Terms of Service

Who can use it

You must be 18 or older. EthnoCAL is not designed for children and we don't knowingly keep accounts for anyone under 18.

What EthnoCAL is and isn't

EthnoCAL is a food log with a conversational assistant we call Eth. Eth estimates calories and macronutrients from what you write, say or photograph. Estimates are estimates: they can be wrong, and portions and recipes vary.

EthnoCAL is not medical advice, not nutrition therapy and not treatment for any condition, including eating disorders. Don't use it to replace a clinician. If you have a history of disordered eating, please talk with a professional before using any calorie log.

Your account

You can use the app as a guest on one device without giving us anything. A guest log lives on that device's session; if you clear it or lose the device, the log is gone unless you added an email.

Adding an email turns the guest account into a permanent one. You sign in with a link sent to that email. Keep your inbox secure; whoever can open the link can open your log.

Plans and payment

New accounts get a 14-day trial with every feature (30 days when you arrive through a friend's link). After that the log stays yours to read, edit, export and delete, but Eth stops taking new plates until you choose a plan: Personal (monthly or yearly), Table (one plan for up to five adults who share a kitchen, billed to the person who starts it), or a Founding membership (one-time, Personal for life, limited to the first 300).

Payments are handled by Stripe. Subscriptions renew until cancelled; you can cancel from the app and keep your plan until the end of the paid period. When a Table plan ends, every member of that house goes back to their own plan (read-only unless they have one). Refunds for the current period are at our discretion except where the law requires them. The Founding membership is a one-time purchase and is refundable within 14 days if you haven't logged more than 20 entries in that time. Referral credit (one month of Personal per friend whose first payment goes through) is applied to your next invoice, if any (for Founding members, a future Table invoice), and has no cash value.

If we ever shut EthnoCAL down, Founding members get a notice at least 90 days ahead and a full export of their data.

Your content

Everything you log is yours. You give us the permission needed to store it, show it back to you, and run it through the model that powers Eth.

Once a dish has been logged three or more times by at least two accounts, we may use the dish's name and the anonymised nutrition estimate (never your messages, never your photo, never anything tied to you) to improve Eth's defaults for everyone. You can't opt out of this aggregate learning, but it never contains personal data.

Acceptable use

Don't try to break, overload or reverse the service, don't use it to harass anyone, and don't log things on behalf of someone without their knowledge. We may close accounts that do.

Ending things

You can delete your account from the app at any time. Everything is removed within about a week (a seven-day grace period, then the nightly purge) and any subscription is cancelled. We can suspend or close accounts that break these terms, with notice when we reasonably can.

Liability

EthnoCAL is provided as is. To the extent the law allows, we're not liable for decisions you make based on estimates in the app, or for indirect or consequential losses. Our total liability to you is limited to what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.

Changes and contact

We may update these terms. If a change matters we'll tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. Questions: hello@ethnocal.com.