Community Guidelines and Age-Appropriateness Notes

Last updated: 15 July 2026

Our Terms of Service are the rules. These guidelines are how we apply them, written plainly. Where the two disagree, the Terms govern.

If you have added a child profile to your account, Section 3 is the part written for you.

1. What Bindlestory is for

Bindlestory turns text into an audiobook narrated in a cloned voice — usually your own. It exists so a child can hear a story in a familiar voice, including on the nights the person who owns that voice cannot be there to read it.

Everything else follows from that. It is a small, private tool for a household and a few friends. It is not a publishing platform, there is no audience, and nothing you make is discoverable by strangers.

2. What is not allowed

Someone else's voice

Clone your own voice. That is the rule, and almost everything else in this section is a consequence of it.

You may clone another adult's voice only where they have given you documented permission, and we verify every voice sample against a consent recording before we process it. Uploading a recording of someone else's voice without their consent is a material breach of the Terms and grounds for immediate termination — not a strike, not a warning.

Never clone a child's voice, including your own child's. A child under 16 cannot validly consent to their own biometric data being processed, and being their parent does not transfer that consent to you. This one has no exceptions and no workaround: narrate in your own voice instead.

Someone else's book

You need the rights to the text you upload. In practice that means your own writing, a work in the public domain where you live, or something you have licensed.

Uploading a commercially published book you bought is not permitted, even for your own child, and even though it feels private. Buying a copy buys you the copy, not the right to produce an audio edition of it. We know this is the rule people most often trip over, and we would rather say it plainly here than have you find out through a takedown notice.

Content that hurts people

No content that harasses, threatens, or degrades a real person. No sexual content involving minors, in any form, ever. No non-consensual intimate material. No audio that impersonates a real person in order to deceive — a fake statement from a politician, a fake voice note from a relative asking for money.

We screen story text automatically before generating anything, and Section 4.1 of the Terms explains exactly which parts of that are software and which are people.

Passing our audio off as real

Every audiobook we generate carries an inaudible watermark marking it as AI-generated. Do not remove it, degrade it, or try to work around it. It exists so that a voice clone made here cannot be laundered into evidence that someone said something they never said.

3. Choosing what your child hears

Nothing reaches a child profile by accident

A child profile starts empty. It can only play audiobooks you have explicitly marked as available to kids — the default is that nothing is. There is no feed, no recommendation engine, no autoplay into something you have not chosen, and no way for another user to put content in front of your child.

Child profiles cannot create audiobooks, clone voices, send or receive friend requests, be shared an audiobook by a friend, or make purchases. They listen. That is the whole surface.

The PIN protects the exit, not the entrance

Our parent PIN works the other way round from most. It does not stop your child getting into their own profile — it stops them getting out into the adult side of the app, where voice cloning, creation, billing and sharing live. Set it to something your child will not guess. It is required before we let you create a child profile at all.

Judging a story

Automated screening blocks things that are broadly prohibited. It cannot know your child. It does not know that your six-year-old is frightened of storms, that a bereavement in the family makes a particular plot unbearable this year, or that a book you loved at ten lands very differently at five.

Some things worth a thought before you mark a story as available to a kid:

• Read it, or skim it, first. A book's age rating is about a child reading it alone in daylight. Yours is being heard at bedtime, in the dark, in a voice they love and trust. That is a different thing, and it lands harder.
• A familiar voice raises the stakes. Frightening material narrated by a stranger is a story. The same material in a parent's or grandparent's voice can feel like it is happening. This is the single most common way a story lands worse than expected.
• Watch the edges of a long book. You may have chosen a book on the strength of its opening chapters. Chapter nineteen may not resemble them.
• Grief and absence are not the same for you as for them. Voices of people who have died are one of the reasons this app exists, and we are not going to tell you how to handle that. But a child's reaction may not be yours, and it may not arrive on the first listen.
• Check back. What was fine last year may not be this year, and the reverse is just as true. The library you built when they were four is still there when they are seven.

You can remove a story from a child's library at any time, and it disappears from their profile immediately.

4. Reporting something

Anyone can report content, whether or not they have a Bindlestory account. Use the form at https://bindlestory.app/report, the report option in the app, or email [email protected]. Copyright complaints go to [email protected] instead, and Section 10 of the Terms explains why that one is different.

If someone has cloned your voice without your consent, say so and we will prioritise it. We can verify that the reported audio came from our service using the watermark, and if the voice is yours we can confirm that with a short call.

We acknowledge every report, a person reviews it, and we tell you what we decided.

5. If you break the rules

We operate three strikes, described in Section 12 of the Terms. Strike one removes the content. Strike two ends your ability to share with friends, permanently. Strike three suspends the account.

Serious cases skip all of that. Deepfake fraud, non-consensual intimate audio, impersonating a public official, or anything involving a minor terminates the account on the first instance.

Whenever we restrict something you made, we tell you what we did, why, whether software or a person decided it, and how to challenge it. If we get it wrong, appeal — a person will look, and if the appeal succeeds we restore the content and reverse the strike.

6. Talking to us

• Something about your account, or you think we made a mistake: [email protected]
• Reporting content: https://bindlestory.app/report or [email protected]
• Copyright: [email protected]
• Your personal data: [email protected]

A person reads all of these.