Terms of service

These terms apply when you use Coffeehouse Chess at coffeehousechess.com. By creating an account or using the service you agree to them. If you are using it on behalf of an organisation, you are confirming you can agree on its behalf.

You need an account to play. You must be at least 13, give us an email address that works, and keep your login details to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else is using it.

A chess opponent you speak to. It plays moves chosen by a chess engine, replies in a synthesised voice and analyses your games. If you pair a compatible board, it also moves physical pieces.

• Silent play is unlimited on every plan, including the free one.
• Voice is metered. Each plan includes an allowance of voice minutes. A minute is counted while a live voice session is connected.
• A single voice session runs for up to one hour. After that the session ends and it is time for a break.
• Running out does not end the game. When your allowance is spent, the persona stops speaking and everything else keeps working. We will not bill you automatically for going over. Additional minutes are only ever bought deliberately.
• There is a setting that limits the roster to the Teacher and the Stoic, for accounts used by children.
• Commentary is not advice. The personas are characters. They will be confident, occasionally wrong, and in at least one case deliberately unreliable. Nothing they say is a guarantee about a position.

Voice features need microphone access, which your browser will ask you for and which you can revoke at any time. You are responsible for making sure you are allowed to record in the place you are playing, including where other people can be heard. What happens to that audio is set out in the privacy policy.

• Use the service to cheat in a rated game, tournament or match anywhere else. This is the one we will act on fastest.
• Share an account, or resell access to one.
• Attempt to extract, scrape, or bulk-collect the model’s outputs, or use the service to train a competing model.
• Deliberately overload the service, evade allowances or rate limits, or probe it for vulnerabilities without asking us first. Security researchers can reach us at security@coffeehousechess.com.
• Use it for anything illegal, abusive, or harmful to other people.

If you break these we may suspend or close your account. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why first.

Paid plans are not currently available. If they open, the following terms will apply.

• Paid plans bill monthly or annually in advance through our payment processor, and renew automatically until you cancel.
• If paid plans open before self-service billing does, email hello@coffeehousechess.com to cancel. We will confirm cancellation within 30 days. Cancelling stops the next renewal, and you keep what you have paid for until the end of the period.
• Voice allowances reset monthly regardless of whether you pay monthly or annually, and do not roll over. Top-up minutes you have bought do not expire while your account is open.
• Free-plan minutes accrue only when you sign in, do not accumulate while you are away, and have no cash value.
• If we change prices we will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email, and the change applies from your next renewal.
• Refunds: within 14 days of a payment we will refund it, no questions. After that, if something is broken and we cannot fix it, tell us and we will sort it out. We are not trying to keep money from people who did not get what they paid for.

Your games, your moves and your recorded reasoning are yours. You grant us the licence we need to store and process them in order to run the service for you. That licence covers analysis, review and persona memory, and nothing beyond those purposes.

The software, the personas, the design and the name are ours. Chess itself is nobody’s. The service is built on third-party components including Stockfish, which is licensed under the GNU GPL; the applicable licences and attributions are available on request.

We will try to keep this running and will not always succeed. The service is provided as-is, without a warranty that it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may change or discontinue features; if we remove something you are paying for, we will give notice and refund the unused portion.

Voice depends on third-party providers. If one of them has an outage, voice will be unavailable and silent play will generally keep working.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability to you for anything connected to this service is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

If you are a consumer, you keep all the statutory rights your local law gives you, and nothing in these terms takes them away.

Email privacy@coffeehousechess.com to ask us to close your account. We will respond within 30 days and handle its data as described in the privacy policy. We may close or suspend an account for a serious or repeated breach of these terms, or if we stop offering the service. If we stop offering it, we will give notice and refund anything unused.

We may update these terms. If a change materially affects your rights we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and continuing to use the service after that means you accept it. If you do not, email hello@coffeehousechess.com before it takes effect. We will cancel any paid plan and refund the unused part of your period.

hello@coffeehousechess.com for anything at all. privacy@coffeehousechess.com for data requests. security@coffeehousechess.com for vulnerabilities.