Terms of Service

1. About These Terms

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are an agreement between you and Threadworks Labs LLC, a Texas limited liability company (“Threadworks Labs,” “we,” “us,” or “our”). They cover your use of Aetherwist, which includes the website at aetherwist.com, the Aetherwist app at aetherwist.com/play, the public Discover gallery, and any print store we offer (together, “Aetherwist”).

Aetherwist is a game made by Threadworks Labs LLC. It isn’t a separate company: wherever these Terms, a receipt, or an email says “Aetherwist,” the company behind it is Threadworks Labs LLC.

When you create an account, you’ll be asked to agree to these Terms, our Privacy Policy, our Children’s Privacy Notice, and our Refund Policy. Those documents are part of these Terms. If you don’t agree, please don’t create an account or use Aetherwist.

2. Who Can Use Aetherwist

• Adults only. You must be at least 18 years old to create an account. We ask for your date of birth when you sign up to confirm this.
• United States only, for now. Aetherwist is currently offered only to people located in the United States.
• One adult per account. Your account belongs to you. You can’t sell it, transfer it, or share it with people outside your household.
• You can’t use Aetherwist if we’ve previously closed your account for breaking these Terms, or if the law doesn’t allow you to.

3. Your Account

You’re responsible for your account and for everything that happens on it, including what anyone in your household does while signed in. Please use a working email address you check, keep your sign-in details secure, and tell us right away at hello@aetherwist.com if you think someone has gotten into your account without your permission.

We use a service called Clerk to handle sign-in and verify your email address. Your password, if you set one, is handled by Clerk and is never visible to us.

4. Kids in Your Household

Aetherwist is made for families to play together, and it works best with a grown-up playing alongside the kids. Children never get accounts of their own. If you let a child in your household use Aetherwist:

• they use it through your account, signed in as you;
• you’re responsible for that use, and for supervising it in whatever way works for your family;
• anyone signed in to your account can share a creation to Discover (see Section 8), so it’s worth agreeing as a family how you want to handle sharing.

Please don’t let children outside your household use your account.

5. Plans, Billing, and Cancellation

Free tier

New accounts get 15 summons to try, once, at no cost and without a payment card. These are a one-time batch. They don’t refill, and signing up for free never charges you.

Paid plans

We offer monthly plans (currently Regular, Regular Plus, and Explorer). Current prices and what each plan includes are on our pricing page. Each paid plan comes with a daily allowance of summons. Allowances refresh every day at midnight Coordinated Universal Time (8 p.m. Eastern in summer, 7 p.m. in winter), don’t roll over to the next day, and have no cash value.

Automatic renewal

Paid plans renew automatically each month until you cancel. When you subscribe, you authorize us, through our payment processor Stripe, to charge your payment method the plan price plus any applicable sales tax at the start of each monthly billing period. You’ll see the price, the billing frequency, and how to cancel before you pay. We’ll email you a confirmation after you subscribe. Charges appear on your card statement as THRDWRKS* AETHERWIST.

Cancelling

You can cancel anytime with the Cancel plan button in your account settings, or through Stripe’s secure billing portal (Manage billing). You don’t need to call or email anyone. Cancelling stops your next charge. You keep your plan’s features until the end of the period you’ve already paid for. After that your account stays open on the free tier, with your gallery and pictures still there, and you can pick a plan again whenever you like. Changed your mind before the period ends? Resume plan on the same page undoes the cancellation. Cancelling doesn’t delete your account; that’s a separate choice (see Section 12).

Changing plans

You can move between paid plans from the same billing portal. Stripe shows you how any change in price is handled before you confirm it.

Price changes

If we change the price of your plan, we’ll email you at least [[NOTICE PERIOD, e.g. 30 days]] before the new price applies to you. If you don’t want to pay the new price, you can cancel before it takes effect.

Failed payments and disputes

If a payment fails, Stripe may retry it, and we may pause your paid features until the payment goes through. If you file a chargeback with your bank, we may pause access while it’s being resolved. Please email us first, since we can usually fix billing problems faster.

Refunds

Our Refund Policy explains when we refund subscription charges and print orders. It’s part of these Terms.

