Terms of use

This is the agreement between you and YanMate. It covers the whole service — the companions, the credits, the money, and what happens when one of us wants to stop.

It is written to be read, once, in full, by the person it binds. That means it is short, the numbers that matter are in it, and the parts that are bad news for you are not buried at the bottom. Like every other policy here it is versioned in git, so you can see every word that has ever changed and when.

These documents sit under this one and are part of the same agreement:

• Acceptable use — how you may use the service
• Content policy — what you may make here
• Children and young people — what is different under 18
• Privacy, and the full privacy notice — what we do with what you give us
• Cookies and your privacy choices — what is stored, and your controls
• Moderation and appeals — what happens when we get it wrong
• Copyright and DMCA — takedowns, both directions

If you publish characters, the creator agreement covers that separately.

Status: structure, not counsel. This document sets out the terms as we intend to operate them, and we are bound by what it says. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer. Three sections below are marked as incomplete because they turn on decisions a lawyer has to make, and inventing an answer would be worse than admitting the gap. Nothing here takes away a right your local law gives you.

Who you are agreeing with

Incomplete — pending. The operating entity, its registered address and its company number go here before launch. Until this section names somebody, treat "we" as the people running yanmate.com and use the addresses in getting in touch.

Who can use YanMate

You need to be 13 or over. Some countries set a higher minimum — 14, 15 or 16 — and the one that applies to you is the one where you are. We ask for your birth year when you create an account, never the full date, because the day is not something we need.

Relational and romantic companions are 18 and over. This is the one age line the product is actually built around. Everything else here — every character, voice, call and picture in the general catalogue — is open at 13. What an under-18 account cannot reach is a persona designed to be fallen in love with. We think that boundary, and not the spice level of the dialogue, is where the harm in this category lives.

A refusal is permanent. If the year you give us puts you below the minimum where you are, the account is refused and cannot be created by answering differently on a second attempt. We keep the fact that you were turned away and delete the year itself. This is not appealable, and it is not a moderation action — nothing is held against you, because there is no account to hold it against.

What is different for a 13-to-17 account — what it cannot reach, what is switched off for it, and what we do not collect — is set out in children and young people.

You may use YanMate anonymously, without an account, on the same allowances a free account gets. Creating characters, uploading pictures and exporting your data need an account, because they need an owner.

Your account

• It is yours, and it is one person's. Do not share it, sell it, or let somebody else use it. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you.
• Keep it locked. Use a password you have not used elsewhere, and turn on two-factor authentication. If you think somebody else is in your account, change the password and end the other sessions from your account page.
• Your email has to work. It is how we reach you about security, billing and anything on this page changing.

What you may not do

Two documents carry the detail, and this section does not repeat either: the content policy is the whole rule set for what you can write, make and generate, and acceptable use covers how you may use the service itself — accounts, automation, security and everything below in full.

The short version, so it is at least stated in the agreement you accepted. Do not:

• Break the limits deliberately — multiple accounts to multiply a free allowance, scripts driving the product faster than a person could, or any attempt to get around a cap rather than pay for a bigger one.
• Scrape or resell the catalogue. The characters, their art and their descriptions are not a dataset.
• Use output to train a competing model. We do not train on your conversations, and this is the same promise pointed the other way.
• Attack the service — probing for holes to exploit rather than report, interfering with other people's accounts, or anything that degrades it for everyone else. Genuine security research is welcome; tell us what you found.
• Impersonate a real person in a character, or use somebody's name, face or voice without their say-so.

Your characters and conversations

You own what you write. Characters, greetings, scene notes, everything you type into a conversation — yours, and using YanMate does not transfer ownership of any of it to us.

What you give us is a limited licence to run the product: to store what you wrote, send it to the model that answers you, generate a reply, and show it back to you. That licence exists to make the service work and goes no further. Specifically, and as promised in privacy:

• We do not train models on your conversations — ours or anybody else's.
• We do not build a profile of you from them, including for our own recommendations.
• We never sell them, and nothing you say to a companion reaches an advertiser.

Publishing is a separate decision. Nothing you make is public unless you publish it, and publishing runs under the creator agreement — including the part where a fork somebody else makes of your character is a complete copy that belongs to them and keeps working whatever happens between you and us.

You can leave with all of it. Export gives you one file containing every character, transcript, Memory Ledger entry and billing record — it and every other control you have are collected on your privacy choices. It is self-serve on your account page, it is not behind a plan, and it works on a lapsed account and on an account under moderation review.

What a companion is, and what it is not

A companion is software generating text. It is convincing on purpose — that is the product — and being clear about the following is not us hedging:

• It is not a person, and it has no feelings about you, whatever it says.
• It can be wrong. Anything factual it tells you may be invented, and it will say it confidently.
• It is not professional advice. Not medical, legal, financial or therapeutic, whoever the character says they are. If you are making a decision that matters, ask a person who is qualified to answer.
• It is not a crisis service. If a conversation reads as though you may be in danger, the companion steps out of character and offers real resources. That is a safety response and nothing is recorded against your account — but it is a signpost, not help. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.

