These are the terms for using Charc, the writing app at charc.app, made by Charc Studio LLC ("Charc", "we", "us"). They are written to be read. If anything here is unclear, write to [email protected] and we will explain it plainly.
1. The agreement
By creating an account or using Charc you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use Charc. If you are using Charc on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you may bind it to these terms.
2. Who we are
Charc is operated by Charc Studio LLC, a limited liability company organised under the laws of the State of New Jersey, United States. You can reach us at [email protected].
3. Who may use Charc
You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. If you are under the age at which you can consent to these terms where you live, a parent or guardian must agree to them on your behalf. You are responsible for everything done through your account, so keep your password to yourself and tell us if you think someone else has it.
4. Your work is yours
Everything you write, upload or design in Charc — manuscripts, outlines, notes, images, cover designs, exported files — belongs to you. We claim no ownership of it and no rights in it beyond what is needed to run the service. That means: the permission to store your work, sync it between your devices, back it up, render it into the files you export, and show it to the people you choose to share it with. That permission ends when you delete the content or your account, subject to the retention periods in section 9.
We do not read your manuscripts, train anything on them, or use them for any purpose of our own. We may look at a specific project if you ask us to help with it, or if we need to investigate a report that it violates these terms.
5. Sharing and publishing
Some features put your work in front of other people, and only when you choose to: inviting collaborators, publishing a writer profile, making a project visible on it, creating a share link, or asking readers for feedback. Anything you make public is public. Once shared, we cannot control what a recipient does with it, so share what you are comfortable sharing. Collaborators you invite can see and, depending on the role you give them, change the project you invite them to.
6. What you may not do
Do not use Charc to store or distribute material that is unlawful, that infringes someone else's rights, or that you do not have the right to use. Do not try to break into other people's accounts or projects, disrupt the service, scrape it, or overload it. Do not use it to send spam or to harass anyone through its sharing features. We may remove content or suspend accounts that do these things; where we can, we will tell you why.
7. Free and paid plans
Charc's free plan is free, without a trial period or a card on file, and we intend to keep it that way. Some features and higher limits are part of a paid plan, described on the pricing page.
Paid plans are sold through Lemon Squeezy, who act as our merchant of record: they process the payment, handle applicable taxes, and issue receipts, and their terms apply to the transaction itself. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period until you cancel, which you can do at any time from your account; cancelling stops future charges and your plan runs to the end of the period already paid. If we change a price, we will tell you before your next renewal. If something about a charge is wrong, contact us and we will put it right.
When a paid plan ends, your work stays. Features that belonged to the plan stop, and limits return to the free plan's; nothing you wrote is deleted for that reason.
8. The service
Charc is a small company's product and it changes often. We add, alter and occasionally remove features; the changelog records what changed. We work hard to keep the service available, but we do not promise uninterrupted access, and we may take it down briefly for maintenance. We may suspend or end the service as a whole with reasonable notice, and if we ever do, you will have the chance to export your work first.
9. Backups, history and retention
Charc is built offline-first: your work is saved on your own device as you type and synced to our servers when you are connected. We keep automatic history and snapshots so you can recover earlier versions. How much history we keep depends on your plan and is described on the pricing page. Deleted projects can be restored for a period after deletion — 14 days on the free plan, one year on a paid plan — and are then permanently removed. A collaborator's working copy is kept for 30 days after they leave a project, in case they are re-invited, and then removed.
We take backups seriously and maintain replicated copies of our database for disaster recovery. Even so, you should keep your own copies of anything that matters to you. Charc can export your whole project as a backup file at any time, and we encourage you to do so regularly.
10. Ending your account
You can delete your account from the account page. Doing so deletes your projects and your account record; see the Privacy Policy for what happens to backups. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, or that has been inactive for a very long time, and where reasonable we will warn you first so you can export your work.
11. No warranty
Charc is provided as it is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we make no warranties about it — that it will meet your needs, that it will be error-free, or that data will never be lost. We do our best; we do not guarantee.
12. Limits on our liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, Charc Studio LLC will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill, arising from your use of Charc. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or one hundred US dollars if you paid nothing. Some places do not allow these limits, in which case they apply as far as they are permitted.
13. Your responsibility to us
If a third party brings a claim against us because of content you put in Charc or something you did with the service in breach of these terms, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it.
14. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New Jersey, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute that we cannot settle between us will be brought in the state or federal courts located in New Jersey. Nothing in this section takes away protections you are entitled to under the consumer law of the place you live.
15. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms as Charc changes. For anything more than a clarification we will let you know — in the app or by email — before the new terms take effect. Continuing to use Charc after that means you accept them. The effective date at the top is the date of the current version.
16. Contact
Charc Studio LLC · [email protected]