Terms of Service

Last updated: April 22, 2026

Welcome to Bindlestory. These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of the Bindlestory mobile application and any related services (together, the "Service") provided by Bindlestory ("we," "us," or "our"). By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms.

1. Who Can Use Bindlestory

You must be at least 16 years old to create a Bindlestory account. People under 16 may not sign up for the Service, create a voice clone, record a consent sample, or otherwise use the Service on their own behalf. Bindlestory is designed for parents and legal guardians who create personalized audiobooks for their families, including children under 16.

When an adult account holder adds a child as an in-app listener sub-profile, or otherwise lets a child use the Service under their supervision, the adult account holder takes full legal and practical responsibility for everything that child does on the platform, including:

• the content the child plays back, requests, or encounters;
• compliance with these Terms and with the Acceptable Use rules in Section 8;
• age-appropriate supervision of that use;
• any damages, claims, or costs arising from that child's use of the Service.

Parents and guardians are responsible for reviewing these Terms, our Privacy Policy, and the in-app community rules, and for ensuring the child's use of the Service stays within those rules. If a child's use of the Service breaches these Terms, the adult account holder is treated as the user who committed the breach, and the consequences in Section 12 (Suspension and Termination) apply to the adult's account.

Children may not use the Sharing with Friends feature under any circumstance — see Section 7.

2. Your Account

You are responsible for the activity that happens under your account. Keep your login credentials private, and let us know right away at [email protected] if you think someone else has accessed your account.

You agree to provide accurate information when you sign up and to keep it up to date.

Your parent profile may be protected by a 6-digit PIN that gates "switch back to parent" when a child profile is in use. If you add a child profile to your account, setting a parent PIN is mandatory — this is how the platform separates parent-only features (voice cloning, content creation, subscription management, friends, sharing) from the listener-only child experience. Keeping the PIN secret is part of the supervision responsibility described in Section 1.

3. Your Content, Rights, and Warranties

You retain ownership of the text, voice recordings, and audiobooks you create with the Service ("Your Content"). By using the Service, you grant us a limited, non-exclusive license to store and process Your Content solely to operate and improve the Service, including the automated processing described in Section 4. We do not sell Your Content and we do not use it to train third-party models.

You warrant that, for every piece of text or other material you upload, paste, record, or otherwise submit to the Service, you either own all rights to that material or have obtained all necessary permissions, licences, and consents to upload it, to have Bindlestory process it, to have Bindlestory generate an audiobook from it, and — if applicable — to share the resulting audiobook with friends through the Service. This warranty applies to every upload, whether or not you ever share the audiobook with anyone else. Uploading content you do not hold rights to is a material breach of these Terms.

You are responsible for Your Content. You agree not to upload text or record voice samples, or generate audiobooks, that:

• infringe someone else's copyright, trademark, publicity, or other rights;
• impersonate or clone the voice of any identifiable person — including living private individuals, public figures, politicians, celebrities, colleagues, family members, or deceased persons — without explicit, verifiable consent from that person (no one may consent on behalf of a deceased person);
• clone or attempt to clone the voice of a minor, even with parental authorisation (see Section 5);
• are designed to deceive a listener into believing they capture a real person, including audio produced for fraud, financial harm, political misinformation, election interference, or manufactured evidence;
• depict any identifiable person in a non-consensual intimate, sexual, or romantic scenario;
• contain sexually explicit, hateful, violent, or illegal material;
• are intended to harass, defame, deceive, or enable coordinated abuse of another person.

You indemnify Bindlestory and hold us harmless from any third-party claims, damages, fines, or costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of Your Content, out of your sharing of Your Content with other users, or out of your breach of the warranties in this Section 3.

We may remove content or suspend accounts that violate these rules. Section 10 describes how rights-holders can notify us of infringing content and how we act on those notices. Section 11 describes how anyone can report non-copyright abuse — voice impersonation, deepfakes, harassment, and similar. Section 12 describes the repeat-offender policy that applies to any account accumulating rights-infringement or abuse strikes.

Each upload to the Service is treated as a distinct affirmation of the warranty in this Section 3 — the "I own or hold all necessary rights to this content" checkbox in the upload screen is your active, per-upload acknowledgement. Each share of Your Content to a friend is likewise a distinct affirmation of the redistribution-rights warranty in Section 7.

External use of your audiobooks. You own the audiobooks you create with the Service. You may listen to them personally, share them with friends through Section 7, or publish them externally (for example, on Audible, YouTube, Spotify, or a podcast feed) only where you hold full commercial publishing rights in the underlying work — your own original writing, works that are in the public domain under the laws that apply to you, or works you have licensed for commercial audio production. External publication does not grant you any additional rights in the underlying work, and you remain solely responsible for compliance with the destination platform's rules and with any rights-holder's terms.

