Terms of Use

1The short version

• This is a rehearsal tool, not therapy. Not counselling, not medical, legal or financial advice, and not a crisis service. Section 3 means it.
• $5 a month gets you 100 credits, automatically renewing until you cancel. Credits are spent by the minute: voice costs 3 a minute, text 1.
• Credits never expire. A month you do not use is still there next time.
• Cancelling and refunds go through Apple or Google, not through us. We cannot cancel your subscription and we cannot refund a store purchase.
• Deleting your account does not cancel your subscription. Two different things, in two different places. Section 8.

A summary is not the agreement. The numbered sections are, and where they differ from this list, they win.

2Who these terms are with

These Terms of Use are an agreement between you and [ TO FILL — legal entity name ] of [ TO FILL — registered postal address ] (“we”, “us”), the operator of HardConvo. By creating an account or using the app, you agree to them. If you do not, do not use the app.

They apply to the website, the iOS app and the Android app. Our Privacy Policy forms part of them.

3What HardConvo is, and what it is not

HardConvo is a rehearsal tool. It generates a fictional character that argues back the way a real person might, so you can have a difficult conversation badly in private before you have it for real, and then reads your transcript and gives you feedback on how you handled it. That is the entire product.

It is explicitly not any of these

• Not therapy, counselling or mental-health treatment. The persona is not a therapist, the scorecard is not a clinical assessment, and no part of this app creates a therapeutic relationship with anyone.
• Not medical advice, and not a diagnosis of anything.
• Not legal advice. Rehearsing a conversation with a landlord, an employer or an ex is not legal advice about your rights in that situation, and no lawyer-client relationship is created.
• Not financial, HR, employment or professional advice of any other kind. Practising a salary negotiation is not advice about what to ask for or what you are worth.
• Not a crisis service. Nothing here is monitored by a human, nothing here can call for help on your behalf, and nobody is reading your conversation while it happens.

If you need any of those things, get them from a person qualified to provide them. Nothing you read in this app should be used as a substitute for professional advice, and you should not delay getting that advice because of something a persona said.

If you are in crisis

If you are in immediate danger, or thinking about harming yourself, please stop using the app and talk to someone who can actually help. In the US you can call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). Elsewhere, findahelpline.com lists free helplines by country. In an emergency, contact your local emergency services.

The persona itself is built to notice this: if a conversation stops being a rehearsal and starts describing real self-harm, suicidal intent or abuse happening to you now, it is instructed to drop the character, say plainly that it is an AI practice partner, and point you to those same resources — and not to go back into character afterwards. That behaviour is a safeguard, not a service. It is a language model following an instruction, it can fail, and it is no substitute for a human being.

4Your account, and your age

You must be at least [ TO FILL — minimum age — assumed 18 throughout this document; must match the age rating declared in App Store Connect and Google Play, and the Privacy Policy ] to use HardConvo. You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your password to yourself.

You can start as a guest, without an email address. A guest account is tied to the device and browser you created it on, and it is not recoverable: if you clear your cookies or app data, or move to another device, that account and everything in it — including any credits on it — becomes permanently unreachable, by us as well as by you. Attach an email address or an Apple or Google sign-in if you want it to survive. We are not liable for a guest account, or credits on one, that is lost this way.

One account per person. Do not create accounts in bulk, and do not resell access to yours.

5Credits: how they work

Everything in HardConvo is paid for in credits, and credits are spent by the minute rather than by the conversation.

• Voice conversations cost 3 credits per minute.
• Text conversations cost 1 credit per minute.
• Time is rounded up to the next whole credit when the conversation ends. A conversation in which you never said anything costs nothing.
• Nothing is charged for starting a conversation. You are charged when it ends, for the time it actually ran.
• Credits never expire. There is no monthly reset and no use-it-or-lose-it.
• Because credits are charged at the end, a conversation is capped at the length your balance can pay for. When you reach that cap the conversation ends, the transcript is kept, and the scorecard still runs.

Credits have no cash value, are not money, cannot be exchanged for cash, and cannot be transferred to another account or another person.

