Terms of service

1. Who these terms are between#

These terms are the agreement between you and Gabriel Anhaia da Silva, trading as Speechfy ("Speechfy", "we", "us") — a sole trader established in Germany. They apply from the moment you create an account, and they cover the Speechfy application, the Speechfy service it talks to, and this website.

Operator

Gabriel Anhaia da Silva, trading as Speechfy

Registered address

Wilhelm-Caspar-Wegely-Platz 6, 10623 Berlin, Germany

Legal form

Sole trader (Einzelunternehmen)

VAT

None charged. Speechfy operates under the German small-business rule (Kleinunternehmerregelung, § 19 UStG), so the price you see is the price you pay.

Contact

[email protected]

How we handle personal data is not in this document. It is in the privacy policy, which forms part of this agreement.

If you are a consumer, nothing here removes a right that European Union or national consumer law gives you. Where a term below and a statutory right disagree, the statutory right wins and the term is read down as far as necessary to let it.

2. What you are buying#

A subscription to a service, on one of three plans — Free, Pro or Enterprise — each with its own allowance of dictation per billing period. The allowance for your plan is the one shown on the pricing page at the time you subscribe.

What the service does: you hold a key and speak, the audio goes to Speechfy's service over an encrypted connection, it is transcribed and the text is polished, and the finished text is inserted into whatever application was focused. Dictation therefore needs a working internet connection and a live account. Your notes do not — see section 9.

The application itself is licensed, not sold. For as long as your subscription is live, you have a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use it on machines you own or control, for your own use or, on Enterprise, for the seats that plan covers. You may not sell, rent, sublicense or redistribute it, and you may not attempt to derive its source code — except to the extent that a mandatory right under Articles 5 and 6 of Directive 2009/24/EC, or equivalent national law, says you may, in which case you may and this sentence does not apply.

We may change how the service works over time. If a change removes a capability you are plainly paying for, section 14 applies and you can leave.

3. Your account#

An account is required, because dictation is metered and a meter needs somebody to count for.

• Give an email address that reaches you. Service notices, receipts and the notice in section 14 go there.
• Keep your password to yourself. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you until you tell us it was not.
• One account is one person. Sharing credentials so that several people dictate through one allowance is not permitted; Enterprise exists for that.
• You must be at least 16. If you are signing up for an organisation, you are confirming you may bind it.

Tell us at [email protected] if you think somebody else has your credentials, and we will help you shut it down.

4. Acceptable use#

A short list, and all of it is the obvious kind.

• Do not break the law with it. Not the law where you are, and not the law where the person you are dictating about is.
• Record only what you have the right to record. If you dictate other people's words or a conversation you are part of, obtaining whatever consent your jurisdiction requires is your responsibility, not ours. We cannot check this and do not try to.
• Do not resell the service or put it behind your own product. The service exists to be used through the Speechfy application; there is no public interface to build against. Putting another product on top of your allowance is not a use of the service, it is a resale of it.
• Do not work around the allowance. No multiple accounts to get more free capacity, no scripted or bulk submission, no automated feeding of pre-recorded audio libraries through a plan sized for a person talking.
• Do not attack the service. No probing, scraping, reverse-engineering of the service, credential stuffing, or anything that degrades it for other people. Responsible reports of a security flaw are welcome at [email protected] and will never be treated as a breach of this section.

If we believe one of these is being broken, section 12 says what happens.

5. Your allowance, and what happens when it runs out#

Each plan includes an allowance of dictation per billing period, stated on the pricing page. Usage counts against it as it happens, and the figure shown in your account is the same figure we bill from. It resets at the start of each billing period and does not roll over.

When the allowance is exhausted, dictation stops until the period resets or you move to a plan with more room. That is the whole of the consequence. Specifically:

• Nothing you have already written is touched, altered or held back.
• Your notes stay exactly where they are — files in your own folder, readable with or without Speechfy, with or without a subscription.
• You are not billed for going over. There is no overage charge and no automatic upgrade; we would rather stop than surprise you with an invoice.
• Upgrading takes effect immediately, and section 6 covers what that costs mid-period.

6. Price, billing and renewal#

Paid plans are billed monthly or yearly, in advance, whichever you chose. Prices are as shown on the pricing page at the time you subscribe, and are stated inclusive or exclusive of VAT as marked there; VAT is charged at the rate applicable to you.

Payment is taken by Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd.. We do not store card numbers — we hold a reference that lets us take the agreed payment and nothing more.

Renewal is automatic. A monthly plan renews every month and a yearly plan every year, on the anniversary of the day you started, at the price then in force for your plan, until you cancel. Cancelling is section 7 and takes one click.

If a payment fails we will retry it and tell you, for 7 days. If it still has not gone through at the end of that, the account drops to the Free plan rather than being deleted: you keep the account, you keep the Free allowance, and your notes were never ours to affect in the first place.

If we change the price of a plan, we will tell you at least 30 days before it applies to you, and it applies from your next renewal — never mid-period. You can cancel before then and pay nothing further.

Upgrading mid-period gives you the new allowance straight away, and we charge the difference pro rata. Downgrading takes effect at the next renewal, so you keep what you have already paid for.

7. Cancelling, and refunds#

Cancelling

Cancel from your account at any time, without giving a reason and without talking to anybody. Cancellation stops the next renewal; your plan then runs to the end of the period you have already paid for and drops to Free after that. We do not cancel a subscription early on your behalf unless you ask us to.

Your statutory right to withdraw

If you are a consumer in the European Union, you have 14 days from entering the contract to withdraw from it, under Directive 2011/83/EU, and to be repaid.

Because a dictation service is of no use to you tomorrow if it starts in a fortnight, we begin providing it immediately — and you are asked to agree to that at checkout, which is what the Directive requires. If you then withdraw within the 14 days, you pay only for the part of the period you actually had, and we refund the rest.