4. Automated Content Processing

When you upload a document or paste text, Bindlestory automatically parses the content, extracts text where needed (from PDF, EPUB, DOCX, ODT, or plain-text sources), runs the text through automated moderation to detect prohibited material described in Section 3, computes a content fingerprint, chunks the text for narration, and submits those chunks to a text-to-speech pipeline that produces your audiobook. Covers and other artwork may be generated through separate automated pipelines. Your voice clone — if you have one — is used to narrate the audiobook; the clone itself remains scoped to your account.

By using the Service you acknowledge and agree that this automated processing takes place.

Bindlestory maintains a content fingerprint blocklist populated from notices we have actioned under Section 10. If you upload a document whose content fingerprint matches an entry on that blocklist, the upload is refused and the attempt is recorded. Repeated attempts to upload blocklisted content may count as strikes under Section 12.

5. Voice Cloning and Consent

Bindlestory lets you clone your own voice to narrate audiobooks. Because voice recordings are biometric data under laws like the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), we require explicit, per-language voice consent before we process any voice recording.

You affirm that every voice you clone is your own (or, if applicable, a voice the owner has given you documented permission to clone). Submitting a recording of someone else's voice without their consent is a material breach of these Terms and is grounds for immediate account termination.

If your consent recording is rejected by our review team, we will notify you. A lifetime total of three rejections will result in your account being frozen pending appeal.

Cloning a minor's voice is prohibited, including by a parent or legal guardian. Under applicable biometric-privacy law, a child under 16 cannot validly consent to the collection and processing of their own voice biometric data. Parental authority to act on the child's behalf does not extend to creating a persistent, reusable voice clone of the child. Family audiobook narration can be performed using an adult account holder's own voice clone instead.

AI transparency. All audiobook audio generated by the Service carries an inaudible perceptual watermark that identifies it as AI-generated and can be detected with standard open-source tooling. This watermark is used by Bindlestory and by third parties (including rights-holders, platforms, and law enforcement) to verify that a given audio file was produced by our Service. You may not remove, degrade, or attempt to circumvent this watermark.

6. Subscriptions, Credits, and Payments

Paid features on Bindlestory are sold through your device's app store as in-app purchases. Your subscription automatically renews at the end of each billing period unless you cancel at least 24 hours before renewal. You can manage and cancel subscriptions from your app store account settings on the device.

Credits purchased as consumable packs do not expire. Credits included in a subscription reset at the start of each billing period and do not roll over. We may change pricing with reasonable notice, but any change will only take effect at the start of a subsequent billing period.

6.1 Refunds, Cancellations, and Right of Withdrawal

Refunds. Subscriptions and credit packs are sold as in-app purchases, so refunds are handled by the app store that processed the transaction — Bindlestory cannot issue refunds directly. For Apple App Store purchases, you can request a refund at https://reportaproblem.apple.com or by tapping the receipt in your email. Apple decides whether to grant a refund under its own policy. If a refund is granted, Bindlestory will revoke any unused entitlements associated with the refunded purchase.

Cancellation. You can cancel your subscription at any time from your device's app store settings. Cancellation stops automatic renewal — you keep access to paid features through the end of the period you have already paid for, after which your account returns to the free tier. Cancellation does not, by itself, refund the current billing period.

Unused credits. Credits included in a subscription reset at each renewal and have no cash value. Consumable credit packs are not refundable by Bindlestory; if you believe a pack was purchased in error, request a refund from the app store as described above.

Right of withdrawal (EEA / United Kingdom). Consumers in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom normally have a 14-day right to withdraw from a contract for digital services. Because Bindlestory begins delivering the service immediately at purchase — generating audiobooks, opening voice cloning, unlocking sharing features — you expressly consent to immediate performance and acknowledge that you lose your right of withdrawal as soon as performance has begun. The app store's purchase flow records this consent at the time of payment. This does not affect rights under mandatory consumer protection law that cannot be waived.

7. Sharing with Friends

7.1 Overview

Simple and Premium subscribers may share audiobooks they have created with a small number of friends who also hold a Simple or Premium subscription. Friends are added by entering an email address associated with an existing Bindlestory account or by exchanging pseudonymous friend codes in-app.

Friend limits:

• Simple: up to 3 mutual friends.
• Premium: up to 5 mutual friends.
• Each individual audiobook may be shared with at most 5 friends at a time, regardless of the owner's tier.

7.2 Rights warranty for shared content

In addition to the general warranties in Section 3, you warrant that, for every audiobook you share with a friend under this Section 7, you hold all rights necessary to redistribute that audiobook to that friend. This warranty is made distinctly for each share you create — the "I confirm I hold the rights to share this audiobook with my friends" acknowledgement in the share dialogue is your active, per-share affirmation. Bindlestory records the acknowledgement, the Terms version under which you made it, and the time at which you made it.

