Terms of service.

These terms are the agreement between you and Writium, an independent project run by a sole proprietor based in Los Angeles, California (“we,” “us”). They cover the website, the app, and everything in it. Our privacy policy explains how we handle data and is part of this agreement. By creating an account or using Writium, you accept both. If you don't accept them, please don't use Writium.

Use Writium for its intended purpose: researching, planning, citing, and organizing your own writing. You agree not to:

• use it for anything illegal, infringing, or harmful;
• harass other people, or misuse the AI to produce abusive, deceptive, or unlawful content;
• scrape, resell, or redistribute the service, or access it through bots or other automated means;
• overload, probe, reverse-engineer, or try to circumvent our systems, usage limits, or credit allowances;
• use Writium (or its outputs) to build a competing product, to assemble a dataset, or to train a machine learning model;
• upload malware, or use the service to attack anyone's systems, including ours;
• share, sell, or transfer your account or your credits to someone else;
• attempt to reach other users' accounts or data.

One person, one account. We may limit, suspend, or close accounts that break these rules, and we may remove content that does.

Keep your login details to yourself, and use an email address you actually control (we send account and billing notices there). You are responsible for what happens under your account. If you think someone else has got into it, tell us straight away through the contact form and change your password.

You must be at least 13 years old to use Writium. If you are under 18, you may use it only with the permission and supervision of a parent, guardian, or teacher who agrees to these terms on your behalf. By using Writium you confirm you meet these requirements. If we learn an account belongs to a child under 13, we will close it and delete the data.

You also confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a comprehensive trade embargo, and that you are not on any government restricted-party or sanctions list. Writium is not available to you if you are.

You own what you create: your drafts, notes, saved sources, and the projects that hold them. We claim no ownership of any of it.

To make the product work, you give us a narrow, non-exclusive, revocable, worldwide, royalty-free license to store, copy, transmit, and display that content, and to pass the limited parts described under AI features and third-party services to the providers who process it for you. That license exists only so we can run the service for you. It is not a license to publish your work, sell it, or train models on it. It ends when you delete the content or your account, apart from copies that sit in routine backups until those roll off on their own schedule.

You promise that you have the right to everything you put into Writium, and that it doesn't infringe anyone's copyright, break the law, or breach an agreement you're under. You are responsible for how you use what you find. We do not screen or monitor what you store, but we may remove content or disable a project if we're told it is unlawful or infringing, or if the law requires it.

If you believe something stored or displayed in Writium infringes your copyright, send a notice through the contact form with: what work you say is infringed, where in Writium the material is, how to contact you, a statement that you believe in good faith the use isn't authorized, a statement that the information in your notice is accurate, and your signature (typed is fine) confirming you're the owner or authorized to act for them.

We'll look into it and remove or disable material where the complaint is valid. If your material was removed and you think that was a mistake, write to us the same way and we'll review it. We close the accounts of repeat infringers.

Writium helps you find, vet, and organize sources, and it can format a works-cited list from the sources you saved. The writing itself is yours to do. We do not draft prose for you, on purpose. Generated citations are a first draft, not a guarantee: check them against whatever style your teacher asks for. You are solely responsible for following your school's academic-integrity and citation policies. Writium is a study aid, not a guarantee of any grade or result.

Writium depends on third-party providers to work. In particular:

• Source search. Your search query goes to our web-search provider (currently Exa) to fetch real results.
• AI vetting. Those results, your query, and a small slice of project context (the essay title, the thesis, and the titles of sources you have already saved) go to our AI provider (currently Anthropic's Claude), which picks, ranks, and classifies the best ones. The body of your document and your private notes are not sent.
• Semantic recall is a feature that would search your own saved sources by meaning. It is not currently enabled. If we switch it on, the text of each saved source (its title, author, your notes on that source, and any highlights you kept) and your recall query would be sent to an embeddings provider (currently OpenAI) to be turned into vectors. Your document body would not be sent, and we will update these terms and the privacy policy before enabling it.
• We also rely on third parties for hosting, database and sign-in, email, and payment processing. They are listed in the privacy policy.

Those providers handle that data under their own terms and privacy policies, and we do not control their systems. We do not permit them to train models on your work, and we rely on the API terms they publish, not on any special arrangement. AI and search results are provided on a best-effort, “as-is” basis and can be incomplete, out of date, or wrong. Always open and check a source yourself before you rely on it or cite it. We are not responsible for the accuracy of third-party results or for interruptions caused by a third-party provider, and we may change the providers we use at any time.

We collect usage data about how Writium is used (pages visited, features used, search activity, performance, and automatic error reports) as described in our privacy policy. This is first-party and cookieless: no advertising trackers, and the data is never sold or shared with ad networks. We use it to improve the product, fix problems, understand where visitors come from, and prevent abuse of plan limits. When you delete your account, this data is kept in anonymized form, no longer linked to you.