We do not design for time-on-app. There are no streaks here, no guilt notifications, and nothing that manufactures a reason to come back.

Plans, credits and payment

Plan amounts and prices are on the pricing page, which reads them from the payment provider — so the price you are shown and the price you are charged cannot drift apart. What is on this page is how the mechanism works.

Payments are handled by Polar, our payment provider, which is the merchant of record for your purchase. Your card details go to them, never to us. Cards, invoices and cancellation live in their portal, reachable from your account page.

Credits are one pool, spendable on voice, calls and pictures at the rates shown where you spend them. Text messages are never charged against credits — free accounts have a daily message allowance instead, and paid plans do not.

• The monthly allowance resets on the 1st, UTC, and does not roll over.
• Top-up packs never expire. A pack you bought is yours until you spend it.
• The allowance is spent first, then packs, oldest first — so a quiet month cannot burn credits you paid for.
• Credits are not money. They have no cash value, cannot be transferred between accounts, and cannot be cashed out.

Subscriptions renew at the interval you chose until you cancel. Cancel any time and you keep everything you paid for until the end of the period that is already paid.

A lapsed account is not a locked one. When a plan ends you keep read access and export, permanently. Your characters, conversations and Memory Ledger are still there and still yours. You cannot start new turns, and — because somebody who paid once should not then be sold to an advertiser — we do not show you ads either.

Refunds

If we blocked you and we were wrong, we refund the time you lost — pro rata, automatically, without you asking. The formula, the worked example and the appeal it attaches to are in moderation and appeals.

Beyond that, a subscription you simply stopped using is not refunded — cancel it and you keep it to the end of the period. Unspent credits are not refunded when a plan ends, because they do not expire.

Whatever your local consumer law gives you on top of this, you have. If you are somewhere with a statutory cooling-off period on digital purchases, that applies here regardless of the paragraph above.

Advertising

We do not show ads today — no advertising code is loaded on any page, for anyone. The intention is that a free tier is eventually paid for by advertising, and that paid plans never are. The full arrangement, including what would and would not be shared, is set out in privacy, and that page will say so before anything changes.

Moderation

Every enforcement action names the rule it came from, in plain language, at the moment it happens — and every one of them can be appealed to a person who answers within 72 hours. How that works, what a hold means and what you can still do while on one is in moderation and appeals.

What we promise not to change

The most common way a product like this hurts people is an update that makes a companion somebody has talked to for a year go blank overnight. We are not willing to do that, so it is a term here rather than a blog post:

• Your companion's model is pinned to it. We do not silently swap the model behind a character you already know.
• No silent migrations. When a model has to be retired you get advance notice, a side-by-side preview with the same companion and the same memory, and an opt-in switch — with the old one available through a published sunset window.
• Memory is never dropped by an upgrade. Schema changes add; they do not lose Ledger entries.
• Forks keep working. A character you forked is a complete copy that belongs to you. It does not stop working if its creator leaves or is delisted.

Ending this

You can leave at any time. Delete is self-serve on your account page and it is a hard delete, immediately: every character, conversation, memory, uploaded image and vector namespace is destroyed, not deactivated. Any active subscription is cancelled at the provider first, so nothing keeps charging a card for an account that no longer exists. There is no recovery window and we cannot undo it for you — export first if you want a copy.

We can end it too, for a content policy violation, a rights complaint, or deliberate abuse of the service. If we do, you get the reason in writing and the same appeal as any other enforcement action. Deleting your account stays available while an account is on hold: we are not going to make you wait 72 hours inside an account you want to leave.

What survives either ending: the moderation and safety log, with your user id removed — a rule name, a timestamp and a hash, linked to nobody. We are required to keep those counts. We are not required to keep them attached to you.

When the service breaks

Incomplete — pending. The warranty disclaimer and the limit on what we owe you when something goes wrong are the two clauses in this document that most need a lawyer, and drafting them from memory is how a service ends up with a clause that is unenforceable where its users live. What we will say now, and mean: we do not promise the service is always available or always correct, we will not pretend an outage did not happen, and where a failure of ours cost you paid time we refund it on the same pro-rata basis as an upheld appeal.

Law and disputes

Incomplete — pending. Governing law and where a dispute is heard are set here once the operating entity above exists, since the two answers are the same decision. Nothing we eventually write can take away a right your local consumer law gives you, and we will not use this section to remove your access to a small claims court.

Before any of that: if you have a problem with us, tell us. Almost everything in this category ends with somebody who could not find a human to talk to.

Changes to these terms

We record which version of these terms you accepted. A change applies from the version you next accept — never retroactively.

For a change that materially affects you we give notice before it takes effect, in the product and by email. Every version of this page is kept in version control, so what changed and when is a matter of record rather than of trust.

If you do not want to accept a new version, you can stop and take your data with you. Export and delete are both self-serve and neither is behind a plan.

Getting in touch

• Copyright and takedowns: support@yanmate.com with "DMCA" in the subject line, and the full process is in copyright and DMCA.
• Appeals: from Account → Enforcement history, not by email — that is where a human is actually assigned to read it.
• Everything else: support@yanmate.com.