You agree not to use Sharing with Friends to redistribute:

• content you do not own or hold redistribution rights to, including commercially published books, screenplays, or other copyrighted works;
• content obtained from a third-party source whose licence or terms of use do not permit redistribution;
• anyone else's voice, likeness, or other personal material without their consent.

7.3 Limited licence granted to recipients

When you accept an audiobook that has been shared with you by a friend, Bindlestory grants you a limited, revocable, non-transferable, personal-use-only licence to stream that audiobook on devices on which you are signed into your own Bindlestory account, and to temporarily cache it on-device in encrypted form for offline playback during the lifetime of the active share. You may not:

• download, extract, export, or retain a plaintext copy of the audio outside the Service;
• re-share, re-distribute, sell, or otherwise transfer the audiobook or any derivative of it to any third party;
• circumvent, attempt to circumvent, or help anyone else circumvent the encryption, key management, or other technical measures Bindlestory uses to protect the audio at rest on your device.

The licence is revocable at any time by the owner of the audiobook, by Bindlestory acting under Section 10, 11, or 12, or automatically if the owner's or your subscription drops below the Simple tier. When the licence is revoked, the Service instructs your device to delete the on-device encrypted copy on its next synchronisation with our servers; you may not retain or attempt to retain the content after revocation.

7.4 Blocks

Either party to a friendship may block the other at any time. Blocking a user immediately terminates the friendship, revokes every audiobook share in both directions, and prevents the blocked user from sending further friend requests. Blocked users are not notified of the block. Blocks may be lifted by the user who created them.

7.5 Children

Child sub-profiles may not send or receive friend requests, may not appear in any other user's friend list, and may not be shared any audiobook through this feature. Sharing with Friends is unavailable on child profiles both in the app and at the server level.

7.6 Scope

Friends-of-friends, public profiles, and any form of discovery beyond the one-to-one friend relationship are explicitly outside the scope of the Service.

8. Acceptable Use

You agree not to:

• reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract our source code, model weights, or content-encryption keys;
• resell, rent, or sublicense access to the Service;
• use automated systems to submit content or probe the Service beyond normal use;
• circumvent, disable, or otherwise interfere with security-related features of the Service, including the digital rights protections described in Section 7.3;
• misuse the Sharing with Friends feature to redistribute content you do not hold redistribution rights to;
• let a user under 16 sign up, hold an account, record a voice sample, or interact with creator or friends features — children may only use the Service through a listener-only sub-profile under an adult account as described in Section 9 (Family Sharing) and Section 7.5 (Friends — Children).

9. Family Sharing (Premium)

Premium subscribers may invite up to five family members to share their library. Invited adults sign in with their own accounts; children added as in-app sub-profiles play back only — they cannot create audiobooks, manage voice profiles, or make purchases.

The Premium subscriber who owns the family account is responsible for everyone they add to it. That means:

• the adults they invite use the Service under their own accounts and agree to these Terms individually, but the Premium owner remains responsible for the audiobooks they share into the family library;
• every child sub-profile sits under the Premium owner's account, and the Premium owner is fully responsible for that child's playback activity, content exposure, and compliance with these Terms;
• a parent PIN must be set on the Premium owner's own profile before any child sub-profile can be added — the platform refuses to create a child profile without one;
• if a child's activity violates these Terms (for example, a child shares account access with a non-family user, or a child plays back content that shouldn't be available to them), the Premium owner is treated as the responsible user under Section 12.

Parents and guardians adding child sub-profiles should read the in-app community guidelines and age-appropriateness notes, and set up the family library with their child's age and sensitivities in mind. Bindlestory surfaces content controls; using them responsibly is part of the adult account holder's role.

10. Copyright Complaints and DMCA Procedure

Bindlestory respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects our users to do the same. We respond to properly submitted notices of claimed infringement in accordance with the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DMCA") and equivalent procedures available under applicable law in other jurisdictions.

10.1 Designated agent

Our designated agent to receive notifications of claimed infringement under the DMCA is:

• Agent: Haydar Öztürk
• Registration number (United States Copyright Office): DMCA-1071796
• Email for notifications: [email protected]

10.2 How to submit a takedown notice

You may submit a notice of claimed infringement by email to the address above or through the public takedown form available in-app. To be effective, your notice must include at least the following, as required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3):

1. your physical or electronic signature;
2. identification of the copyrighted work you claim has been infringed;
3. identification of the material on the Service that you claim is infringing and enough information for us to locate it (for example, the audiobook title, a description of the content, and any URL, share link, or screenshot);
4. your contact information (name, address, telephone, email);
5. a statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;
6. a statement under penalty of perjury that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are authorised to act on behalf of the rights owner.

