Terms of Service

v0.6-draft · Effective 7 August 2026 · pending one professional review pass

Full terms below. By creating an account you agree to them.

1. Who we are; acceptance of these terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a contract between you and Ilse Funkhouser, an individual sole trader operating from Portugal ("House Brownie", "we", "us"). They govern your use of the House Brownie app and website (the "Service"). Our legal notice (imprint), including our postal address and how to reach us, is published at /imprint.

By clicking "I agree" (or creating an account), you accept these Terms and our Privacy Policy. We record the version you accepted and the date. If you don't agree, don't use the Service. You must be at least 18 (or the age of majority where you live).

Where we offer the Service: at launch, House Brownie is marketed to residents of the United States and the European Union. We do not sell into the United Kingdom (checkout refuses UK purchases and any that slip through are automatically refunded).

2. The Service; who sells it to you (Stripe as merchant of record)

House Brownie is a prepaid (one-time-purchase) software service for tracking a household's inventory, shopping, and tasks. A "household" is a shared workspace; the person who creates it is the owner and can invite members.

Payments and the purchase contract are with the merchant of record. We use Stripe (its Managed Payments merchant-of-record service) as our merchant of record. At checkout and on your receipt the seller appears as Link (Stripe's consumer service), and your card statement will show LINK.COM*. When you buy a plan or credits, your purchase contract for that transaction is with the merchant of record, and the merchant-of-record terms presented at checkout apply to the sale, including price, taxes (VAT/GST), receipts, payment, statutory withdrawal rights, and the handling of refunds and chargebacks. Please read them; where they govern the sale, they control over these Terms for that transaction. These Terms govern your use of the Service itself.

3. Plans, prices, billing — and why nothing auto-renews

3.1 What you can buy

• Yearly plan — $20 for 12 months, per household. A one-time purchase — it does not auto-renew (see §3.2). Renewing early never costs you time: a new year is added to the end of the one you already paid for.
• Lifetime — $60 one-time per household. A single payment; does not auto-renew and carries no recurring charge. See §3.5 for what "lifetime" means and the shutdown safeguard.
• AI credits (optional top-ups) — prepaid. Used to pay for AI features (voice, translation, freshness) on our managed OpenAI key at our cost + 15%. Alternatively, bring your own OpenAI key (BYOK) and the platform charges you nothing for AI usage. See §4.

Prices are shown at checkout (Stripe displays the total, including any tax). We may change prices prospectively; a price change never affects a purchase you've already made.

3.2 No auto-renewal — ever

House Brownie never auto-charges you. The yearly plan is a one-time purchase of 12 months of service, not a subscription:

• There is no recurring charge and nothing to cancel. We do not store a payment method for future charges.
• About two weeks before your year ends, we email you a reminder. Renewing is a fresh, deliberate purchase you make yourself — or don't.
• If you do nothing, nothing is charged. When the year ends your household simply becomes read-only: everything you put in stays visible and exportable, and we keep it for 12 months (§7 / the Privacy Policy) in case you come back.
• Renewing never wastes paid time: a new year is added to the later of "now" and the end of your current year.

3.3 Nothing to cancel; how your plan ends

Since nothing renews, there is nothing to cancel and no retention maze to escape — your plan simply ends at the end of its paid period unless you choose to renew. To delete your data before (or after) that, use Settings → Danger zone (see §7 and the Privacy Policy); a frozen household can always be deleted from its plan screen.

3.4 The emails we send about your plan

We email you: a renewal reminder about two weeks before your year ends, a notice when it ends (your home is read-only, nothing was charged), and a final warning before a dormant household is permanently deleted at the end of its retention window (§7). These are operational commitments, not marketing; they go to the household owner's sign-in address.

3.5 What "lifetime" means, and the shutdown safeguard

"Lifetime" means a one-time purchase that gives your household access for the lifetime of the House Brownie service — it is not a promise that the service will exist forever, and it is not a personal-lifetime or perpetual-maintenance guarantee. It carries no recurring charge.

