MicJot Terms of Use (End User Licence Agreement)
Draft for legal review. Not yet in force. Bracketed items must be completed and the whole text checked by a lawyer for the jurisdictions where MicJot is sold (consumer-protection rules differ, and some of the limitations below are not enforceable everywhere). Section 3 describes subscriptions and MicJot AI, which are built into version 0.4.0 but not switched on in any build shipped so far (no account service is deployed; such builds show no sign-in and count no words); it takes effect with the release that turns them on. Last updated: 2026-10-30.
These terms are an agreement between you and Ram Deshmukh ("we", "us") about the MicJot software for macOS, including updates (the "Software"), and about the optional MicJot AI service (the "Service"). By installing or using the Software you accept them. If you do not agree, do not install it.
1. Licence
The Software is free to download and use. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use it on Macs that you own or control, subject to these terms. On-device speech recognition, smart formatting, rule-based cleanup, history, dictionary, snippets, styles and every privacy control are part of this licence and run on your Mac without a network connection. The Free plan (section 3.2) takes no payment method and covers every feature for the first 3,000 words dictated on your account; after them, dictation pauses until you start the trial (section 3.3) or subscribe to Pro (section 3), neither of which changes this licence. Everything you dictated stays on your Mac. The Software is licensed, not sold; we keep all rights not expressly granted.
2. Restrictions
You may not: copy the Software except for backup; sell, rent, lend or sublicense it; remove notices; use it to break the law or to record people without the consent the law requires; share your account or device token with others; use automated means to call the Service outside the Software; or circumvent plan limits or licence checks. You may examine how the Software behaves on your Mac, and the open-source components it includes keep their own licences (see Acknowledgements).
3. MicJot AI, subscriptions, payment and refunds
(Planned; effective from the first release with MicJot accounts.)
3.1 Merchant of record
Subscriptions are sold through Paddle as merchant of record. Paddle's buyer terms state that "Paddle is an authorised reseller of Products for Suppliers, which means you purchase the Product from Paddle" (Paddle Checkout Buyer Terms, dated 31 March 2026). Your purchase contract, receipt, invoice, tax calculation and payment are with Paddle under those terms; the licence to the Software and the Service, and the promises in this section, are ours. Where our promises are more generous than Paddle's terms (for example section 3.5), ours apply to you.
3.2 Plans and prices
The plans are Free and Pro. Prices, what each plan includes, the fair-use budgets and the number of Macs per plan are stated on the pricing page at [website]/pricing at the time you buy, in US dollars before tax; Paddle adds sales tax or VAT at checkout where applicable. The pricing page is part of these terms by reference. The Free plan costs nothing and takes no payment method; it includes every feature, the Service among them, for the first 3,000 words dictated on your account, counted once across all your Macs and never reset. Pro has no word limit.
3.3 Free trial
When your account has used its free words, dictation pauses and you are offered 7 days of Pro at no charge, once; dictation resumes when the trial starts. No payment method is taken, nothing is charged automatically when the trial ends, and you cannot be billed by forgetting to cancel. One trial per account. The trial has usage caps (requests and tokens) stated on the pricing page; when they are reached, the Service pauses until the trial ends while dictation continues with on-device cleanup. When the 7 days end, the Software tells you once and dictation pauses until you subscribe to Pro. Your history, dictionary, snippets and settings stay on your Mac.
3.4 Renewal and cancellation
Monthly subscriptions renew every month and annual subscriptions every year until cancelled, at the price shown at checkout (subject to section 3.8). You can cancel at any time from Settings → Account → Manage billing or from your account page; Paddle's terms likewise let you cancel "at any time with effect from the end of your current billing period" (Buyer Terms, section 6). After cancelling you keep the Service until the end of the period you have paid for, then the Software returns to Free. Your history, dictionary, snippets and settings stay on your Mac. We email you 7 days before an annual renewal. If a renewal payment fails, the Service continues for a period while Paddle retries the payment and you are shown how to update your payment method; if the payment is not completed, the subscription ends and the Software returns to Free. [Owner: state no retry counts or day counts here until Paddle's schedule is confirmed.]
3.5 Refunds
Our promise: within 14 days of your first purchase, or of an annual renewal, we refund the payment in full on request, no reason needed and regardless of how much you used the Service. Monthly renewals are not separately refundable; cancel instead and the Service continues to the end of the paid month. When a refund is issued, the subscription ends immediately and the Software returns to Free. How to ask and what happens next is on the refund page at [website]/legal/refunds (docs/REFUNDS.md), which is part of these terms.
