Terms, refunds and cancellation

Coffee Pad is a personal to-do list. It costs $3 a month, or $30 a year, after a free trial of 14 days that asks for no payment details at all. One account is for one person.

Payment is processed by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.

Cancel whenever you like, from the Subscription page or the link in any Stripe receipt. There is no notice period and nothing to ask for.

Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, not immediately — you keep the pad until the day you paid through.

If you are a consumer in the UK or EU you have a statutory right to cancel within 14 days of purchase. Because the 14-day trial runs before any payment, most people will have used the service for a fortnight before they are charged anything — the withdrawal right still stands and is not affected by that.

Beyond that, if something has gone wrong, ask. A refund on a $3 subscription costs less than an argument about one.

We cannot reset your passphrase, and we cannot recover your notes without it. This is not a policy we could choose to relax. Your data is encrypted in your browser with a key derived from that passphrase, and the key never reaches us — so there is nothing on our side to unlock. Anyone who could reset it could also read your notes, which is the thing this product exists to prevent.

You are given a one-time recovery key when you set up your pad. It is the only other way in. Losing both means losing the contents, and no refund can bring them back — which is why it is said here, before you pay, rather than in an email afterwards.

Your pad locks. Nothing is deleted: the database goes on holding the same ciphertext it always did, nobody reads it, and subscribing again brings it straight back.

You can export everything at any time, including after a trial or a subscription has ended. A paywall around your own writing would not be one worth having.

Do not use Coffee Pad to break the law, and do not try to attack the service or other people’s accounts. Accounts doing either may be suspended. Because the contents are encrypted, we moderate nothing and can see nothing — enforcement is based on behaviour we can observe, not on what you write.

This is a small product run by one person. It is offered as it is, without a guaranteed uptime figure. Keep an export of anything you would be upset to lose — that is good advice for any service, and honest advice from this one.

Questions about any of this go to me@jp.coffee. See also the privacy policy.