If we ever discontinue House Brownie, then for lifetime purchasers we will:

1. give at least six (6) months' advance notice;
2. keep data export available for the whole notice period (you can take everything with you); and
3. provide a pro-rata refund of the lifetime price to anyone who purchased within the preceding five (5) years, prorated over that five-year reference period.

This safeguard is a deliberate conformity commitment (EU Digital Content Directive 2019/770) and will not be narrowed. It survives changes to the rest of these Terms.

3.6 Prepaid AI credits

Prepaid AI credits are consumed as you use managed AI features and are drawn down from your balance. Credit that has already been spent on AI usage is non-refundable (the AI has run and we've paid for it). Unspent credit balance is refundable — if you request a refund of a top-up under the 14-day guarantee (§3.7), we (via Stripe) refund the unspent portion. Credits do not expire. If we permanently shut down the Service, remaining credit balances are not refunded (the §3.5 shutdown safeguard applies to lifetime plans, not credit balances). When your balance hits zero, managed AI simply pauses until you top up (BYOK is unaffected).

3.7 14-day money-back guarantee

Beyond any statutory right, we offer a 14-day money-back guarantee on the household's first purchase (plan and any top-ups), once per household — everything paid minus the metered AI actually consumed (a guard against top-up→refund→re-signup cycling). Where you have a statutory right of withdrawal (e.g. EU consumers' 14-day right), that right is provided through the merchant of record under the terms presented at checkout and is not diminished by this guarantee — you get whichever is more favorable.

4. AI features (OpenAI); acceptable AI use

House Brownie's voice capture, translation, and "freshness" estimates are AI-powered, using OpenAI. By using these features you understand that:

• your input (audio, or the text you submit) is sent to OpenAI to produce the result;
• AI output can be wrong or imperfect — treat freshness estimates, transcriptions, and translations as helpful suggestions, not authoritative facts, and review them before relying on them;
• AI features run only if you have an active paid AI/credit plan or you've supplied your own OpenAI key (BYOK); otherwise they're unavailable and you can enter data manually.

If you supply your own OpenAI key, you are responsible for your OpenAI account, its costs, and compliance with OpenAI's terms; we store your key encrypted and never use it beyond running your household's AI features (see the Privacy Policy).

5. Your responsibilities and acceptable use

You agree to use the Service lawfully and not to misuse it. Specifically, you will not:

• break the law with it, or use it to store or transmit unlawful content;
• violate anyone's rights, including privacy or intellectual-property rights;
• attempt to breach isolation or security — no accessing another household's data, probing, scanning, penetration-testing without permission, or circumventing our rate limits, quotas, billing, or the AI-access controls;
• overload or disrupt the Service (denial-of-service, excessive automated requests outside our documented API/MCP interfaces, scraping);
• abuse AI/credits — e.g. reselling access, or automating usage to extract our managed AI at a loss; the managed AI cap is your prepaid balance and you may not attempt to exceed it;
• resell, sublicense, or white-label the Service without our written permission;
• upload malware or use the Service to attack others;
• abuse the refund/guarantee through repeated cancel-and-rejoin cycling.

Abuse → deletion without refund. If we determine, in good faith, that a household is abusing the Service (including the categories above, fraud, or chargeback abuse), we may suspend or delete the account without a refund. Where practical and lawful, we'll let you export your data first.

You are responsible for the content you put into the Service, for keeping your login secure, and for your household members' use.

6. Availability, updates, and conformity

We aim to keep the Service available and working as described, but we don't guarantee uninterrupted or error-free operation. We may modify or improve features over time.

Security & conformity updates. For as long as we provide the Service to you (through your paid year, or for the lifetime plan for as long as the Service operates), we will supply the updates — including security updates — needed to keep the Service in conformity with what we described to you. (This reflects our duty under the EU Digital Content Directive 2019/770 and is not waivable for consumers who have it.)

7. Your data; termination; deletion

Your data is yours. You can export everything and delete your household yourself at any time from Settings → Danger zone (delete permanently purges your household's data; nothing recurs, so there is no subscription to cancel). How we handle personal data is set out in the Privacy Policy.

