Terms of service

The service

Brevcast makes short written and spoken summaries of podcast episodes. A summary is our own account of an episode. It is not a transcript, it is not the episode, and it is not a substitute for listening to one.

Summaries are produced automatically and can be wrong or can leave things out. Do not rely on one for a decision that matters without checking the episode itself.

Parts of Brevcast are public and need no account at all. For the parts that do, such as following shows and requesting briefings, you must be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and the details you sign up with must be your own.

Subscriptions and payment

Brevcast has a free tier and paid plans. What each plan includes, and what it costs, is shown on the pricing page at the moment you subscribe, and that is the version that applies to you.

Paid plans are billed in advance, monthly or yearly depending on what you picked, and they renew automatically at the end of each period until you cancel. Checkout, billing and your invoice are handled by Polar, our payment provider, so your card details go to them and never to us.

If a payment fails your account moves back to the free tier until it is fixed. We may change prices, and if we do it takes effect from your next renewal, never mid-period, and we will tell you before it happens.

Cancelling

You can cancel at any time from the Account screen. Cancelling stops the next renewal. You keep your paid plan until the period you have already paid for ends, and we do not pro-rate the remainder of a period you started.

You can also delete your account outright, which cancels the subscription first and then erases your data. That one is not reversible, so it is worth being sure.

If you are a consumer in the EU you have a statutory right to withdraw from a distance contract within fourteen days. We do not ask you to waive that right at checkout, so it applies in full: write to us inside those fourteen days and we will refund you, whether or not you used the service in the meantime.

Acceptable use

Do not do these things with Brevcast.

• Break the law with it, or use it to infringe the rights of somebody else.
• Resell, redistribute or republish our summaries as if they were a feed or a product of your own.
• Scrape it, hammer it with automated requests, or work around the limits of your plan.
• Share your account so that several people use one subscription.
• Try to break, probe or overload the service, or get at data that is not yours. Good-faith security research is welcome and has its own address in our security policy.

What you send us

When you paste a link, send feedback, or ask for a show to be summarised, you keep whatever rights you already had in it. You give us permission to use it to run and improve Brevcast.

Do not send us anything you have no right to send, and do not send us anything confidential. Feedback in particular may be acted on freely, and we owe you nothing for it beyond the improvement itself.

Intellectual property

Podcasts belong to the people who make them. A briefing is a synthetic voice reading our own writing: we do not host or re-publish the episode audio of any show to make one. Where Brevcast offers you the full original episode instead, your player streams it from the address the feed gives, exactly as any podcast app does, and we are not serving it to you.

We claim the rights we have in the summaries we write, in the software, and in the Brevcast name. How far those rights reach over material derived from an episode someone else made is a question we have put to specialist counsel, and we will state the answer here rather than assert one now.

Your subscription buys you personal access, which is not the same as owning anything: you may read, listen to and quote from a summary in the ordinary way, but not republish it as a product.

If you publish a podcast and want us to stop using your feed, write to us and say so.

Ending your access

You can leave at any time by cancelling or deleting your account.

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that puts the service or other people at risk, or that we are required to act on. Where it is fair to do so we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right, and if we close a paid account that had done nothing wrong we refund the part of the period you had paid for and not used.

Liability

Brevcast is provided as it is. We work to keep it accurate and available, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or right about any particular episode.

We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for a decision you took on the strength of a summary without checking the episode. Where we are liable, our liability is limited to what you paid for your Brevcast subscription in the twelve months before the problem arose, whoever took the payment.

None of this limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or the rights you have as a consumer.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the Netherlands, and disputes about them go to the courts of the Netherlands.

If you use Brevcast as a consumer somewhere else in the EU, the consumer protections of your own country still apply to you, and you can bring a claim in your own courts. Nothing here takes that away.

Changes to these terms

We update these terms when the product changes and move the date at the top. If a change materially affects you we will tell you before it takes effect, and continuing to use Brevcast after that is how you accept it. If you would rather not, cancel.

Who you are contracting with, and how to reach us

Brevcast is operated by Brevcast B.V., Prins Hendrikkade 82c, 1012 AE Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Your purchase itself is made from Polar, who sell Brevcast subscriptions as an authorised reseller and merchant of record. Polar is the party you pay, the party that invoices you, and the party that handles the tax on the sale. What you get for it is access to Brevcast, which we provide and which these terms govern.

Questions about these terms go to support@brevcast.com, the same address as everything else.