Terms of Service

1. The agreement

These Terms of Service are an agreement between you and eQuill Labs ("we", "us"), which operates The Cottage Garden Companion at cottagegardencompanion.com (the "Service"). By creating an account or using the Service you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

Our Privacy Policy is part of this agreement and describes what we do with your information.

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account, at least 16 if the EEA or UK digital age of consent applies to you, and at least 18 to buy a subscription. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian must agree to these terms on your behalf and is responsible for your use of the Service. If you accept these terms for an organization, you confirm you are authorized to bind it.

2. Your account

• Give us an email address that reaches you. Account notices, including billing and security notices, go there.
• Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account, and for telling us promptly at equilllabs+cottage-garden-companion@gmail.com if you think someone else has got into it.
• One account is for one person or household. Share the sign-in with a stranger and you have handed them your gardens; we cannot undo that for you.
• Do not create an account for someone else without their say-so, or impersonate anyone.

3. What you may do with it

While your account is in good standing we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Service to plan gardens — your own, your clients', your allotment society's, commercially or not. That is the whole of what we are granting: a right to use the hosted Service as it is offered.

The application's source code is published separately under the GNU General Public License v3.0. Those license terms govern the code; these terms govern this hosted Service. Having the right to the source does not give you a right to this deployment, its database, its infrastructure or its accounts.

4. The free trial

New accounts get 30 days of full access, with no card asked for. When the trial ends nothing is deleted and nothing is charged: the account simply becomes read-only — you can still open, print and export everything you made.

Your trial end date is always shown on your billing page, and we tell you that date before you reach it: on your noticeboard, and by email as well if your address is confirmed. It is a notice about your own account rather than a newsletter, so it is sent whatever your notification settings say.

One trial per person; creating extra accounts to extend it is a breach of these terms.

5. Subscriptions and billing

• Price and currency. Prices are shown on the pricing page in US dollars and are exclusive of any tax we are required to collect, which is added at checkout.
• Payment. Payment is taken by Stripe. We never receive or store your card details. You confirm you are authorized to use the payment method you give Stripe.
• Renewal. A subscription is billed in advance for the period you chose and renews automatically at the then-current price at the end of each period, until you cancel. Your renewal date is always shown on your billing page.
• Renewal reminder. About 30 days before each renewal we email you to say what renews, the amount, the date it will be charged, and how to cancel. It is a billing notice rather than a newsletter, so it is sent whatever your notification settings say.
• Cancelling. Cancel whenever you like from Account → Billing, which opens Stripe's portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for — you keep full access until then, and are not charged again.
• Refunds. Payments are non-refundable except where the law where you live says otherwise — and it may; consumers in the UK and EU keep their statutory cancellation rights whatever this paragraph says. Beyond that, if you were charged by mistake, or the Service has not been what you hoped, write to equilllabs+cottage-garden-companion@gmail.com and ask. We consider every request on its merits and look kindly on one made within about 14 days of the charge, but a refund outside your statutory rights is at our discretion rather than something you are owed.
• Price changes. We may change prices. If a change affects you, we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and it applies only from your next renewal — never retroactively. Not wanting the new price is a fine reason to cancel.
• Failed payments. If a renewal fails, Stripe retries for a while and your account goes read-only if it never succeeds. Nothing is deleted.
• Features not yet built. Anything marked "coming soon" on the pricing page is an intention, not a promise, and forms no part of what you are buying today. Do not subscribe for a feature that is not shipped.

6. Inviting a friend

You can invite someone to the Service by giving us their email address, with an optional note from you. We record who invited whom, and we send that address one letter, naming you as the sender. We do not write to them again unless they make an account of their own, and we do not add them to any list. Only invite people you actually know and who would not mind hearing from you.

• What an accepted invitation earns you. When somebody you invited creates an account, we add bonus Ask the Garden credits to yours: 10 if you are on a paid subscription, or 2 plus 7 extra days of your free trial if you are not. Which of the two you get depends on your standing at the moment they sign up.
• Bonus credits are credits, not money. They have no cash value, cannot be bought, sold, transferred or refunded, and are not a discount on any subscription. They do not expire and are not reset at the turn of the month, and they are spent only after your monthly allowance is used up. They go with the account, so closing it ends them.
• Limits. There are limits on how many invitations you can send in a day and how many earn a reward, and we may adjust them. We do not reward an invitation to an address that already has an account, to yourself, or to accounts made to collect rewards rather than to garden.
• Abuse. Sending invitations to people who did not want them, buying or scraping addresses, or creating accounts to farm rewards is a breach of these terms. We may withdraw bonus credits obtained that way, turn off invitations for an account, or close it.
• An invitation is not the only way to earn one. There is a game of patience in the potting shed, and winning a hand earns one bonus credit, at most one a day however many hands you win. Everything above about what a bonus credit is applies to those in full, and so does everything below about abuse: credits obtained by forging a result rather than by playing may be withdrawn.
• Changing or ending it. Invitations and the card game are goodwill rather than part of what you buy. We may change either reward or end either at any time; credits already granted stay granted.
• An accepted invitation now arrives as a friend request. When somebody takes up your invitation, a request to be friends is waiting for them from you — theirs to accept or decline, and nothing is shared either way until they do. See section 8.