Your statutory rights are not affected. If you are a consumer in the EU/EEA or the UK you have a legal right to withdraw from a distance contract within 14 days without giving a reason: in the EU under the Consumer Rights Directive, "14 days after the day the contract was agreed" for services (Your Europe, "Returns and refunds"); in the UK under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 (SI 2013/3134), regulation 30(2): for a service contract or digital content not on a tangible medium "the cancellation period ends at the end of 14 days after the day on which the contract is entered into" (legislation.gov.uk). The law lets a trader end that right early once digital content is supplied with your express consent and acknowledgement (UK regulation 37; Paddle's Buyer Terms section 15 apply the same exception). We do not rely on that exception: our 14-day promise above applies whether or not you used the Service. [Lawyer: confirm whether the Service is a "service" or "digital content" for these rules, the checkout wording Paddle requires, and whether the promise needs restating for other jurisdictions, e.g. Australia.]
3.6 Fair use and how the Service degrades
The Service is for your own dictation and writing. Each plan has daily budgets of requests and tokens, stated on the pricing page; when a plan's daily budget is used up, the Service declines further requests until midnight UTC. Whenever the Service declines, fails or is unreachable, the Software inserts the rule-based text instead and shows one notice; a dictation is never lost, and within your plan's words (sections 3.2 and 3.3) never blocked. We may adjust budgets, models and providers; we will not reduce a budget during a paid period without notice. We may suspend an account that uses automated means to call the Service, shares a device token, or disputes a payment with the card issuer instead of asking us for a refund.
3.7 Macs and accounts
A subscription covers the number of Macs stated on the pricing page (signed in at the same time). Signing in on a further Mac asks you which Mac to sign out; we never sign a Mac out silently. Accounts are passwordless: you sign in with a one-time email code, Google or Apple. You are responsible for keeping access to that email account or identity. Every new Mac sign-in is announced by email; an email-address change is confirmed at the current address and can be reverted from it for 7 days.
3.8 Price changes
We may change prices for new purchases at any time. For an existing subscription, a price change applies only from the next renewal and only after we have emailed you at least 30 days in advance [owner: confirm]; you can cancel before it takes effect.
3.9 Ending the Service
If we discontinue the Service or a plan, we will give you notice and refund any prepaid, unused period. The Software's free features are not affected by the Service ending.
4. Third-party services
Your own accounts (QA builds only). The QA builds used in the private beta have a field for your own Anthropic API key (Settings → Writing → Advanced), which sends the AI writing step to Anthropic instead of the Service when you choose "Prefer my own Anthropic key over MicJot AI". Customer builds have no such field (a key a QA build left in your Keychain is used until you remove it there). Where you use your own key, Anthropic's terms and prices govern that data; you are responsible for the key and the charges it incurs.
Our providers. With the Service, Anthropic processes your text as our provider under Anthropic's commercial terms, Paddle processes payments as merchant of record, Cloudflare hosts the service, and Resend sends our emails; our Privacy Policy lists what each receives and keeps. We may change or remove integrations when a provider changes its service. The on-device speech models are provided under open licences listed in the Acknowledgements.
5. Privacy
Our Privacy Policy explains what the Software processes and what leaves your Mac. In short: speech recognition runs on your Mac, nothing is transmitted unless you enable a feature that says so, we collect no analytics, and the Service keeps token counts, never your text.
6. Updates
The Software may check for updates once a day when a build is configured to do so and offer them to you; it never installs anything without your action. We may stop supporting old versions or old macOS releases, and the Service may require a current version of the Software; dictation keeps working on any version.
7. Accuracy and your responsibility
Dictation and AI rewriting make mistakes: words can be misheard, numbers misread, and text inserted into the wrong place or sent before you reviewed it. You are responsible for reviewing text before you rely on it, send it or enter it anywhere consequential, including messages, contracts, medical, legal or financial records, and forms. The Software is not designed for emergency, safety-critical or legally regulated transcription.
8. Disclaimer of warranties
To the extent permitted by law, the Software and the Service are provided "as is" without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that they will be error-free, uninterrupted, or compatible with every app, keyboard or microphone. Statutory rights that cannot be excluded (for example consumer guarantees in the EU, UK and Australia) are not affected.
9. Limitation of liability
To the extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, lost data, or damage caused by text inserted or sent by the Software, and our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid for the Service in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything that cannot be limited by law.
10. Termination
These terms end if you breach them; you may end them at any time by uninstalling the Software and cancelling any subscription or deleting your account. Sections 2 and 7 to 11 survive.
11. General
These terms are governed by the laws of [jurisdiction] and disputes go to the courts of [place], without affecting mandatory consumer protections where you live. If a clause is unenforceable, the rest stands. We may update these terms for new versions of the Software or the Service; we will post the change on the website and in the release notes before it takes effect, and continued use after notice means acceptance.
12. Contact
Ram Deshmukh, [address], [support email]. (Owner: fill in before publication.)
Open-source components and model licences are listed in docs/ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md, which is also linked from the website. Sources read for section 3 on 2026-10-28: Paddle Checkout Buyer Terms (31 March 2026), Your Europe "Returns and refunds", UK SI 2013/3134 regulations 30 and 37 (as in force 25–27 October 2026).
Rendered from docs/TERMS.md by scripts/make-site.sh; the Markdown is the source of truth.