What you agree to

Who you are agreeing with

Taper is operated by PANDA DESIGN CITY SRL, registered in Cluj-Napoca, jud. Cluj, Romania. "We" and "us" mean that company; "you" means the person holding the account.

Using Taper means accepting these terms. If you do not accept them, do not make an account — and if you already have one, close it from settings and nothing further is owed either way. Questions about anything here go to hello@taper.news.

Your account

An account belongs to one person. You need a working email address, a password you have not used elsewhere, and to be at least 16 years old.

Keep the password to yourself. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you, so tell us as soon as you think somebody else can reach it and we will help you shut it.

Keep the email address current. It is the only way we have of reaching you about the account, and it is the only way to get back in if you forget the password.

What Taper actually does

Taper fetches feeds at addresses you give it, blends the items into an edition of the size you set, and shows it to you. That is the whole of the service.

• The content is the publisher's. They wrote it, they own it, and their own terms govern what you may do with it. Taper takes no rights in it and grants you none.
• We do not check or endorse what a source publishes. A feed you add is a feed you chose.
• Fetching happens because you asked for it. Adding a source is an instruction to go and get it on your behalf, from then on.
• Saved items are private. They are stored for you and published nowhere by us.
• An edition is built when you open it. Nothing is held for you overnight, and nothing you did not save is kept.

We may change how the product works — that is what building it means. What we will not do is quietly reverse the commitments on the front page: no ads, no counts, no infinite scroll, no algorithm, no streaks, and no notification about an individual item. Those are product definition, and a change to them would be announced, not slipped in.

What you agree not to do

Short, and each one is here because it would hurt somebody:

• Paywalls. Do not point Taper at a feed you are not entitled to read, or use it to get around a publisher's access controls.
• Scraping. Do not use the service to hammer a publisher's server. No running an account as a scraping engine, and no automating it to fetch far beyond what a person reads.
• Other people's accounts. Do not try to reach another account's data, probe the service for a way in, or test its security without asking us first. Ask, and the answer is usually yes.
• Reselling. Do not resell the service, or run it as a backend for something else you charge for.
• Accounts in bulk. Do not create them automatically, or to get around a plan's allowance.
• The law. Do not upload anything unlawful, and do not use the service to break a law where you are.

There is also material we will not carry, whoever published it and whatever the feed is called:

• Pornography, sexually explicit feeds, and anything sexualising a person who is not clearly an adult.
• Graphic violence. Feeds whose point is gore or cruelty — the footage rather than the story.
• Harassment and hatred. Feeds that exist to go after a person, or to promote hatred or violence against people for who they are.
• Terrorism and mass violence, including anything promoting, coordinating or celebrating it.
• Anything illegal to possess or distribute where you are or where we are.

This is about what a feed is for, not what it reports on. News covers war, crime and atrocity, and a source that shows you the worst of a week is doing journalism, not breaking this. The line is a feed whose purpose is the material itself.

We do not review what you subscribe to and we do not want to — your source list is yours and nobody else can see it. What that means in practice is that this clause is acted on when something is reported to us or when we are told by an authority, and that when we do act it is on the account rather than on the feed.

If something here is stopping you doing something reasonable, write to us before assuming the answer is no. These exist to stop the service being used against publishers and against other readers, not to be a trap.

What each plan lets you do

The free tier holds 15 editions and as many sources as you want. The paid tier lifts the edition figure and adds filters that do more than match a word. There is no number on the source list in either tier, and there never will be.

Both figures are enforced by the database rather than by the interface, which means they are exact. A plan changes how many ways your sources can be arranged. When a paid plan ends, editions past the free tier's 15 stay where they are but their blends do not run, so you cannot read past the ceiling until you are back under it.

We may act against an account whose use genuinely degrades the service for other people — an automated fetch pattern, say, rather than a large source list. If that happens we will write to you first and give you a chance to fix it, unless what is happening makes waiting unsafe.

