These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between you and Shane Ward, doing business as Tome ("Tome," "we," "us," or "our"), and govern your use of the Tome app, the website at tomejournal.com, and related services (collectively, the "Service"). By creating an account, starting a trial, subscribing, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.
Contents
- Who can use Tome
- Your account
- What the Service does
- Your content
- AI-generated output
- Plans, trials, and allowances
- Billing, renewal, and cancellation
- Refunds
- Family plans
- Acceptable use
- Our software and brand
- Third-party services and app stores
- Ending your use of the Service
- Changes to the Service
- Disclaimers
- Limitation of liability
- Indemnity
- Governing law and disputes
- Changes to these Terms
- General
- Contact us
1. Who can use Tome
You must be at least 13 years old (or the minimum age required by your jurisdiction, if higher) to use the Service. If you are under 18, or under the age of majority where you live, you may use the Service only with the involvement of a parent or legal guardian, who agrees to these Terms on your behalf. You may not use the Service if you are barred from doing so under applicable law.
2. Your account
You need an account to use the Service. Give us an accurate email address and keep it current, because we use it for sign-in, billing notices, and anything important about your account. Keep your password secure and don't share your account. You are responsible for activity under your account. If you think someone has accessed it without permission, change your password and email hello@tome.app.
3. What the Service does
Tome lets you record your voice, saves and backs up those recordings, transcribes them, and organizes them with titles, dates, people, and tags. Its Life Journal asks you questions about your life, one at a time, and can compile your answers into book chapters you can export as a Word document. Some features depend on your plan, your monthly allowances, and third-party AI providers, as described in these Terms and in our Privacy Policy.
Tome is a personal journal. It is not a medical, legal, financial, or mental-health service, and it is not a guaranteed archive: keep your own copies of anything you can't afford to lose, for example by exporting your book.
4. Your content
You own your content. Your recordings, transcripts, writing, journal answers, attachments, and the chapters compiled from them ("Your Content") belong to you. We claim no ownership of them.
So that we can run the Service, you give us a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to store, copy, process, transcribe, and display Your Content, and to send it to the service providers described in our Privacy Policy, solely to provide the Service to you and as you direct. This license ends when Your Content is deleted from the Service, except for copies we are legally required to keep. We do not use Your Content to train AI models, and we do not sell it.
You are responsible for Your Content. Make sure you have the right to record and upload it. If you record other people, follow the recording-consent laws that apply where you are, which in some places require everyone's permission.
5. AI-generated output
Transcripts, titles, tags, dates, summaries, journal questions, live captions, and book chapters are produced automatically by AI systems. They can be incomplete or wrong: names may be misheard, dates guessed, or wording changed. Review anything that matters before relying on it or sharing it. You can edit your entries, and your own tags are never overwritten by automatic tagging.
6. Plans, trials, and allowances
Free trial. Every new account gets a free 7-day trial of the full Service, starting when the account is created. No payment details are needed for the trial, and it does not turn into a paid subscription on its own. One trial per person.
Paid plans. Tome currently offers:
- Individual — $8 per month, for one person.
- Family — $15 per month, for the plan owner plus up to three invited people, each with their own private account (see Section 9).
Prices are in U.S. dollars and do not include any taxes that may apply, which will be shown at checkout. Earlier plans that existing subscribers already have continue on their current terms.
Without a plan. If you have no active trial or paid plan, you can still sign in, view, and play back everything you've saved, and delete your account. Making new recordings, transcription, automatic tagging, Life Journal questions, and book compilation need an active trial or plan.
Monthly allowances. Each plan includes monthly allowances for AI processing and for book compilation, which reset each month and do not roll over. They are set generously for normal personal use. If you reach one, the features that depend on it pause until the allowance resets; everything you've already saved stays available. We may adjust allowances to keep the Service sustainable and will tell you in advance if a change materially reduces what your plan includes.
7. Billing, renewal, and cancellation
Paid plans are sold through our website and processed by Stripe. Your subscription renews automatically every month at the then-current price, and Stripe charges the payment method you provided at the start of each billing period until you cancel. By subscribing, you authorize these recurring charges.
You can cancel at any time using the subscription management link in your Stripe receipt emails, or by emailing hello@tome.app from your account's email address. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period: you keep full access until then, and you won't be charged again. Deleting your Tome account cancels your subscription immediately.
If a payment fails, we or Stripe may retry it, and your plan's features may pause until payment succeeds. If we change the price of your plan, we will notify you by email at least 30 days before the new price applies, and you can cancel before then.
