Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of these Terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") form a binding agreement between you and shadowtext.ai ("we", "us", "our", or "ShadowText"). They apply every time you visit shadowtext.ai, create an account, or use any feature, page, dashboard, or API we operate at that domain or its subdomains (collectively, the "Service").

By creating an account, signing in, paying for a plan, or otherwise using the Service, you confirm that you have read these Terms, that you have the legal capacity to enter into this agreement, and that you accept these Terms in full. If you do not accept them, you must stop using the Service.

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we make a material change we will give you a reasonable notice in-product or by email before the change takes effect. Continued use of the Service after the effective date of an update means you accept the updated Terms. The current version is always available at https://shadowtext.ai/terms.

2. What the Service Is

ShadowText is an AI-assisted writing and content-editing platform. The Service helps you draft, polish, restructure, and review the clarity, structure, and naturalness of your own written drafts. It is intended for content creators, marketers, professional writers, non-native English speakers, and other users who want editorial assistance with their own original work.

The Service is not a substitute for professional advice. You are responsible for reviewing, editing, and approving any output before you use it, share it, or publish it. We do not pre-screen output for accuracy, completeness, suitability, or compliance with any third-party rules that may apply to your use case.

3. Eligibility and Account

You must be at least 13 years old (16 years old if you are located in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom) to create an account. If you are under the age of majority in your jurisdiction, you may only use the Service with the express consent of a parent or legal guardian, and that parent or guardian accepts these Terms on your behalf.

• You must provide accurate, current, and complete information when you create an account, and keep that information up to date.
• You are responsible for keeping your password and any session credentials confidential, and for all activity that occurs under your account.
• You must notify us promptly at support@shadowtext.ai if you suspect any unauthorized use of your account.
• Each paid subscription is for one natural person. Sharing one account across multiple people is not permitted (see Section 6).

4. Subscriptions, Plans, and Billing

We offer paid plans on either a recurring basis (monthly or yearly auto-renewal for new purchases; legacy weekly subscriptions may continue while active) or, in some markets, as one-time access passes that expire on a fixed date. Detailed billing terms — including renewal cadence, pricing, refund eligibility, and how to cancel — are set out in the separate Subscription Agreement available at /subscription-terms and the Refund Policy available at /refund-policy. Both documents are incorporated into these Terms by reference.

Payments are processed by our payment partners (currently Stripe, Inc., with Alipay supported as a payment method through Stripe in eligible regions). We never see or store your full card number. By submitting payment information you agree to the applicable payment partner's terms in addition to ours.

Where the Service is offered with auto-renewal, your subscription will renew automatically at the end of each billing period unless you cancel before the renewal date. We will send a reminder email before each renewal. You may cancel at any time from the in-product Settings page or by emailing support@shadowtext.ai; cancellation stops future renewals but does not refund the current period unless our Refund Policy says otherwise.

5. Fair Use Policy and Quotas

Each paid plan includes a monthly word allowance for editorial assistance. The current published allowances are: Essential — 1,000 words per month; Pro — 1,500 words per month; Business — 2,000 words per month; Enterprise — 10,000 words per month. Daily request limits and per-request word limits also apply and are shown on the Pricing page.

Quotas reflect typical, good-faith use by an individual subscriber working on their own drafts. Reasonable use means: editing your own writing, drafting marketing or business content for your own organization, polishing emails or articles you intend to publish under your own name, and similar everyday editorial tasks.

Where we observe abuse we will, in our reasonable discretion, contact you, throttle your account, downgrade processing priority, or — in serious or repeated cases — suspend or terminate the account. We will refund any pro-rated unused balance only where our Refund Policy requires it.