Refunds beyond that

After the withdrawal period we are not obliged to refund the unused part of a period you chose to buy. But if the service failed you, or it did not do what this page says it does, write to [email protected] and say so. We would rather fix it or give the money back than keep a payment for something that did not work.

Refunds go back to the payment method they came from, through Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd..

8. Availability#

We do not promise an uptime percentage. We could write one down, and it would be a number we do not control end to end — the service depends on infrastructure and on model providers, and a figure we cannot honour is worse than no figure at all.

What we will do instead: keep the service running as well as we reasonably can, do disruptive maintenance at quiet hours and give notice where we can, and tell you plainly when something is broken rather than describe an outage as degraded performance.

Dictation needs the service. When the service is down, dictation does not work, and this agreement does not make that a breach of contract on our part unless the outage is long or repeated enough to mean you are not getting what you paid for — in which case talk to us about the period concerned.

Your notes are not affected by any of this. They are files on your machine; they open when Speechfy is down, when your subscription has ended, and when this company no longer exists.

Enterprise agreements may include commitments this section does not. Where a signed Enterprise agreement and this page disagree, that agreement governs.

9. Intellectual property#

Yours

You own your words and your notes absolutely.

We claim no ownership, no licence and no interest of any kind in what you dictate or in what you write. The audio is processed to produce your text and is then gone; the text is yours the moment it lands. Your notes are Markdown files in your folder and were never ours to have a view about.

We do not use anything you say or write to train, fine-tune or evaluate any model, and our sub-processors are contractually barred from doing so. We will not use your content to advertise the product, and we will not quote you without asking first.

Ours

The Speechfy application, the service, the site, the name and the mark remain ours. The licence in section 2 is what you get, and it does not transfer any of that.

Feedback you send us — a bug report, a feature idea — we may act on freely and without owing you anything for it. That is not a claim on your work; it is so that fixing what you reported does not create an argument later.

10. What we do not promise#

To the fullest extent the law allows, the service is provided as it is, without warranties beyond those set out here or given by law. In particular we do not warrant that:

• transcription will be accurate, complete, or right about a name;
• polished text will preserve every nuance of what you meant;
• the service will be uninterrupted, or free of every defect;
• it is fit for a purpose you have in mind but have not told us about.

Read what it wrote before you send it. Dictation is a fast way to get words down, not a substitute for your own judgement about what those words say — and that matters more, not less, where the text is medical, legal, financial or otherwise consequential.

None of this affects a consumer's statutory rights. If you are a consumer, you keep every guarantee that Directive (EU) 2019/770 on digital content and services, and your national law implementing it, gives you — including the right to have a service that is not in conformity brought into conformity, and to a reduction or a refund where it is not.

11. Limitation of liability#

Nothing in this agreement excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for intent or gross negligence, or for anything else that German law does not permit to be excluded. Those come first, and the rest of this section is read subject to them.

Subject to that, our total liability arising out of or in connection with this agreement, in any period of twelve months, is limited to the amount you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Subject to the same, we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of anticipated savings, or indirect or consequential loss; nor for the consequences of text that was transcribed or polished differently from what you intended and then sent without being read.

We are not liable for your notes. Not because we disclaim them — but because they are files on your own machine that we never touch, and backing up your own computer remains your job.

If you are a consumer, this section applies only so far as consumer law allows, and no further.

12. Suspension and termination#

You can close your account whenever you like, from your account settings or by writing to [email protected].

We may suspend or end an account if section 4 is being broken, if payment has failed past the grace period in section 6, or if we are legally required to. Except where a delay would cause real harm — an active attack on the service, say — we will tell you first, say what the problem is, and give you a chance to put it right.

When an account ends, access to dictation ends with it, and personal data is dealt with as the privacy policy describes. Your notes remain on your machine, in Markdown, exactly as they were. Sections 9, 10, 11, 13 and 15 survive termination.

13. Governing law and venue#

This agreement is governed by German law, and the courts of Berlin, Germany have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it. Germany is a member state of the European Union.

If you are a consumer resident in another member state, two things follow and we would rather state them than leave you to find them. You keep the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, under Article 6 of Regulation (EC) 593/2008. And you may bring proceedings in the courts of that country, and may only be sued there, under Articles 17 to 19 of Regulation (EU) 1215/2012.

Before any of that: write to [email protected]. Almost everything is cheaper to solve in an email.

14. Changes to these terms#

We may change these terms — the law changes, the service changes, and a document that cannot be updated goes stale and starts lying.

For any change that affects your rights or obligations, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and the date at the top of this page will change with it. If you do not accept the change, cancel before it takes effect and it will never apply to you. Continuing to use the service after that date is how you accept it.

For a typo or a clearer sentence that changes nothing about what either of us owes the other, we simply update the date.

Previous versions are available on request from [email protected].

15. The rest#

• Whole agreement. These terms, the privacy policy, the plan you chose, and any signed Enterprise agreement are the whole of what is between us on this subject.
• Severability. If a court finds one provision unenforceable, the rest stands and that provision is narrowed only as far as it must be.
• No waiver. Not enforcing something once does not give it up for good.
• Assignment. You may not transfer this agreement without our consent. We may transfer it as part of a merger or a sale of the business, and if we do, you will be told and your plan and price come with it.
• Events outside our control. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely beyond our control, for as long as it lasts.
• Language. These terms are written in English. A translation is offered for convenience; the English governs, except where consumer law in your country requires otherwise.
• Contact. [email protected] for the service and for billing; [email protected] for anything about your personal data; and Wilhelm-Caspar-Wegely-Platz 6, 10623 Berlin, Germany for anything that has to be sent on paper.