• There is a free plan you can use indefinitely. Paid plans (Plus and Pro) are optional and unlock deeper search tiers and larger allowances.
• You can choose monthly or annual billing through our payment processor. Monthly plans are billed each month in advance. Annual plans are billed once, up front, for the whole year, and then renew annually. Both renew automatically until you cancel.
• Introductory discounts apply to your first billing period only; the plan then renews at the regular price. Any discount shown (including the annual saving) is promotional and may change or end for future billing periods. The price you actually pay is the one shown at checkout before you confirm.
• We may change our prices. If a change affects what you pay at renewal, we'll tell you by email before it takes effect, and you can cancel before then. Prices are in US dollars and don't include any sales tax or VAT that may apply.
• Promotional codes, when we offer them, are for the plan and period we say they are. We may withdraw them at any time for future redemptions.
• You can cancel any time from Settings, and you keep paid features until the end of the period you have already paid for. If instead you delete your account, we cancel the subscription at that moment and the rest of the paid period is not refunded, so cancel first if that matters to you.
• If a renewal payment fails, we may downgrade the account to the free plan until a payment goes through.
• We refund a new subscription if you ask within 3 days of purchase. After that, payments are non-refundable. If the law where you live gives you a cooling-off or withdrawal right, you keep it: that right applies on top of this policy, not instead of it.
• Plans include a weekly and a monthly credit allowance. Weekly allowances reset every Monday; monthly allowances reset on your own renewal day (the day of the month you signed up, or your subscription renewal date), not on the 1st. Unused allowance does not roll over. A search that returns nothing usable doesn't cost credits.
• Extra credits bought as a one-time pack are only spent once your plan allowance is used up. They do not expire while your account is open, they do not roll over into your plan allowance, and they are non-refundable once used. They're gone if you delete your account.

We work hard to keep Writium running and your data safe, but we don't promise any level of uptime. There is no service-level agreement here. We may add, change, or discontinue features (or the whole service) at any time; if we plan to retire something you rely on, we'll try to give reasonable notice so you can export your work. Some features may be labelled beta or experimental, and those can break or disappear without notice. Please export important projects periodically: Settings, then Data, then Export.

Writium is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, or non-infringement. We can't guarantee the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or fit for your specific needs, or that the results it produces are accurate or complete. Some places don't allow these exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

First, the part we are not trying to limit. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for gross negligence or wilful misconduct, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to exclude or limit.

Beyond that, and to the fullest extent the law allows: we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, punitive, or consequential damages, or for lost data, lost work, lost grades, lost opportunities, or lost profits, arising from your use of (or inability to use) Writium.

Our total liability for all claims taken together is capped at the greater of these two amounts: (a) everything you paid us in the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim, or (b) US$100. Whichever of the two is larger is the cap. Paying us something never leaves you with a lower cap than paying us nothing.

If your use of Writium, the content you put into it, or your breach of these terms leads to a claim against us from someone else, you agree to defend us and cover the reasonable costs, damages, and legal fees of dealing with it, to the extent the law allows. We'll tell you promptly about any such claim and let you take part in handling it. If you are under 18, this applies to the parent, guardian, or teacher who agreed to these terms for you.

You can stop using Writium whenever you like, and delete your account at any time from Settings. We may suspend or close an account that abuses the service, breaks these terms, creates legal risk for us, or doesn't pay. Where we reasonably can, we'll tell you why and give you a chance to fix it first. If we close your account for something you didn't do wrong, we'll refund the unused part of any period you had paid for.

Deleting your account does not reset plan limits: to prevent abuse of the free plan, we keep a one-way hashed record (which cannot be turned back into your email) of your usage counters and your cycle start date at the time of deletion. If an account is later created with the same email, its usage allowances continue where they left off. Feedback you submitted is kept in anonymized form.

Sections that are meant to outlast the account survive it: your content warranties, covering misuse, no warranties, limitation of liability, and the dispute and small-print sections.

Contact us first. Most issues are quicker to resolve that way than through a formal process, and we genuinely want to sort them out. Please give us 30 days from the day you write to us to put things right before starting anything formal.

These terms, and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of Writium, are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Los Angeles County, California have exclusive jurisdiction. Either of us can still bring a claim in a small-claims court where that court has jurisdiction. Nothing here takes away mandatory consumer-protection rights that the law of the country you live in gives you and does not let you sign away, including the right to bring a claim in your local courts where that law says you may.

When we make a material change to these terms, we'll email everyone with an active account at least 14 days before it takes effect, and update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use Writium after that means you accept the updated terms. If you don't, cancel and delete your account before the change takes effect. Non-material changes (fixing a typo, clarifying wording) take effect when we post them.

• If one part fails. If a court decides some part of these terms can't be enforced, that part is trimmed to the narrowest change that makes it work, and the rest stays in force.
• The whole agreement. These terms and the privacy policy are the entire agreement between us about Writium, and they replace anything said earlier. Nothing on our marketing pages adds a promise that isn't written here.
• Letting something slide. If we don't enforce a term straight away, we haven't given up the right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You can't transfer your account or these terms to anyone else without our written agreement. We may transfer them to a successor if Writium is sold or reorganized, and we'll tell you if that happens.
• Things outside our control. We're not liable for delays or failures caused by events we can't reasonably control: outages at our providers, network or power failures, natural disasters, war, epidemics, strikes, or government action.
• No partnership. These terms don't make either of us the other's employee, agent, or partner, and nobody else gains rights under them.
• Headings. Section titles are there to help you find things. They don't change what the text says.

Questions about these terms: contact form.