6. account safety and Acceptable Use

When you use the Service you agree that you will not, and you will not allow any third party to:

1. Share, resell, sublicense, or otherwise make your subscription available to anyone other than the single natural person on the account. One paid subscription is for one person.
2. Operate more than one account in order to circumvent quotas, free-tier limits, promotional offers, or any prior suspension or termination of an account associated with you.
3. Redeem any one-time promotional code more than once on the same account, or attempt to use a promotional code outside the conditions disclosed when the code was issued.
4. Scrape, crawl, reverse-engineer, decompile, or extract data from the Service (other than your own content), or attempt to discover the source code or underlying models we route to.
5. Build a competing service from the Service, or wrap the Service in another product or API, without a written commercial agreement with us.
6. Use the Service to create misleading content, including deepfakes that impersonate real people, fake reviews, fraudulent endorsements, fake news articles, or material designed to deceive consumers, voters, employers, or regulators.
7. Use the Service to misrepresent authorship of any work to any platform, employer, educational institution, professional licensing body, regulator, court, or similar third party that requires the work to be your own.
8. Use the Service to evade, circumvent, or interfere with detection, moderation, or compliance systems operated by any third party.
9. Use the Service to generate content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, threatening, sexually explicit involving minors, or otherwise prohibited by applicable law.
10. Initiate, encourage, or process payments through the Service in connection with any activity that would breach our payment partners' terms (including Stripe and Alipay), or use chargebacks abusively to obtain refunds for service you have already used.
11. Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service, or breach or circumvent any authentication or security mechanism.
12. Interfere with the integrity or performance of the Service, including by sending automated traffic at a rate likely to disrupt other users.

Initiating a chargeback, dispute, or reversal with your card issuer or with Alipay without first contacting us at support@shadowtext.ai and giving us a reasonable opportunity to resolve the issue is itself a breach of these Terms. Where we observe a pattern of chargeback abuse, we may refuse to provide the Service to you in the future, even on a new account.

7. Your Content and Output

As between you and us, you retain all rights you already have in any text, files, prompts, or other material you submit to the Service (your "Input"). We do not claim ownership of your Input or of any output generated from your Input (your "Output"). You are responsible for ensuring you have the right to submit your Input and to use the Output.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, copy, transmit, process, and display your Input and Output solely as necessary to operate the Service for you, to provide support, to bill you, to detect and prevent abuse, and to comply with our legal obligations. We will not use your Input or Output to train new public foundation models. Some metadata about your usage may be retained in aggregated, de-identified form to monitor service quality.

You are responsible for ensuring that your use of the Service and the resulting Output complies with all laws and rules that apply to you. That includes, where relevant, your employer's policies, your educational institution's code of conduct, the publishing or platform rules of any service you submit content to, and regulatory or professional obligations in your jurisdiction. We do not give legal, financial, medical, or other professional advice, and we do not warrant that any Output will satisfy any third party's policies.

8. Third-Party Services and Sub-Processors

The Service is delivered with the help of third-party providers, including hosting and content-delivery (Cloudflare), payments (Stripe), transactional email (Resend), authentication (Google), and one or more large-language-model providers (such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepSeek). The current list of sub-processors and what each one does is published in our Privacy Policy at /privacy.

Use of those third-party services is also governed by the providers' own terms. We are not responsible for the acts or omissions of third-party providers, but we will use commercially reasonable efforts to choose providers that we believe are reputable and to update the Service if a provider becomes unsuitable.

9. Our Intellectual Property

All right, title, and interest in and to the Service — including the website, the underlying software, the user interface, the ShadowText brand, our logos, our written documentation, and our model-routing system — belong to shadowtext.ai and our licensors. Except for the limited rights expressly granted in these Terms, you receive no rights in our intellectual property.

If you send us feedback, ideas, bug reports, or feature requests, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, transferable licence to use that feedback for any purpose, without obligation to you.

10. No Warranty

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. WE DISCLAIM ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, AND ANY WARRANTIES ARISING FROM A COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or that any Output will be accurate, complete, fit for any particular purpose, or free from harmful elements. You use the Service, and rely on any Output, at your own risk.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain implied warranties, so some of the exclusions in this section may not apply to you in full.