Paying for it

A subscription is $5 a month, or $48 a year. Prices include VAT where we have to charge it, and the amount is shown before you confirm anything.

• It renews on its own at the end of each period, at the price you were paying, until you stop it.
• You can cancel at any time. Cancelling stops the next renewal; the tier keeps working until the period you already paid for runs out, and we do not pro-rate the remainder back.
• 14 days to change your mind. Write to us within 14 days of a first payment and we will refund it in full, whether or not you have used it.
• A price change never applies to a period already paid for, and we will tell you at least 30 days before one takes effect. If you do not want it, cancel before it does.
• A payment that fails is retried a few times, and then the account goes back to the free tier. Nothing is deleted when that happens.
• The card never reaches us. It is handled by our payment provider on their own pages, and we never see the number.

When a paid plan ends, for any reason, your editions and sources stay exactly where they are. Filters that only the paid tier can express stop being applied, and start again the moment the plan does — they are not deleted, because deleting them would punish somebody for pausing. Editions past the free tier's 15 also stay, but their blends do not run and they cannot be read until you are back under the ceiling. You can delete a locked edition to open the next one.

What we do not promise

Taper is provided as it is. We work to keep it up and we do not promise it will be — there is no uptime guarantee, and we would rather say so than publish a figure we cannot stand behind.

• A source that is down is not the service failing. Slow, malformed or discontinued either. Taper shows you what it can reach, and tells you when it could not reach something.
• A publisher can withdraw a feed at any time, and some do so without warning. Nothing we can do about that is a promise we can make about it.
• We may take the service down for maintenance, and will avoid doing it without notice where we can.
• None of this overrides consumer law. In the EU those rights are not ours to sign away.

Ending it

You, at any moment

Account settings, at the bottom. It is immediate and complete: the account and everything hanging off it are deleted in one operation, with no grace period and no way back. Export your sources as OPML first if you want them.

Us, if something is being broken

We can suspend or close an account that is being used against the terms above, including one being used to collect the material we said we will not carry. We will tell you which term and give you a chance to answer, unless what is happening makes that unsafe or unlawful.

A suspension stops the service and nothing else. No edition is built and nothing new can be added, and everything you already had stays exactly where it is. Four things keep working for as long as it lasts: you can read what is on the account, export your sources, cancel a paid plan, and close the account outright. None of those needs our agreement, and a suspension is lifted the moment it should be.

Us, immediately, in one case

Material sexualising children, and material coordinating terrorism or mass violence, end an account on the spot, with no notice and no chance to answer. Where the law obliges us to report it, we report it. This is the only case where the paragraph above does not apply.

Us, if we stop running it

If Taper were ever to shut down, we would give at least 30 days' notice by email, keep OPML export working for the whole of it, and refund whatever is left of a paid period.

How far our responsibility goes

We are responsible for running the service with reasonable care, and for the things Romanian and European consumer law makes us responsible for. Those cannot be signed away and this section does not try to.

Beyond that: we are not responsible for what a publisher writes, for a source going away, for what you do with something you read, or for losses that were not a foreseeable result of something we did wrong. Where a claim is left after all of that, our total responsibility for it is no more than what you paid us in the twelve months before it arose.

If you are a consumer, none of this affects your statutory rights, including the right to a service that matches its description.

When these terms change

The date at the top moves whenever the words below it do. A change that materially affects you — the price, what you may do, what we may do — is emailed to you at least 30 days beforehand and written up in the changelog.

Carrying on using Taper after a change takes effect is how you accept it. If you would rather not, close the account before then and we will refund whatever is left of a paid period.

Which law, and where a disagreement goes

These terms are governed by the law of Romania, and the courts there have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer resident in the European Union, that does not take anything away from you: you keep the mandatory protections of the country you live in, and you can bring a claim in your own local courts.

Before either of us goes near a court, write to hello@taper.news. Almost everything is a misunderstanding that a reply fixes.