The terms, in plain words.

The service

rl8 is an iPhone app that records conversations you choose to record, transcribes them, scores how you showed up in them, and lets you ask questions about them. “rl8”, “we” and “us” in these terms mean the people who make rl8; “you” means the person holding the account. The service is what the app does today; we improve it over time, and features can change or be retired.

Who can use it

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account. rl8 is offered in the United States through the App Store; if you use it elsewhere, you are responsible for making sure that is allowed where you are.

Your account

You need an account to use rl8, and you are responsible for what happens under it: keep your password to yourself and tell us at once if you think someone else has it. Give us accurate details when you sign up, and keep them that way. One person, one account; an account is not for sharing or reselling. You can delete your account from inside the app at any time, and everything in it is permanently erased.

Subscriptions

rl8 offers auto-renewable subscriptions, Plus and Pro, bought and billed through Apple. The price is the one the App Store shows you before you confirm, in your local currency. A subscription renews automatically at the end of each period, monthly or annual, until you cancel it in your App Store subscription settings at least 24 hours before the renewal date; cancelling later than that means one more period is charged. Cancelling stops the next charge and your plan runs to the end of the paid period.

Apple handles the purchase, the renewal and any refund. If you want money back, ask Apple through the App Store; we cannot issue refunds ourselves and we do not see your card details. If a renewal fails, Apple retries the payment for a while and your plan lapses if it does not go through.

What each plan allows, how weekly metering works, and the current prices are on the pricing page. We can change allowances and prices; a price change for an existing subscription only takes effect the way Apple requires, which includes telling you first. Deleting your rl8 account does not cancel a subscription, so cancel it through Apple as well; the support page shows how.

The free pool

A new account gets a fixed number of conversations and questions at no charge, with no expiry. It is a pool, not a monthly allowance: once it is used, recording and asking need a subscription, and everything you already recorded stays readable. The pool counts every conversation and question the account has ever made, on any plan, so it does not refill when a subscription ends. It is one pool per iPhone: a phone that has already used its free pool cannot start a second one with a new account. The current numbers are on the pricing page.

Recording other people

You are responsible for how you record. Laws on recording conversations differ from place to place, and in many places every person in the conversation has to agree first. Before you record, tell the people you are recording and make sure they are fine with it. rl8 is built for conversations recorded in the open, and we may close an account used to record people secretly.

Acceptable use

Use rl8 for your own conversations and your own reflection. Do not use it to harass, surveil or stalk anyone; to record anyone who has not agreed to be recorded; to upload audio you do not have the right to use; to break the law; or to probe, overload or reverse-engineer the service. Do not share your account or resell access to it. If an account is used this way we can suspend or close it.

Your content

Your recordings, transcripts, scores and insights are yours. You give rl8 permission to store and process them only as far as the service needs: to transcribe, score and analyze your conversations and show you the results. That processing includes sending audio and transcripts to third-party speech and language processors under contracts that forbid them from keeping or training on your data. We do not sell your content, advertise on it, or use it to train AI models, ours or anyone else's. The privacy page says in detail what we keep and for how long.

The app, its design and the scoring behind it are ours. You get a personal, non-transferable licence to use the app on your own devices under these terms, and nothing more.

Ending things

You can stop any time: delete your account in the app and, if you subscribe, cancel through Apple. We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and we can end or change the service; if we shut rl8 down we will tell you in advance where we can. When an account closes, its content is deleted as the privacy page describes. Any subscription period already paid is Apple's to refund or not.

What we do not promise

rl8 is offered as it is. It listens to the way you talk and reflects it back; it is not therapy, medical care, legal advice or a substitute for any of them, and its scores and insights are automated impressions that can be wrong. Do not make important decisions about a relationship, your health or your safety on the strength of a number from an app. We work to keep the service up and your data safe, but we cannot promise it will always be available, error-free or uninterrupted, and we make no other warranty, express or implied, to the extent the law lets us disclaim one.

Limits on liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, rl8 and the people who make it are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost profits or lost relationships, arising from the service or these terms. Our total liability to you for anything to do with rl8 is limited to what you paid us through Apple in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred US dollars if you paid nothing. Some places do not allow these limits, in which case they apply as far as that place permits.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the service changes. The date at the top says which version is in force; if a change matters to you we will say so in the app or by email before it takes effect. Using rl8 after that date means you accept the new terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules, and any dispute is heard in the state or federal courts in California. If part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to dave@fogcitycodeworks.com, and a person will answer.