11. Limitation of Liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, IN NO EVENT WILL SHADOWTEXT.AI, ITS AFFILIATES, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, OR AGENTS BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, GOODWILL, USE, OR DATA, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH YOUR USE OF, OR INABILITY TO USE, THE SERVICE.

OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THESE TERMS OR THE SERVICE WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE TOTAL AMOUNTS YOU ACTUALLY PAID TO US FOR THE SERVICE IN THE 12 MONTHS IMMEDIATELY PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) US$100.

These limitations apply regardless of the legal theory on which the claim is based (contract, tort, statute, or otherwise) and even if we have been advised of the possibility of the relevant damages. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, in which case the limitations above apply only to the extent permitted by law.

12. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless shadowtext.ai, its affiliates, and their respective officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against any claims, damages, liabilities, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of or related to: (a) your Input or your Output; (b) your use of the Service in breach of these Terms; (c) your violation of any law, regulation, or third-party right (including any platform, employer, educational, or professional rule that applies to you); or (d) any chargeback or payment-dispute that we determine in good faith to be without merit.

We reserve the right to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you, in which case you agree to cooperate with our defense.

13. Suspension and Termination

We may suspend or terminate your account, with or without notice, where we have a reasonable belief that you have breached these Terms, that your use is harmful to other users, that we are required by law to do so, or that the Service is being used in a way that triggers risk for our payment partners.

You may close your account at any time from the Settings page or by emailing support@shadowtext.ai. Upon closure your Input and Output will be retained for the period set out in the Privacy Policy and then deleted. Sections of these Terms that by their nature should survive termination — including Sections on Your Content, No Warranty, Limitation of Liability, Indemnification, Governing Law, and Dispute Resolution — will survive.

14. Force Majeure

We will not be liable for any delay or failure in performance caused by circumstances beyond our reasonable control, including acts of God, war, terrorism, civil disturbance, labor disputes, internet or telecommunications outages, denial-of-service attacks, failures or unavailability of third-party providers, government actions, or epidemics or pandemics.

15. Governing Law

These Terms and any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service are governed by the laws of the State of New York, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

16. Dispute Resolution

Before starting any formal proceeding, you agree to first contact us at support@shadowtext.ai and give us thirty (30) days to attempt to resolve the dispute informally.

If informal resolution fails, and unless your local law gives you a non-waivable right to bring a claim in another forum, any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules. The arbitration will be conducted in English. The seat of the arbitration will be New York, New York; you may participate by video conference. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

YOU AND WE EACH WAIVE THE RIGHT TO A TRIAL BY JURY AND THE RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION OR REPRESENTATIVE PROCEEDING. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims and may not preside over any form of representative or class proceeding.

Notwithstanding the above, either party may bring a small-claims action in the small-claims court that has jurisdiction over the party, and either party may seek injunctive relief in court to protect intellectual property or confidential information.

If for any reason a dispute is not subject to arbitration, the state and federal courts located in New York County, New York will have exclusive jurisdiction.

17. Miscellaneous

These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy, Subscription Agreement, and Refund Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service and supersede any prior agreements on the same subject. If any part of these Terms is held to be unenforceable, the remaining parts will continue in effect. Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of that provision. You may not assign these Terms without our written consent; we may assign them in connection with a corporate transaction. The headings in these Terms are for convenience only.

18. How We Handle Your Data (Summary)

We retain account data while your account is active and for 12 months after closure, after which it is deleted or fully de-identified. Text you submit for processing is retained on a sliding window of up to 30 days and then automatically deleted. The full description of what we collect, why, and how we share it is in the Privacy Policy at /privacy.

19. Contact Us

Questions or notices about these Terms can be sent to shadowtext.ai at support@shadowtext.ai. Notices will be deemed received when we acknowledge them or, if no acknowledgement is sent, after a reasonable time.