. You will honour removal requests. If a Guest asks you to delete their Message, delete it. If you do not, they can ask us and we will.
5. You will not use Messages for a purpose the Guest would not expect — including advertising, publishing them publicly without permission, selling them, or feeding them to a machine-learning system.
6. You are the controller of your Event's Content under data-protection law, and we act as your processor for it, as described in the Privacy Policy §1.

If the Host does not do these things, that is the Host's failure, not ours. To the extent the law allows, the Host will indemnify us — that is, cover our losses, damages, and reasonable legal costs — for any claim brought by a Guest or anyone appearing in a Message that arises from the Host's failure to get the consent required, or from what the Host did with a Message.

6. Acceptable use

You agree to follow the Acceptable Use Policy. In short: no illegal content, no content that harms or harasses people, no recording people who have not agreed to it, no attempts to break the Service or get around its limits, and no sexual content involving minors — ever, under any circumstances.

We may remove Content, close an Event, or suspend an account that breaks these rules. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why and give you a way to respond.

7. Free Period, billing, and what happens when an Event expires

7.1 The Free Period

An Event created in the current apps is free for 37 days from the moment it is created. We email the Host a warning about 7 days and again about 1 day before the Event expires, so there is time to download anything worth keeping.

When the Free Period ends and the Event has not been kept, the Event and its Messages are permanently deleted. Please download what you want to keep before then. Deletion is described precisely, including its current limits, in the Privacy Policy §8.

Some older Events have no expiry date recorded and are not automatically deleted. [PLACEHOLDER — product decision: whether those Events will be given a 37-day window. These Terms and the Privacy Policy must say the same thing.]

7.2 Keeping an Event

If paid subscriptions are enabled, a Host can keep an Event beyond the Free Period for [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: price, currently $1.99 per month in the code] per Event per month, billed through Stripe.

• Subscriptions renew automatically each month until cancelled.
• You can cancel at any time from the billing portal. Cancelling stops future charges; the Event stays available until the end of the period you have paid for, and then returns to the expiry countdown.
• Prices may change. We will give notice before a change affects you.
• Refunds: [PLACEHOLDER — confirm the refund policy. A workable default is "we do not offer refunds for partial months, except where required by law", but it must be checked against UK/EU consumer cancellation rights (14-day right of withdrawal for digital services), and against Apple's rules if in-app purchase is ever used.]

7.3 Purchases made outside the app

Subscription billing currently happens on our website, not through in-app purchase. The iOS app points Hosts to the web dashboard to subscribe. [PLACEHOLDER — confirm with counsel and with Apple's guidelines: Apple's Guideline 3.1.1 restricts linking out to external purchase mechanisms for digital content, and 3.1.3 sets out the narrow exceptions and the "reader"/"multiplatform" rules. This may require either an in-app purchase implementation or a change to how the iOS app presents the upgrade. Resolve before App Store submission.]

7.4 Limits

To keep the Service usable and safe, we apply limits including a cap on the number of messages per Event, a maximum file size, permitted media formats, and rate limits per device and per network. We may change these limits. Current figures are in the Acceptable Use Policy.

8. Notifications

Hosts can receive an email digest when new Messages arrive, and push notifications on iOS. Both can be turned off — account-wide, or for a single Event. We will always send essential service emails (password resets, expiry warnings, billing receipts, security notices) regardless.

9. Removing Content

• A Host can permanently delete any Message in their Event.
• A Guest can ask the Host to delete their Message, or ask us at [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: contact email]. We will remove it.
• Anyone can report Content that breaks the rules — see the Acceptable Use Policy for how, and what we do about it.
• We may remove Content ourselves where we believe it breaks these Terms, the law, or puts someone at risk.

10. Service availability

We aim to keep the Service running, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may change, suspend, or discontinue features. If we discontinue the Service entirely, we will give Hosts reasonable notice and a chance to download their Content.

ChuEok is not a backup service. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.

11. Disclaimers

To the fullest extent the law allows, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that Content will always be available, that recordings will be free of defects, or that the Service will meet your requirements.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing here limits rights you have as a consumer that cannot be limited by contract.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost recordings.
• Our total liability for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the greater of [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: cap amount — commonly the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or a fixed floor such as USD 50].

Nothing in these Terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

[PLACEHOLDER — confirm with counsel: consumer-protection carve-outs for the UK (Consumer Rights Act 2015), the EU, and any US state where a cap of this kind may be unenforceable.]

13. Indemnity

You will indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, losses, and reasonable legal costs arising from your Content, your use of the Service, your breach of these Terms, or — for Hosts — your failure to obtain the consents required by §5. This does not apply where the law does not permit it, and it does not apply to consumers to the extent prohibited.

14. Suspension and termination

• You may stop using the Service at any time and ask us to delete your account.
• We may suspend or terminate your access if you break these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, if we are required to by law, or if your use puts the Service or other people at risk. For serious breaches — illegal content, content sexualising minors, or a credible threat — we may act immediately and without notice, and may report it to the authorities.
• When an account ends, its Events and Messages are deleted as described in the Privacy Policy §8.
• Sections that by their nature should survive termination do (ownership, disclaimers, liability, indemnity, governing law).

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. If a change is material, we will tell Hosts by email or in the app before it takes effect. If you keep using the Service after the change takes effect, you accept the new Terms. If you do not accept them, stop using the Service and ask us to delete your account.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: governing-law jurisdiction, e.g. the State of Delaware, USA], without regard to conflict-of-law rules.

Any dispute will be resolved in [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: dispute-resolution venue and mechanism. Decide explicitly whether to include (a) an arbitration clause, (b) a class-action waiver, and (c) a small-claims carve-out. Each has material enforceability differences by jurisdiction, and consumer-arbitration clauses are unenforceable or restricted in several places, including much of the EU and UK.]

If you are a consumer in the UK, EU/EEA, or another place with mandatory local consumer protections, nothing here removes your right to bring a claim in your local courts or to rely on the mandatory law of your country of residence.

17. General

• Entire agreement. These Terms, plus the Privacy Policy and the Acceptable Use Policy, are the whole agreement between us about the Service.
• Severability. If a part of these Terms is unenforceable, the rest still applies.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a right straight away, we have not given it up.
• Assignment. You may not transfer these Terms. We may transfer them as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.
• Apple. If you use the iOS app, you acknowledge that these Terms are between you and us, not Apple; that Apple has no obligation to provide support or to handle any claim about the app; and that Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and may enforce them against you. [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: Apple requires the minimum EULA terms in Schedule 1, Exhibit A of the Apple Developer Program Licence Agreement if you supply your own EULA rather than using Apple's standard one. Counsel should confirm this section covers them all.]

18. Contact

[PLACEHOLDER — confirm: legal entity name] [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: business address] [PLACEHOLDER — confirm: contact email]