• You may stop using the Service and delete your household at any time.
• We may suspend or terminate access for the reasons in §5 (abuse) or if required by law. Except in abuse cases, we'll give reasonable notice where practical.
• On termination for any reason, you may export your data during any notice period; after deletion, data we control is purged (some billing/tax records are retained by Stripe/us as legally required).

8. Intellectual property

We (and our licensors) own the Service, its software, design, and trademarks. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable right to use the Service per these Terms. You keep all rights to the content and data you put into the Service; you grant us only the limited license needed to host, process, and display it to run the Service for you (including sending it to the sub-processors named in the Privacy Policy).

9. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available." To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim implied warranties (merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement). AI outputs may be inaccurate — you are responsible for verifying them.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability arising out of or relating to the Service is limited to the amount you paid us (or the merchant of record on our behalf) for the Service in the 12 months before the claim, and we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages.

Nothing in these Terms limits any liability that cannot be limited by law, or your mandatory rights as a consumer. If you are a consumer, these caps apply only so far as the law allows, and your statutory rights (including any provided through the merchant of record) are unaffected.

10. Governing law and disputes

10.1 Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Nevada, USA, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. If you are a consumer, this choice does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer-protection laws of your country of residence, and you may bring proceedings in your local courts where the law gives you that right.

10.2 No mandatory arbitration

We do not require you to arbitrate disputes. There is no mandatory, binding arbitration clause in these Terms.

10.3 Small-claims carve-out and class-action waiver

• You may always bring an eligible individual claim in small-claims court.
• To the extent permitted by law, disputes are brought on an individual basis only, and you and we waive any right to bring or participate in a class action or class-wide/representative proceeding. This waiver does not apply where it is unenforceable under the mandatory law that applies to you as a consumer.

10.4 Consumer dispute resolution — Portugal / EU (RAL)

As a business operated from Portugal, we provide the information required by Lei 144/2015 (Art 18) on alternative resolution of consumer disputes (RAL): in case of a consumer dispute, you may turn to the competent alternative-dispute-resolution entity — CNIACC — Centro Nacional de Informação e Arbitragem de Conflitos de Consumo (www.cniacc.pt) — and you can find the full list of RAL entities at www.consumidor.pt. An electronic complaints book (Livro de Reclamações Eletrónico) is available at www.livroreclamacoes.pt; complaints made there are answered within 15 working days. These mechanisms are voluntary for you and do not limit your right to go to court (§10.1, §10.3).

11. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. When we make a material change, we'll update the version and effective date and give reasonable notice (e.g. email or in-app), and where required we'll ask you to re-accept. Your continued use after an update means you accept the current version. Each version is dated and archived.

12. Contact

Questions about these Terms: hello@housebrownie.com. Our legal notice with registration details is at /imprint. Billing, invoices, and refunds are handled by Stripe — use the link in your Link receipt, or the refund flow in Settings → Plan & credits.

We do not link to the EU Online Dispute Resolution platform — it was shut down in 2025.

Attribution & sources

Hand-drafted to House Brownie's actual practices; external policies used for structure and coverage checklists only — no third-party wording copied — so no share-alike or other license obligation attaches to this document. Sources consulted:

• 37signals / Basecamp open-source policies — CC BY 4.0 — github.com/basecamp/policies (now 37signals.com/policies). Informed: plain-language "short version," cancellation/refund framing, and the "until the end of the internet" sunset-notice spirit (rewritten to our DCD pro-rata terms). Attribution per CC BY 4.0.
• Common Paper — Acceptable Use Policy — CC BY 4.0 — commonpaper.com/standards/acceptable-use-policy. Informed the acceptable-use categories in §5 (checklist only; wording is ours). Common Paper's CSA/DPA/NDA are B2B and were not used (wrong quadrant for a consumer product). Attribution per CC BY 4.0.
• Automattic "Legalmattic" — CC BY-SA 4.0 — github.com/Automattic/legalmattic. Consulted for the structure of the IP-license and liability sections. Share-alike note: CC BY-SA binds only if their text is adapted; we copied no expression, so this document is not a derivative and is not encumbered.

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