Terms of Service

• Slownotes is a small, independent app made in the Netherlands by Superintendent BV.
• Your notes belong to you. We never train AI on them, and we never sell or share them for marketing.
• Pay your subscription, write your notes. Be reasonable about volume so the AI bill stays sane for both of us.
• We can change pricing, free quotas, and feature limits at any time. We will give existing paying subscribers reasonable notice for material changes.
• If you abuse the service in a way that costs us a lot of money, we may pause or rate-limit your account.
• You can cancel any time from your Apple subscription settings.

The full text below has the legal detail. Those bullets are the gist.

Slownotes is operated by Superintendent BV, a Dutch private limited company (besloten vennootschap) registered in the Netherlands. When this document says "we", "us", or "our", that is who we mean. When it says "you" or "your", that means you, the person using the app.

You can reach us at [email protected].

When you download Slownotes from the App Store, Apple's standard End User License Agreement (EULA) automatically applies to your use of the app on your device. Apple's EULA covers app distribution, the device-level licence, and the App Store's refund process.

These Terms cover everything else: your account, the notes you create, the AI processing on our servers, your subscription, and our service-level rules. Apple's EULA governs your relationship with Apple. These Terms govern your relationship with us.

You can read Apple's EULA at apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula.

To use Slownotes you create an account using email and a password, or by signing in with Apple or Google. You are responsible for keeping your sign-in credentials safe. If someone else gets access to your account, let us know.

Slownotes requires users to be at least 13 years old. Users under 16 in the EU require parental consent.

We do not allow more than one person to share a single account. If you want Slownotes for your team, contact us at [email protected] to discuss the possibilities.

You can use Slownotes for any lawful purpose: personal journals, work notes, study, sketches, recipes, lists. You can export your notes to Notion, Obsidian, or anywhere else. You can quote, share, or publish your own notes however you like.

You may not use Slownotes to:

• Process content that you do not have the right to scan or share.
• Process content that depicts or describes the sexual abuse of minors, incites violence, or violates the rights of others.
• Reverse-engineer the app or its API beyond what is permitted by Dutch law.
• Resell, sublicense, or rebrand Slownotes as your own service.
• Probe, scan, or otherwise try to break our infrastructure.
• Use automated tools to extract content from Slownotes that does not belong to you.

You keep all rights to the notes, scans, and content you create in Slownotes. We do not claim ownership of any of it.

The only thing we do with your content is what you ask us to do: process the scan into structured text, optionally enrich it, and return it to your device. We do not use your content to train machine-learning models, we do not show it to anyone, and we do not use it for marketing. See the Privacy Policy for the technical detail.

To make the app function (display your note in the app, sync it to your other devices, send it to your Notion or Obsidian if you choose), you grant us a narrow, free licence to store, transmit, and process your content for that purpose only. The licence ends when you delete the content or your account.

Slownotes is sold on a subscription, with a free tier that includes a small monthly quota. Current prices, free-tier limits, plan quotas, and feature availability are shown in the app and in the App Store at the time you subscribe.

We may change any of the following at any time:

• Prices for new and renewing subscriptions.
• The number of scans, pages, or notes included in the free tier or in any paid plan.
• Rate limits on processing, exports, integrations, or API usage.
• The set of features included at each tier.
• The list of supported AI models or the size and complexity of inputs we will accept.

Why we reserve this right: Slownotes runs on third-party AI services that bill us per request, per page, and per token. Their prices and rate limits change. New models appear and old ones are deprecated. To keep the app affordable and reliable for everyone, we need to be able to adjust our own prices and limits in response.

For existing paying subscribers, we will give you reasonable advance notice (at least 30 days) by email and in the app before any change that materially raises your price or materially reduces your included quota. You can cancel before the change takes effect if you do not want to accept it.

Changes that do not affect your paid subscription mid-cycle, for example the price for new subscribers or limits for the free tier, can take effect at any time.

Slownotes is designed for personal note-taking. It is not designed to ingest the entire contents of a library, run as a backend for someone else's product, or serve as a general-purpose AI scraping tool.

If your usage pattern is significantly outside what a single human note-taker would produce, for example thousands of scans per day, automated submission of identical content, or workloads that consume a disproportionate share of our processing capacity, we may, without prior notice:

• Apply additional rate limits to your account.
• Pause processing of new submissions until usage normalises.
• Ask you to upgrade to an appropriate plan, or to stop the activity.
• Suspend or terminate the account if the pattern continues.

We will always try to talk to you first if there is a person on the other end. The point of this clause is to protect the service from runaway costs, not to police you. If you have a legitimate use case that needs higher limits, email us and we will work something out.

Paid subscriptions to Slownotes are billed by Apple through your App Store account. Apple, not us, handles payment, currency conversion, taxes, and your saved payment method.

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends, as required by the App Store. You can manage and cancel your subscription from Settings → [your name] → Subscriptions on your iPhone or iPad.

Refunds are handled by Apple under their standard refund policy. We are happy to support your refund request when it is reasonable, but we cannot issue refunds directly. If you believe you were charged in error, contact Apple Support first, and let us know if anything we can do would help.

Under EU consumer law, you have a 14-day right of withdrawal for most digital services. By starting to use Slownotes immediately after subscribing, you may waive this right for the portion of the service you have already used. Your statutory rights are not otherwise affected.

You can stop using Slownotes at any time. To delete your account and the data we hold about you, email us at [email protected] with the subject line "Delete my account". We will action it within 30 days.

We may suspend or terminate your account if:

• You materially breach these terms and do not fix the issue within a reasonable time after we ask you to.
• You use the service in a way that is illegal, abusive, or that we reasonably believe puts other users or our infrastructure at risk.
• Your usage pattern triggers the fair-use clause above.
• You charge back a payment that we believe was legitimate.
• We are required to do so by law.

If we terminate your account, we will give you a chance to export your notes first, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so. Any unused portion of a paid subscription is non-refundable in the case of termination for cause.

Slownotes is actively developed. We add features, change features, and occasionally remove features that did not work out. We will try to give meaningful notice in the app for material changes that affect how you use it.

The third-party AI models that Slownotes uses can change without our control. If a provider deprecates a model or changes its behaviour, the quality of certain results may shift. We will do our best to keep the experience consistent.

We work hard to make Slownotes reliable, but we do not guarantee that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that the AI processing will always produce accurate results. Slownotes is provided "as is". We disclaim all implied warranties to the maximum extent permitted by law.

In particular, do not rely on Slownotes as your only copy of important information. Keep your physical notebooks, export to a service you trust, and back up.

To the maximum extent permitted by Dutch law, our total liability to you for any claim arising out of or relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including lost data, lost profits, or lost notes.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for fraud, gross negligence, intentional misconduct, or anything else that cannot be limited under Dutch consumer law. If you are an EU consumer, your statutory rights apply on top of these terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Netherlands. Any dispute that we cannot resolve by talking to each other will be brought before the competent court in the Netherlands. If you are an EU consumer, you keep the right to bring proceedings in the courts of the country where you live.

The European Commission also runs an Online Dispute Resolution platform that you may use, although we would much rather sort things out directly.

We may update these terms from time to time. When we do, we update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page and bump the version number. For material changes, we will notify you in the app and ask you to accept the new terms before continuing to use it. Continuing to use Slownotes after a non-material change means you accept the update.

The current version always lives at slownotes.app/terms. Every published version is also kept at a permalinked URL so you can always find the exact text you agreed to: this is version 1.1 (slownotes.app/terms/v1.1). The previous version 1.0 remains available at slownotes.app/terms/v1.0.

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