Terms of Service

Effective 19 July 2026

These terms govern your use of Dear Reader. They are written to be read. By creating an account or using the service you agree to them.

1. It is fiction

Dear Reader delivers personalized horror fiction. Chapters, letters, and every other artifact the service produces are fictional works generated by software, using only details you chose to share. Nothing in the service reflects real events, real surveillance, or real knowledge of you beyond what you typed in. The service marks this on every page and email ("This is fiction — Dear Reader"), and the Lights On control instantly reduces the experience to its gentlest setting. The fiction is designed to feel close; it is never real.

2. Eligibility and your account

You must be 18 or older. You are responsible for your account credentials and for the accuracy of the email address on the account. One person per account; you may not use the service on behalf of someone else or feed it another person's private information as if it were your own.

3. Your material

Everything you share — questionnaire answers, replies, messages to the antagonist — remains yours. You grant us a limited license to process it for one purpose: operating the service and writing your story, under the tier limits and exclusions you set. Our Privacy Policy describes this in detail and is part of these terms.

When you name real people from your life, you confirm that you accept the service's framing: they appear only as fictionalized versions, are never depicted as harmed or endangered, and you take responsibility for having named them. Do not share information you do not have the right to share.

4. Your story

Chapters and letters generated for you are yours to read, keep, export, and share privately. We grant you a personal, non-commercial license to that generated text. The underlying story structures, arcs, prompts, software, and the Dear Reader name remain ours (or our licensors'); you may not resell generated content or use the service to build a competing dataset or product.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• attempt to make the engine produce content it is designed to refuse (instructions for harm, sexualized content, content targeting real people, and the rest of the safety rules the service enforces);
• probe, scrape, overload, or reverse-engineer the service, or access another person's story or data;
• use the service to harass, impersonate, or harm anyone — including by feeding it a real person's private details as "your" material.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that do these things.

6. What the service is not

Dear Reader is entertainment. It is not a medical, psychological, or crisis service, and no human monitors it in real time. Its safety features — the crisis classifier, Lights On, hard exclusions — are best-effort affordances, not guarantees, and not a substitute for real help. Horror is the product: by choosing higher intensity tiers you are asking the fiction to come closer, and you can always turn the lights on.

7. Paid features

Some features may require payment (for example instant chapter unlocks or additional concurrent stories). Prices and terms will be shown before you pay. Subscriptions, if offered, can be cancelled any time and end at the close of the paid period. Nothing you already generated is taken away when a paid feature lapses.

8. Ending things

You can stop any time: pause the story, or delete your account in settings — deletion is immediate and permanent, as described in the Privacy Policy. We may suspend or terminate accounts for breach of these terms, and may discontinue the service with reasonable notice, in which case you will have the chance to export your stories first.

9. Disclaimers and limits

The service is provided "as is." Generated fiction is probabilistic: we do not warrant that any chapter will be to your taste, free of errors, or uninterrupted. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim implied warranties and our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim or fifty dollars. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

10. Changes, law, contact

If these terms change materially we will tell you in the app before the change takes effect; continued use after that is acceptance. These terms are governed by the laws of British Columbia, Canada, and disputes belong to its courts. Questions: use the contact form.

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