Marketing copy in the app rounds these minute figures down to the nearest five, so the advertised number always under-promises what a balance actually buys. The exact figures are in the table below, and the meter inside a conversation shows the real time remaining.

6What you can buy

Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax that applies where you are. On iOS and Android the price you are charged is the one the store shows you at the moment of purchase, in your own currency, and the store may differ from the figures above because of local pricing tiers and tax. Prices can change; a change never affects a period you have already paid for.

7The monthly subscription

The disclosures Apple requires, in one place:

• Title: HardConvo Monthly.
• Length of subscription period: one month.
• Price: $5 per month, or the equivalent shown by your app store in your local currency.
• What it includes: 100 credits are added to your balance at the start of each billing period — 33 minutes of live voice rehearsal, or 100 minutes of text, or any mix of the two. Credits from previous periods are not removed, so an unused month accumulates.
• Auto-renewal: the subscription renews automatically each month, at the same price, until you cancel it.
• When you are charged: your app store account is charged for renewal within 24 hours before the end of the current period.
• How to cancel: in your app store account settings, at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. See section 8.

The subscription is not a licence to unlimited use. It is a monthly grant of credits, and those credits are metered as described in section 5.

8Cancelling, and refunds

We cannot cancel your subscription and we cannot refund a store purchase. Both of those live with whoever took your money, and we have no access to it.

• iOS: Settings → your name → Subscriptions. Refund requests go to Apple, at reportaproblem.apple.com.
• Android: Google Play → Menu → Subscriptions. Refund requests go to Google Play support.
• Website: use the billing link in your purchase confirmation email, or write to [ TO FILL — support@ email address ].

Cancelling stops the next renewal. It does not end the period you have already paid for, and it does not remove the credits already in your balance — those stay, because they never expire.

One-time credit packs are consumable. Once credits are in your balance they are delivered, and they are not refundable by us. Any refund of a pack is at the store’s discretion under its own policy, and if a store refunds a purchase we may remove the credits it granted.

Statutory rights come first. If the law where you live gives you a right to cancel or a right to a refund, that right applies regardless of anything in this section.

Deleting your account is not cancelling your subscription. If you delete your account while a subscription is active, the store keeps charging you, because the subscription is held in your app store account and not in ours. Worse, a renewal that arrives after your account is gone has no balance to credit — you are charged and receive nothing. Cancel it first: iOS: Settings → your name → Subscriptions; Android: Play Store → Payments & subscriptions.

9Acceptable use

Do not do any of the following. Any of them can get your account suspended or removed.

• Use a persona to harass, stalk, threaten, defame or sexually exploit a real person, or to impersonate someone in order to deceive anybody outside your own rehearsal.
• Build a persona of, or rehearse a conversation involving, a minor in any sexual or abusive context.
• Use the app to plan or carry out anything illegal, including fraud, coercion, or evading a protective order.
• Try to turn the persona into a general-purpose assistant — writing code, essays, homework, translations or bulk content. It is a roleplay partner, and the underlying provider capacity it consumes is metered and paid for by us.
• Attempt to extract system prompts, probe for provider keys, or get the model to produce content that would violate the underlying providers’ policies.
• Automate the app, script it, stream pre-recorded audio into it, or run it through anything other than our own clients. There are rate limits and abuse guards, and circumventing them is a breach of these terms.
• Upload another person’s sensitive personal data — medical records, financial details, government identifiers — into a persona or a conversation. Traits and a situation are all it needs.
• Resell, sublicense or share access to your account, or resell credits.

There are technical limits as well as rules: a cap of 50 saved custom personas, caps on how long any field can be, a limit on how many conversations you can open at once, and an hourly limit on how many you can start. These exist to keep one account from running up an unbounded bill, and we may change them.

10Your personas and your transcripts

What you write and say stays yours. You give us the licence we need to run the service with it: to store it, to send it to the providers listed in the Privacy Policy so a conversation can happen and be graded, and to show it back to you. Nothing more. We do not publish it, sell it, or use it to advertise to anyone.

You confirm that you are allowed to include what you include. A persona describing a real person is a description you are writing about someone you know — it is not an endorsement by them, and it must not be used to harm them.