6. How Aetherwist Makes Pictures

When you place runes and summon, Aetherwist uses AI image models to create a new picture from that combination. A few things are worth knowing:

• Results vary. AI pictures can surprise you. Characters can blend together, details can come out differently than you pictured, and sometimes a rune doesn’t show up at all. That’s part of how Aetherwist works, and it isn’t a defect in the service.
• You can’t type a request. Pictures are assembled only from our curated set of runes, styles, and moods. There’s no text box, and you can’t upload photos.
• Every picture is safety-checked. Every summon is steered away from adult content and blood, and we screen each finished picture for adult content with an automated check before it’s saved, discarding any picture that fails. These measures work well, but no automated system is perfect. The pictures are made by an AI, so once in a while one may come out stranger, darker, or scarier than you’d expect, and fantasy themes like monsters and battles can feel intense for young children even when nothing has gone wrong. We recommend playing together with younger children, and you can remove any picture from your gallery with Release. If you ever see something in your gallery or on Discover that shouldn’t be there, please tell us and we’ll look into it.
• Availability. Aetherwist runs on computers we rent from third parties. When lots of people are summoning, you may wait in a short line. We work hard to keep things running, but we can’t promise Aetherwist will always be available or free of errors.

7. Your Creations

“Creations” means the pictures Aetherwist makes on your account, along with their titles and the runes and settings used to make them.

• We don’t claim ownership of your creations. Between you and us, any rights that exist in a creation belong to you, and we assign to you whatever rights we may have in the picture itself. This doesn’t include rights in Aetherwist itself, such as our rune artwork, characters, names, or logos.
• Copyright may not apply. Under current U.S. law, pictures made by AI without enough human creative input may not be protected by copyright. That means we can’t promise you’ll be able to stop other people from copying a creation, especially one you’ve shared publicly.
• Similar pictures can happen. Everyone summons from the same set of runes, so someone else may make a picture that looks a lot like yours. Neither of you gets rights over the other’s picture.
• How you can use them. You may use your creations for any lawful purpose, personal or commercial, including selling them, and you don’t owe us anything for it. We’d love it if you mentioned they were made with Aetherwist, but you don’t have to. Some places have laws about AI-generated pictures, such as rules that they be labeled as AI-made, so check the laws where you live before using a creation commercially.
• What you let us do with them. You give us permission to store, copy, process, display, and transmit your creations as needed to run Aetherwist for you. That includes saving them to your gallery, making thumbnails and titles, running safety checks, preparing print files when you order a print, showing them to you, and testing and improving picture quality. This permission ends when the creation is deleted, except as described in Section 8 for Discover and in our Privacy Policy for files we keep after an account is closed.
• We don’t use your creations to train AI models.

8. Sharing to Discover

Discover is our public gallery of pictures that families have chosen to share.

• Sharing is always a choice. Nothing appears on Discover unless someone signed in to your account shares that specific creation from the account area. Pictures are never shared automatically. Sharing is available on paid plans.
• Shared creations are anonymous. Discover shows the full picture, its title, and the runes and settings used to make it. It never shows your name, email address, or any username.
• There’s no review before posting. Shared creations appear right away. Signed-in users can report a creation. We hide a creation once several accounts report it, we remove reported creations that break these Terms, and we may remove any shared creation at our discretion. If we remove one of yours, we’ll email you.
• Permission you give us. When you share a creation, you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to display, copy, and distribute it, along with its title and recipe, on Discover and elsewhere on aetherwist.com, including the preview image that appears when someone shares a link to it. We won’t use shared creations in ads or post them on our social media accounts. Anyone can view shared creations. Signed-in users can like them and start a summon of their own from the same recipe, which makes a new picture rather than a copy of yours.
• You can withdraw anytime. If you take a creation off Discover, we’ll stop showing it on aetherwist.com. Copies may linger for a short time in caches or search results before they clear.
• Deleting your account removes everything you’ve shared from Discover.

9. Rules for Using Aetherwist

To keep Aetherwist safe and working for everyone, please don’t:

• try to get around our safety measures, or try to make Aetherwist produce sexual, violent, hateful, or otherwise inappropriate pictures;
• use bots, scripts, scrapers, or other automated tools to access Aetherwist or Discover, or to make summons;
• probe, attack, overload, or interfere with our systems, or try to access accounts or data that aren’t yours;
• copy, decompile, or reverse engineer the Aetherwist app, except where the law specifically allows it;
• resell access, share your account outside your household, or open extra accounts to get more free summons;
• share something to Discover that you know breaks these rules, or use Discover to harass anyone;
• use Aetherwist for anything illegal.

