Terms of Service

Your account

You can start writing in Bylines without signing up. Doing so creates a guest account for you automatically, so that drafts, notes and sync genuinely work before you have given us anything. A guest account may write up to 250 words in total before an email account is required; claiming the account keeps everything already written.

To create a full account you must give a working email address and confirm it. You are responsible for your password and for everything done through your account. Tell us at adrians.inquiries@gmail.com if you believe someone else is using it.

You must be at least 13 years old to use Bylines, and at least 16 in any country where 16 is the minimum age for consenting to online services. An account is for one person. If you open an account on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you may bind it to these terms.

What Bylines does

Bylines reads what you write and leaves notes beside it: figures and claims checked against reference sources, claims with no evidence behind them flagged, terms you have used explained, and a map of where your register shifts. Producing those notes involves automated systems, including third-party AI models.

Bylines does not rewrite your writing. Suggestions are offered as options, and nothing is applied to your draft unless you accept it.

Accuracy, and what we do not promise

Nothing produced by Bylines is legal, medical, financial, academic or other professional advice. Reference sources cited in a note are the property of whoever published them, and their own terms govern how you may use them.

Your drafts stay yours

You keep every right you already have in what you write, upload or store in Bylines (“your content”). We claim no ownership of it.

So that the Service can work, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, display and process your content — including by sending it to the third-party providers listed in clause 16 — solely in order to operate, secure, sync and improve the Service and to provide it to you and to anyone you have invited into a shared session. This licence exists for those purposes only, and it ends when you delete the content or your account, except for backup copies that expire on their ordinary cycle.

We do not sell your drafts, and we do not publish them. How your content is stored and handled is described in our Privacy Policy.

Notes you upload

You can upload your own notes and documents for a session to work from. Only upload material you have the right to upload. Do not upload anything you are not permitted to copy, anything confidential to someone else, or anyone else's personal data without a lawful basis for sharing it.

Shared sessions

A shared session shows the other participant your draft, your notes and the material you have uploaded to it, live, for as long as the session runs. Invite only people you are willing to show that to. We cannot control what a participant does with what they see, and you are responsible for the invite links you hand out.

Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• break the law with the Service, or use it to infringe anyone's rights;
• use it to produce or launder material you know to be false in order to deceive people, or to harass, defame or endanger anyone;
• upload malware, or content that is unlawful for us to host;
• try to break, overload, probe or circumvent the Service's security, rate limits, word limits or paywall, or access another account;
• scrape it, resell it, or run it through automated bulk clients rather than the apps we publish;
• reverse-engineer it, or use it to build a competing product, except to the extent the law says we cannot stop you;
• share one account between several people.

The free tier

Writing, editing and sync are free. Your first complete read-along is free. After that, further checks and shared sessions require Bylines Pro. These limits are part of the product rather than a promise: we may change them, and we will not change them retroactively in a way that takes away something you have already paid for.

Bylines Pro and billing

Bylines Pro is sold on the web as a subscription at $7.99 per month or $59.99 per year, in US dollars, exclusive of any tax we are required to collect. Payments are processed by Stripe; we never receive your full card number.

• Renewal. A subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period, at the then-current price, until you cancel.
• Cancelling. You can cancel at any time. Pro stays active until the end of the period you have already paid for, and is not renewed after that.
• Refunds. Payments are otherwise non-refundable, and part-periods are not refunded — except where the law says otherwise, or where we choose to make an exception. Nothing here removes a statutory right of withdrawal or refund you have under the consumer law of your own country.
• Price changes. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before a price change affects your renewals, and you can cancel before it takes effect.
• Failed payments. If a renewal fails, Pro features may be switched off until payment succeeds.

Purchases made in the iPhone app

If you buy Bylines Pro inside the iPhone app, Apple is the seller: the charge, the renewal and any refund are handled by Apple under Apple's own terms, through your Apple Account. Cancel those subscriptions in your Apple Account settings — cancelling here cannot stop them. Refund requests for App Store purchases go to Apple, not to us.

Cancelling and deleting your account

You can delete your account from Settings. Deleting it cancels any web subscription, and permanently removes your drafts, your notes, your entitlement record, your usage counters and any feedback you sent us. This cannot be undone, so export anything you want to keep first. If a subscription cannot be cancelled at that moment, we stop and delete nothing, rather than leave an account that could keep being charged.

Feedback

If you send us a suggestion or a bug report, we may use it to improve the Service without restriction and without owing you anything for it. Do not include anything confidential in feedback.

Availability and changes to the Service

We do not promise the Service will be uninterrupted or available at any particular time, and we may change, add or withdraw features. If we withdraw something material that you are paying for, you may cancel and we will refund the unused part of the period you have paid for.

Suspension and termination by us

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that is being used unlawfully, or where we must act to protect the Service or other people. Where it is reasonable to do so we will tell you why and give you a chance to put it right. If we close a paid account other than for a breach by you, we refund the unused part of the period you have paid for.

Our intellectual property

The Service itself — the software, the design, the Bylines name and logo — belongs to us and our licensors. These terms give you permission to use the Service, not any ownership of it.

Third-party services

Bylines is built on services run by other companies, and using Bylines means your content passes through them:

• Google — accounts, database and hosting (Firebase), and the AI models that produce the notes;
• Stripe — payments for web subscriptions;
• Apple — the iPhone app and purchases made inside it;
• Vercel — serving this website and its usage analytics.

These providers act under their own terms, and we are not responsible for their services. Our Privacy Policy has the detail of what each one receives.

Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent the law allows, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranty of any kind — express or implied — including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or that the Service or anything it produces will be accurate, complete, current or error-free. Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions, in which case they do not apply to you.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, nor for lost profits, lost data, lost goodwill, or any loss arising from your reliance on a note, a check or a citation produced by the Service.

Our total liability to you for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or US$50.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or under the mandatory consumer law of your own country.

Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable legal costs arising from your content, your uploads, or your use of the Service in breach of these terms — except to the extent the claim is caused by us.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change is material, we will give reasonable notice — by email or in the app — before it takes effect, and the date at the top of this page will change. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the new terms; if you do not, you can cancel and delete your account.

Arbitration and class-action waiver

Except as set out below, you and YSA LLC agree that any dispute arising out of these terms or the Service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration, administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court. The arbitration will be held in Florida, or remotely, or in the county where you live — your choice — and the arbitrator's decision may be entered as a judgment in any court with jurisdiction.

Individually, not as a class. Claims may be brought only in your own name. Neither of us may bring a class, collective or representative action, and the arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims. If this paragraph is held unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim — and only that claim — goes to the courts named in clause 22.

You can opt out, and it costs you nothing. Write to adrians.inquiries@gmail.com within 30 days of first accepting these terms, saying that you opt out of arbitration and giving the email address on your account. Opting out has no effect on anything else here, and we will not treat you differently for it.

What is not covered. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small-claims court, and either of us may ask a court for an injunction over intellectual property or unauthorised access to the Service. Nothing in this clause applies where the law of the country you live in does not permit it — consumers in the UK and the EEA in particular keep their courts and their local-law protections, as clause 22 says.

Before starting either arbitration or a court case, please email us and give us 30 days to try to sort it out. Most things are faster fixed that way.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of the State of Florida, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and disputes go to the state and federal courts located in Florida. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of the country you live in, or of your right to bring proceedings there.

If any clause here is unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing a term is not a waiver of it.

Contact

Questions about these terms, or about your account: adrians.inquiries@gmail.com.