Terms

Last updated May 2026

By using Tellings, you agree to what follows. We've kept it short and concrete because legalese has no place between a parent and the archive they're building for their child.

What Tellings is

Tellings is an oral-history app. You record voice notes about your child. We transcribe and arrange them into chapters and books your child can read when they're grown. The recordings and writing are yours. We are the custodian, not the author.

Your account

You must be 18 or older to create an account. Your child is the reader, not the user. Don't share your account with anyone other than co-parents or other family members you've explicitly invited.

What you record

You retain all rights to your recordings, transcripts, photos, and chapter text. Tellings holds a limited license to store, transcribe, generate chapters from, and deliver this content back to you and the family members you've invited. We never sell or share it with third parties for advertising or training.

Subscription and billing

Crystal subscriptions renew monthly or annually at the price shown when you subscribed. We send a renewal reminder seven days before each charge. You can cancel anytime in Settings — your subscription stays active until the period you've paid for ends. Refunds for purchase mistakes within 14 days; for chapter generation failures, automatic refund per our quality commitment.

Free tier promise

Recording, listening to your own recordings, reading your own transcripts, and exporting your full archive will always be free. This is a constitutional commitment, not a marketing line. See Article IV in our public constitution.

Books

Books are printed and shipped by Lulu Direct. We freeze the PDF at order time so reorders match the original. Printing and shipping costs are passed through; we keep a small margin on the first copy. Shipping times vary by region.

AI-generated chapters

Chapters are generated from your recordings using a language model. We run a cliché filter and traceability check on every chapter before it reaches you. If a chapter fails our quality bar, we mark it “needs your edit” rather than ship it silently. If a chapter generation fails for more than 24 hours and you've paid for it, we automatically refund.

What you can't do

• Upload content you don't have the right to record (someone else's child without their parent's consent, etc.)
• Upload content that's illegal, abusive, or designed to harm someone
• Reverse-engineer, scrape, or attempt to access another family's data
• Use the service to send spam, harassment, or unsolicited messages

Account termination

You can delete your account at any time from Settings. We hold the data for 30 days in case you change your mind, then hard-delete it. Before deletion, you can export everything — audio (FLAC + AAC), transcripts, chapters, photos, and a manifest. The export works without a subscription.

We may suspend or close an account if you materially violate these terms or use the service to harm others. We'll let you know and give you a chance to export first, except in the rare cases where doing so would itself cause harm.

If we shut down

If Grindstone Labs ever closes Tellings, we trigger the kill switch documented below. You get a 90-day notice, a final export window, and we open-source the codebase so a successor can keep the archive running. This is a public, binding commitment.

Disclaimers

Tellings is provided “as is.” We work hard to keep your data safe and the service running, but software has bugs and infrastructure has outages. Make use of the export feature — your archive is yours, and keeping your own copy is a good idea. To the extent permitted by law, our liability is limited to fees you've paid us in the prior 12 months.

Changes to these terms

If we change anything material, we email you at least 30 days before the change takes effect. If you don't agree with the change, cancel and export — no penalty.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of New Zealand. If you're in another country, your local consumer protection rights still apply where they're stronger than what's written here.

Contact

Questions, complaints, or anything else: [email protected].

This is a thirty-year vessel between two people: the parent who lived these days, and the adult-child who one day reads what the parent could not say to a baby. We take the responsibility seriously.