Notices that do not include these elements may be rejected as non-compliant.

10.3 What happens when we action a notice

When we determine that a notice is valid and complete, we will:

• disable access to the identified content;
• if the content had been shared with friends, pause or revoke every affected share;
• record the content's fingerprint on our internal blocklist to prevent re-uploads of the same material;
• notify the user who uploaded the content and record a strike against their account under Section 12.

10.4 Counter-notification

If you believe your content was removed or disabled as a result of a mistaken or incorrect notice, you may submit a counter-notification to the address above. A valid counter-notification must include the elements required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3). On receiving a valid counter-notification, we will forward it to the complaining party and, unless the complaining party files suit within the statutory window, restore the content.

10.5 Misrepresentations

Under the DMCA, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents either that content is infringing or that it was removed by mistake may be liable for damages to the rights-holder, to the user, or to Bindlestory.

11. Voice Impersonation and Non-Copyright Abuse Reports

Section 10 covers copyright infringement under the DMCA. This section covers reports that are not copyright claims — most commonly, that someone has cloned or used another person's voice on Bindlestory without their consent, or has generated audio that impersonates, harasses, or depicts another person without permission.

11.1 Who may report

You do not need to be a Bindlestory user to submit an abuse report. Anyone — including the subject of the reported audio, a legal representative, a parent or legal guardian acting on behalf of a minor, or the next-of-kin of a deceased person — may contact us.

11.2 How to submit a report

Send your report to [email protected] or through the public "Report a voice or audiobook" form available in-app. A useful report includes:

1. your relationship to the person whose voice or likeness is affected;
2. enough information to identify the reported content or voice profile on the Service (share link, screenshot, audio excerpt, or the username of the account you believe cloned the voice);
3. a description of why the content is abusive — for example, unauthorised cloning, deepfake misuse, harassment, or non-consensual intimate audio;
4. your contact information so we can follow up;
5. a good-faith statement that the information in your report is accurate.

If the reported audio purports to be you, we accept identity verification through a short live video or voice call establishing that your voice matches the reported clone.

11.3 What happens when we action a report

When we determine that a report is credible, we may:

• disable access to the reported content and pause or revoke any active shares of it;
• disable the reported voice profile pending review;
• where the content is AI-generated by the Service, confirm provenance using the inaudible watermark described in Section 5;
• record a strike against the uploading account under Section 12;
• in serious cases — including deepfake fraud, non-consensual intimate audio, impersonation of a politician or public official, or any report involving a minor — terminate the account immediately and preserve the relevant evidence for lawful-access requests.

We will notify you of the outcome. We may disclose your report, or information derived from it, to law enforcement or to a data protection authority where required by law.

12. Repeat-Infringer Policy, Suspension, and Termination

We enforce a three-strike repeat-offender policy that applies both to rights infringement actioned under Section 10 and to credible abuse findings actioned under Section 11:

• Strike 1 — recorded; the affected content is removed and the account continues to operate normally.
• Strike 2 — the account's ability to share content with friends is permanently suspended. Existing shares by the account are revoked. The account may continue to use other features.
• Strike 3 — the account is fully suspended pending appeal. The user is notified and may submit an appeal through the in-app appeals flow.

Strikes are counted across copyright notices, abuse findings, uploads, and shares together. A successful DMCA counter-notification under Section 10.4, or a successful appeal of an abuse finding under Section 11, reverses the related strike.

In addition to the repeat-infringer policy, we may suspend or terminate your account if you breach these Terms, if required by law, or if continued access poses a risk to other users or to the Service. Under Sections 1 and 9, breaches committed by a child under your supervision or by any user under your family account are treated as breaches by you, the adult account holder. You can close your account at any time from the app's Settings screen; a grace period of 30 days applies before data is permanently deleted.

13. Disclaimer and Limitation of Liability

The Service is provided "as is," without warranties of any kind. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages, and our total liability to you for any claim related to the Service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.

Nothing in these Terms excludes our liability for death, personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, or any other liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law.

14. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, we will give you reasonable notice in-app and require you to re-accept before continuing to use the Service. Continued use after the effective date of updated Terms means you accept them.

Material changes — including changes to Sections 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, or 12 — will trigger an acceptance modal on the next launch. You will not be able to upload new content or use Sharing with Friends until you accept the updated Terms.

15. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the European Economic Area member state in which Bindlestory is established, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Disputes will be resolved in the courts of that jurisdiction, except where applicable consumer protection law requires otherwise.

16. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Email us at [email protected]. DMCA rights-holder notices and counter-notifications should go to [email protected] per Section 10. Non-copyright abuse reports should go to [email protected] per Section 11.