Whether your content is used to train models is a matter of our contracts with those providers and is set out in the Privacy Policy: [ TO FILL — state whether any provider is contractually barred from training on this content ].

11What the AI says, and what the scorecard means

The persona is a language model instructed to play a difficult character. It will be wrong. It will sometimes be harsher than the real person, sometimes softer, and sometimes it will invent a detail that was never in your scenario. It does not know the real person, it is not a prediction of what they will do, and rehearsing successfully here is not a guarantee of anything at all in the real conversation.

Because it is designed to push back, it will say things you find uncomfortable. That is the product working, not a defect. If it produces something you think crosses a line, stop the conversation and tell us.

The scorecard is generated by a model from your transcript. Its scores are feedback on one rehearsal, not a measurement of you, your abilities, or your case. Do not treat it as an assessment of anything outside the app.

12Availability, and changes to the service

We provide HardConvo as it is, when it is available. Voice conversations depend on a live connection to third-party providers, and the platform we run on imposes its own limits on how long a single connection can stay open — so a long voice session can be interrupted. When that happens the transcript is saved and you can carry on in a new session.

We may change, add or remove features, and we may change the credit rates and prices in section 6. If a change materially reduces what a subscription you are currently paying for provides, we will tell you before it takes effect.

13Suspension and termination

You can stop at any time, and you can delete your account from inside the app — Account settings → Delete account. Deleting is immediate and permanent, it destroys your transcripts, scorecards and personas, and any credits left on the account are forfeited without a refund. It does not cancel a subscription (section 8).

Two things outlive a deletion, and you should know both before you press the button. We keep the credit transactions themselves — amount, reason, store transaction id and date — with your account identifier removed. And if you used your free trial, we keep a one-way keyed hash of your email address and the date, so the free trial cannot be claimed twice. Both are described in the Privacy Policy.

Coming back is a fresh start, not a restore: signing up again, even with the same address, creates a brand-new empty account with no past purchases and no free trial.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches section 9, that we reasonably believe is being used fraudulently, or where we are required to by law. Where it is proportionate we will warn you first. If we terminate an account for a breach, unused credits are not refunded.

14Disclaimers and limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, HardConvo is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind — express or implied — including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free. We do not warrant that rehearsing here will produce any particular outcome in a real conversation.

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, opportunity, earnings, employment, relationships or data, however caused. Our total liability to you for all claims is limited to [ TO FILL — liability cap — commonly the greater of the amount you paid us in the preceding 12 months, or a fixed sum; confirm with counsel for your jurisdiction ].

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

15Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of [ TO FILL — governing law — country or state ], and disputes are subject to the courts of [ TO FILL — jurisdiction — the courts that will hear a dispute ].

If you are a consumer resident in the EU, the UK or another jurisdiction that grants you the right to bring proceedings locally, that right is unaffected by the paragraph above.

Arbitration and class-action waiver, if the operator wants one: [ TO FILL — include or omit an arbitration clause on advice — an unenforceable one is worse than none ].

16Additional terms for the Apple App Store

These apply if you obtained the app from the Apple App Store, and they override anything inconsistent above.

• This agreement is between you and us alone, not with Apple. Apple is not responsible for the app or its content.
• We grant you a non-transferable licence to use the app on any Apple-branded device you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules in the Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions.
• Apple has no obligation to provide maintenance or support for the app. We provide it, at [ TO FILL — support@ email address ].
• If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple and Apple will refund the purchase price of the app. To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation whatsoever with respect to the app.
• We, not Apple, are responsible for addressing any claim by you or a third party relating to the app — including product liability claims, any claim that it fails to conform to a legal requirement, and claims under consumer protection or privacy law.
• We, not Apple, are responsible for the investigation, defence, settlement and discharge of any third-party claim that the app infringes intellectual property rights.
• You represent that you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated as a “terrorist supporting” country, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and may enforce them against you.

17Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top changes when we do, and material changes are announced in the app before they take effect. Continuing to use HardConvo after a change means you accept it; if you do not, stop using the app and delete your account.

18Contact

Support, complaints, and anything about these terms: [ TO FILL — support@ email address ].

Postal address: [ TO FILL — registered postal address ].