Terms of Service

1. The service

BetrayStories ("we", "us") publishes an anonymised library of first-person betrayal and breakup stories, with optional audio narration, and offers the Recovery Companion — a structured 21-day plan with daily activities, mood and behaviour tracking, rituals, and an AI companion you can write to. We provide the service through this website, the progressive web app, and our mobile apps.

The service is for reflection and self-help. It is not legal, medical, psychological or financial advice, and it is not a crisis or emergency service.

2. Who can use it

• You must be 18 or older to create an account or to use the Recovery Companion. The subject matter is adult, and the companion is not designed for minors.
• Our mobile apps are rated 17+ in the app stores because of frequent mature and suggestive themes in user-submitted stories.
• You must not use the service if we have previously terminated your account, or if sanctions or local law prohibit you from doing so.

3. Your account

• Reading and listening on the web needs no account. An account is needed to submit a story, keep bookmarks and history, and to use the Recovery Companion. Our mobile apps require an account to read and listen.
• Give accurate sign-up details, keep your credentials to yourself, and tell us if you think someone else has access.
• You are responsible for what happens under your account. One account per person; do not share it.
• You can delete your account at any time from your account page. Deletion removes your recovery data, submissions and reading history as described in our Privacy Policy.

4. Free content

All published stories — currently around 340 of them — are free to read and free to listen to, with no meter, no paywall and, on the web, no account. Crisis screening and crisis resources are free for everyone, always, and are never placed behind a paywall or a usage limit.

We may add, edit, unpublish or reorganise stories at any time. Nothing in these terms promises that a particular story, narration, category or feature will remain available.

5. Your submissions

• You must own, or have the right to share, everything you submit.
• Do not include real names, contact details, addresses, workplaces, photographs or anything else that identifies a real person — yours or anyone else's. We anonymise and moderate submissions before publication, but the first responsibility is yours.
• No sexually explicit content involving minors, no content that is illegal, defamatory, harassing or hateful, and no content published to shame or expose an identifiable person.
• We may edit for clarity and anonymity, decline to publish, or remove a published story at our discretion.
• Submitting is not employment and creates no expectation of payment.

Licence you give us. By submitting a story you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable and transferable licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt (including editorial editing and anonymisation), translate, create audio narration from, publish, publicly display and distribute that story in and in connection with the service and its promotion, for as long as we operate the service. You keep ownership of your story and may ask us to unpublish it; we will remove it from the service within a reasonable time, though copies may persist in backups and in third-party caches we do not control.

6. Recovery Companion Pro

The core of the Recovery Companion — your plan, your daily activities, rituals, tracking and progress — becomes a paid subscription, Recovery Companion Pro, after a guided trial.

Trial

Your trial lasts three days or three companion sessions, whichever comes first. No card is required to start it. When it ends, everything you have already written stays yours — you can read it, export it and delete it whether or not you subscribe.

Price and billing

• Pro costs $2.99 per month (or the local equivalent, and any yearly price shown at checkout), including any tax we are required to collect.
• On the web, payments are processed by Polar as merchant of record. We never see or store your card number.
• In our mobile apps, the subscription is an in-app purchase sold by Apple (App Store) or Google (Google Play). Their terms govern that purchase, including payment, renewal, refunds and restoring purchases, and the subscription is managed in your Apple or Google account settings — not by us.

Auto-renewal and cancellation

• Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period until you cancel.
• You can cancel at any time, for any reason, with no exit fee. Cancelling stops the next renewal; your Pro access continues until the end of the period you have already paid for.
• Cancel on the web from your account page (or the Polar customer portal); cancel a mobile purchase in your App Store or Google Play subscription settings.

Refunds

• Web: if you are unhappy, contact us within the first billing period and we will refund that period. Consumers in the EU, EEA and UK keep their statutory withdrawal rights; by starting Pro immediately you ask us to begin the service during the withdrawal period, and you may still withdraw and receive a refund reduced in proportion to what you have used.
• App Store and Google Play: refunds are handled entirely by Apple or Google under their policies. We cannot issue them.

Price changes

If we change the price of an existing subscription, we will tell you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and the new price applies only from your next renewal. You can cancel before then and the change will never apply to a period you have already paid for.

7. AI, health and crisis

The Recovery Companion uses AI to generate replies, reflections and suggestions. It is not a licensed therapist, counsellor or clinician, we do not provide medical or mental-health care, and nothing in the service is a diagnosis or treatment. AI output can be wrong or unhelpful; treat it as a prompt for your own thinking, never as professional advice.

We screen messages for signs of crisis, and when we see them we stop the companion work and show you real-world resources instead. That screening runs before any paywall or usage limit — safety is never gated. We are not an emergency service and cannot monitor you. If you are in danger, contact your local emergency number.

The full explanation is in our AI & health disclaimer, which forms part of these terms.

8. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the service to identify, expose, harass, threaten or stalk any person;
• scrape, bulk-download, mirror or resell our stories, audio or other content, or use it to train a machine-learning model;
• circumvent or attempt to circumvent access controls, rate limits or payment;
• probe, disrupt or overload the service, or upload malware or automated traffic;
• use the AI companion to generate content that is illegal, that sexualises minors, or that plans harm to anyone;
• impersonate us or another user, or misrepresent your affiliation with anyone.

9. Intellectual property

The service, its design, code, audio narration, editorial edits, plans, activity catalogue and brand are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by copyright and other laws. Except for the licence you grant us in section 5, nothing here transfers ownership in either direction. You may read, listen to and personally use the content; you may not republish it.

10. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the service and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate access if you materially breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue the service — with notice where it is practical to give it. If we terminate a paid subscription other than for your breach, we will refund the unused portion of the current period. On termination, your data is deleted as described in the Privacy Policy; sections 5 (licence for already-published stories), 9, 11 and 12 survive.

11. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

The service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that the AI output or the stories will be accurate, complete or suitable for you.

Stories are personal accounts submitted by other people. We anonymise and moderate them, but we do not verify that they are true and we are not responsible for decisions you make after reading one.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, data or goodwill. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or USD 50.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or any mandatory consumer rights you have in your country of residence.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of India have jurisdiction over disputes arising from them. If you are a consumer resident in the EU, EEA or UK, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer laws of your country of residence, and you may also bring proceedings in your local courts. The European Commission's online dispute resolution platform is available at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr.

13. Changes and re-acceptance

These terms are versioned. When we make a material change we publish the new version here with a new date and ask you to accept it the next time you open the app; you will see the four documents and a single checkbox before you can continue. Minor corrections that do not change your rights take effect on publication. If you do not accept a new version, you can still export and delete your data, and you can close your account.

14. Contact

Reach us through the contact form. It is the only support channel we operate — we do not publish a support inbox, and we will never ask you for a password or payment details in a reply.

This document is published in English only. Where any translation of it exists, the English version governs.