← Hearts & Ink Terms of Membership

The terms, written to be read

These are the terms of using Hearts & Ink — the free chapters, the membership, and the keepsakes. They're plain on purpose. Using the site means you agree to them.

1 · What Hearts & Ink is

Hearts & Ink (heartsandink.com) is a digital fiction publisher. We publish serialized, interactive romance: worlds, characters, and chapter arcs authored by people, in which a character's replies to you are generated by artificial intelligence within our authored worlds. It is fiction from the first page to the last — the characters are not people, and the service is not companionship, therapy, coaching, or advice of any kind. More on this, in plain words, on the Pen & the Reader page.

2 · Who may read

You must be eighteen or older to use Hearts & Ink. By creating an account or reading, you confirm that you are. Conversational AI may not be suitable for minors, and we do not offer any version of this service to them.

3 · Membership

Chapters one and two of every world are free, no account needed.
Membership is $14.99 per month. It renews automatically each month until you cancel. There are no tiers, no coins, and no other subscription.
Membership includes every world, every chapter as it is bound, and His Side. Keepsakes from the press are separate, optional, one-time purchases — never required to read any part of any story.
Cancel anytime, online: use the "Manage membership" link in your account, which opens our payment processor's portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you've already paid for; you keep reading until then. No phone calls, no chat queues, no retention scripts.
Payments are processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card number. Prices are in US dollars; your bank may apply currency conversion. Where law requires, tax is added at checkout.

4 · Refunds

Written the way we'd want it written to us:

Membership: if your first month wasn't right, write to hello@heartsandink.com within 14 days of your first charge and we'll refund it in full, no questions asked. Renewal charges aren't refundable once a new period begins — cancel before renewal instead — but if a billing error or a genuinely broken experience is ours, we'll make it right.
Keepsakes: each keepsake is written from your own story. What the pen writes to be kept — letters, portraits, anything that travels by post — is read by a person before it's sealed. Two kinds work differently, and we'd rather say so than imply otherwise: a scene commissioned for tomorrow arrives the same evening, because its speed is the point, and if one misses we rewrite it; and typeset collections of your own kept lines contain nothing we wrote at all — only what you underlined, set in order. Until a keepsake is delivered to your Keeping Room, you can cancel for a full refund. After delivery, if it misses the mark, write to us within 14 days — we'll rewrite it or refund it.

5 · Your words, our worlds

Ours: the worlds, characters, chapter texts, names, and designs of Hearts & Ink are our intellectual property. Reading here doesn't transfer them, and they may not be scraped, republished, or used to train AI systems.
Yours: what you write in a scene, your ledger, and your heroine's casting are yours. You grant us only the license needed to operate the service — to store them, sync them to your account, and hand them to our AI provider so the story can be written. Never for training, never for sale, never for marketing. The full promise is in the privacy pledge, which is part of these terms.
Keepsakes you purchase are yours to keep and print for personal use.

6 · House rules

A short list, honestly held. Don't use Hearts & Ink to:

attempt to push the stories past their PG-13 ceiling — the door closes softly, but it closes;
probe, scrape, overload, or automate the service, or resell access to it;
impersonate someone else, or do anything unlawful.

We may suspend or close accounts that break these rules. If we close your account without cause of yours, we'll refund the unused part of anything you've paid for.

7 · Honest limits

The stories are generated in part by AI: they are fiction, they can be imperfect, and nothing a character says is factual claim, professional advice, or a promise by us. The service is provided "as is"; we work hard to keep it available but can't guarantee it will never hiccup. To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you is limited to the amounts you've paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing in these terms limits liability that the law does not allow to be limited, and nothing in them takes away consumer rights you're entitled to where you live.

8 · Changes and endings

We may update these terms as the library grows. If a change matters, we'll write to members before it takes effect — continuing to read after that is acceptance. You can end your membership any time (see section 3), and delete your account entirely from within the service or by writing to us; deletion removes your story from our systems, as the pledge describes — except for anything you have deliberately placed in custody, which section 8a governs.

8a · Custody

Some things are written to outlive the account that made them. If you choose it, you may place specific items in the library's custody: letters you have addressed to a named person, to be opened on a date or on a condition you set, and your bound volume. These terms apply to custody and nothing else.

It is opt-in, and off by default. Nothing is ever held unless you switch custody on, and switching it on asks you to accept this section first. We record when you did.
What is held, and only this. The letters you placed in custody and your bound volume, together with the recipient and the condition you attached. Not your story, not your ledger, not your margin, not your email beyond what is needed to identify the item — those are deleted with the account as normal.
Where it is held. Separately from the live service, reachable by us and by no reader-facing part of the site, and released only when the condition you set is met.
You can withdraw it at any time. Switch custody off and nothing is held; withdraw before you delete your account and your deletion is ordinary and complete. You can view what is in custody, and export a full copy of it, whenever you like.
Naming someone is not a promise on their behalf. We contact a named recipient only at the moment you designed, only about the item you left them, and never for anything else. Remove them and their details go at once.
What we can honestly promise. We will keep custody for as long as Hearts & Ink operates, and we will not quietly drop it: if the library ever closes, we will give members reasonable notice and a means to take custody items into their own hands, and we will not destroy a held item without that notice. We cannot promise to outlive every condition anyone might set, and we say so plainly rather than implying a guarantee no small publisher can give.

9 · The formalities

Hearts & Ink is operated from the United States. These terms are governed by the laws of the operator's principal place of business in the United States, and disputes belong to the courts there — except that if you are a consumer in a jurisdiction whose law gives you the right to your local courts and protections, that right stands. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest remain. Questions first, always: hello@heartsandink.com.