8. Refunds
The free trial is there so you can try Tome before paying. After you subscribe, payments are non-refundable and we do not give refunds or credits for partial months, unused allowances, or periods when you didn't use the Service, except where the law requires one. If you believe you were charged in error, email hello@tome.app and we will look into it. Nothing in these Terms limits any refund or cancellation rights you have under the consumer-protection laws where you live.
9. Family plans
The person who buys a Family plan is its owner and is responsible for its payments. The owner can invite up to three people by email from the app; an invitation is accepted when that person signs in to Tome with the invited email address. Each member has their own separate, private account: no member, including the owner, can see another member's content. The owner can see who has been invited and who has joined, and can remove a member at any time.
Only invite people who have agreed to join. If the Family plan ends — because it's cancelled, a payment fails, or the owner deletes their account — members lose the plan's features, but keep their accounts and content, and can start their own plan.
10. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- use the Service to break any law, including recording-consent, privacy, and intellectual-property laws;
- upload content that you don't have the right to upload, or that exploits or harms children;
- access or try to access another person's account or content;
- probe, overload, disrupt, or bypass the security or limits of the Service, or reverse-engineer it except where the law allows;
- use automated means to access the Service, or resell it or use it to build a competing product; or
- abuse trials, promotional codes, or Family plan invitations, for example by creating multiple accounts to get repeated trials.
11. Our software and brand
The Service, including its software, design, questions, and the Tome name and logo, belongs to Tome and is protected by law. We give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the app and website for your own non-commercial use, in line with these Terms. If you send us feedback or ideas, we may use them without any obligation to you.
12. Third-party services and app stores
The Service relies on third parties, including Google (Firebase and Google Cloud), Stripe, OpenAI, and Anthropic, as described in our Privacy Policy. Their own terms may also apply when you use them directly, such as Stripe's checkout pages. If you downloaded the app from an app store such as Google Play, that store's terms also apply to the download; the store is not responsible for the Service and has no obligation to support it.
13. Ending your use of the Service
You can stop using the Service at any time and delete your account in the app's Settings or at tomejournal.com/account.html. Deletion is immediate and permanent, as described in our Privacy Policy.
We may suspend or close your account if you seriously or repeatedly break these Terms, if we're required to by law, or to protect the Service or other people. Where reasonable, we'll tell you first and give you a chance to export your content. If we close your account without cause, we'll refund the unused part of any prepaid period.
14. Changes to the Service
We're always improving Tome, so features may change, be added, or be retired. If we retire a feature you rely on, we'll keep the content you made with it available to you wherever practical, as we have with stories from the retired Storyteller feature. If we ever shut the Service down, we will give you at least 30 days' notice and a way to get your content out.
15. Disclaimers
To the extent the law allows, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not promise that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that content will never be lost, or that AI-generated output will be accurate. Some jurisdictions don't allow these exclusions, so some of them may not apply to you.
16. Limitation of liability
To the extent the law allows, Tome will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, profits, or goodwill, arising out of or related to the Service or these Terms. Tome's total liability for any claim arising out of or related to the Service or these Terms is limited to the greater of the amount you paid Tome in the 12 months before the claim arose, or $50. These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be limited by law, such as for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
17. Indemnity
If you use the Service in breach of these Terms or the law, and that leads to a claim against Tome by someone else, you agree to cover Tome's reasonable losses and costs from that claim, to the extent the law allows.
18. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Utah, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. If a dispute comes up, please email hello@tome.app first so we can try to resolve it informally. If we can't resolve it within 60 days, either of us may bring a claim in the state or federal courts located in Utah, and we both consent to their jurisdiction. Either of us may instead bring an individual claim in small-claims court where you live if it qualifies. If you live in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or another country whose laws give you the right to bring claims in your local courts or under your local law, nothing in this section takes that right away.
19. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. If a change is material, we will tell you inside the app or by email before it takes effect, and we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page. If you keep using the Service after a change takes effect, you accept the updated Terms; if you don't agree, you can cancel and delete your account.
20. General
These Terms and our Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and Tome about the Service. If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in effect. Our not enforcing a provision right away isn't a waiver of it. You may not transfer these Terms without our consent; we may transfer them as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of the Service, with notice to you. Neither of us is responsible for delays or failures caused by events beyond reasonable control.
21. Contact us
Questions about these Terms: email hello@tome.app. A person reads it, and we aim to respond within a few business days.