If you break these rules, we may remove content, limit features, or suspend or close your account.

10. Prints and the Store

Made-to-order prints aren’t available to buy yet. When they are:

• you’ll see the product, price, shipping cost, any subscriber discount, and a preview of how your picture will be cropped before you pay;
• each item is made just for you by our print partner, which receives the print file and your shipping details so it can make and deliver your order;
• our Refund Policy covers damaged, defective, or wrong items;
• we may cancel an order we can’t fulfill, and we’ll refund it in full if we do.

Any extra terms that apply to a particular order will be shown at checkout.

11. Aetherwist Itself

Aetherwist, including the app, the runes and their artwork, sounds and music, the Wistkeeper and other characters, text, design, and software, and the Aetherwist and Threadworks Labs names and logos, belongs to us or the people we license it from. As long as you follow these Terms, we give you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use Aetherwist for your household. We can end this license if you break these Terms.

If you send us ideas or feedback, we’re grateful, and we may use them without paying you or owing you anything.

12. Closing an Account

• You can delete your account anytime from your account settings or by emailing us. There’s a 30-day window in case you change your mind, and deleting stops future billing the same way cancelling does. Our Privacy Policy explains what we delete and what we keep.
• We may suspend or close your account if you break these Terms, if the law requires it, or if we stop offering Aetherwist. If we close your account for a reason that isn’t your fault, we’ll try to give you advance notice so you can save your creations, and [[DECISION: we’ll refund the unused part of any period you’ve paid for]].
• Sections 7 (as it applies to shared creations and files we keep), 8, 11, and 13 through 17 continue to apply after your account closes.

13. Changes to Aetherwist and to These Terms

We’re always working on Aetherwist, so runes, styles, features, and plans will change over time. We may add, change, or remove features. If a change takes away something important you’ve paid for, we’ll let you know.

We may update these Terms. If we make a change that materially affects you, we’ll email you at least [[NOTICE PERIOD, e.g. 30 days]] before it takes effect [[and ask you to accept the new version the next time you sign in]]. If you keep using Aetherwist after the change takes effect, the new Terms apply. If you don’t agree with them, you can cancel or delete your account.

14. Disclaimers

Aetherwist is provided “as is” and “as available.” To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We don’t promise that Aetherwist will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, that any picture will match what you expected, or that pictures will be free of unexpected or unwanted content. Some states don’t allow certain warranty disclaimers, so some of these may not apply to you.

15. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we won’t be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost data, profits, or goodwill, arising out of or related to Aetherwist or these Terms. Our total liability for any claim related to Aetherwist or these Terms is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose or [[CAP AMOUNT, e.g. $50]]. Some states don’t allow these limits, so they may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that can’t be limited by law.

16. Resolving Disputes

Talk to us first. If you have a problem with Aetherwist, please email hello@aetherwist.com. Most issues can be fixed quickly, and we’ll try in good faith for at least 30 days before either of us takes formal action.

Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

[[COUNSEL TO CHOOSE: individual arbitration with a class-action waiver and a small-claims carve-out, or the state and federal courts in [[COUNTY, STATE]]. See docs/legal/questions_for_counsel.md.]]

17. General Terms

• Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the documents they link to, are the whole agreement between you and us about Aetherwist.
• If part of these Terms can’t be enforced, the rest still applies.
• If we don’t enforce a term right away, we haven’t given up the right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You can’t transfer these Terms to anyone else. We may transfer them as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of our business, and we’ll let you know if that happens.
• Things outside our control. We aren’t responsible for delays or failures caused by events we can’t reasonably control, such as outages at the providers we rely on.
• Notices. We’ll send notices to the email address on your account. You can reach us at the address below.

18. Contact Us

Threadworks Labs LLC [[MAILING ADDRESS]] hello@aetherwist.com

For California residents: the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs can be reached in writing at 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or by phone at (800) 952-5210.