7. Your gardens are yours

You keep every right you have in what you create — plans, drawings, journal entries, varieties, notes and anything else you put in ("Your Content"). We claim no ownership of it.

You grant us only the license we need to run the Service for you: to store, copy, back up, process, transmit and display Your Content, and to reformat it for the screen or the printer. It is worldwide and royalty-free because servers and backups are, but it exists purely to operate the Service, ends when you delete the content or your account, and covers nothing else. Specifically, we will not sell Your Content, publish it, or use it to train machine-learning models.

You are responsible for Your Content, and you confirm you have the right to put it here — including anything you import from a file. If you publish a plan by minting a share link, you are the publisher of it: anyone with the link can read it, and revoking the link is your job.

If you send us feedback — a bug report, a feature idea, a complaint about the wording on this page — we may use it freely, without obligation or payment to you. Do not send us ideas you want to keep or be paid for.

8. Friends and messages

You can become friends with another gardener here. It is mutual and consented: one of you asks, the other accepts, and nothing at all is shared until that accept. Declining is silent, and so is unfriending, blocking and unblocking — nobody is told either way.

• What a friend can see. The gardens you switch on and the plots in them, plus your recent garden activity — what you sowed, planted out, picked and cleared. Never your journal notes, never your address or coordinates, never your email address, never your subscription, and never a garden you have not switched on. You can switch a garden off at any time, and it disappears from their side at once, going back over the whole window.
• Messages are Your Content, on the same footing as everything else in section 7: yours, and your responsibility. We do not own them and we will never sell them, publish them or use them to train machine-learning models.
• You cannot unsend or edit a message. Once it is sent it is on the other gardener's screen for good. We say this plainly because every other app has trained the opposite expectation.
• Deleting your side does not delete theirs, and closing your account does not erase what you wrote to somebody else. This is the one exception to section 7's promise that the licence you grant us ends when you delete the content or your account. A message is as much your friend's record of a conversation as it is yours. When both gardeners have gone, the conversation goes with them.
• Blocking removes you from their view, and the person who blocked you keeps the conversation. That is unusual, and it is deliberate: that record is what makes a complaint to us checkable. We would rather tell you now than have you discover it later.
• We do not read your conversations in the ordinary course. There is no report queue and no moderation team. If somebody is treating you badly, block them — and if you want us to know, write to equilllabs+cottage-garden-companion@gmail.com. Abuse is grounds for closing an account under section 14.
• When a report reaches us we may read the conversation it concerns, and neither of you is told. Every such reading is recorded, with a reason, against the person who did it.

9. Acceptable use

Do not:

• Break the law with the Service, or use it to plan or conceal anything illegal — including growing what you are not permitted to grow where you are.
• Upload content that infringes someone's rights, or that is unlawful, abusive or malicious.
• Store other people's personal information in it unlawfully.
• Harass another gardener, use a friendship as a channel for advertising or bulk messages, or set up a fresh account to get around somebody's block.
• Probe, scan, overload or attempt to break the Service, its infrastructure or anyone else's account; or access data that is not yours.
• Scrape it, or hammer it with automated requests. Our plant catalogue and artwork are not a free data source for your product.
• Resell, sublicense or white-label access to the hosted Service.
• Remove attribution, or misrepresent the Service as your own.
• Work around billing, access controls or per-account limits.

We may set reasonable limits on storage, request rates and account size to keep the Service standing up for everyone, and will apply them with a light hand.

10. Our part of it

The Service's plant catalogue and its curated data, the emblem artwork, the illustrations, the typography, the interface, the copy, the name The Cottage Garden Companion and our logos belong to eQuill Labs or our licensors, and are protected by copyright and trademark law. Using the Service does not transfer any of it to you. Third-party data we build on — public frost and hardiness data, and open plant references — remains subject to its own terms.

11. Gardening information is not advice

This matters more than the rest of this document, so please read it properly.

Frost dates, hardiness zones, sowing and harvest windows, spacing, companion and rotation warnings, pest and predator notes and every other horticultural figure in the Service are general estimates derived from public data and averages. They are not tailored to your soil, your slope, your microclimate or this year's weather, and they are frequently wrong at the edges. Treat them as a starting point for your own judgement, never as instruction.

The Service does not provide, and must not be relied on for:

• Identification of what is safe to eat or handle. Never eat, touch or medicinally use a plant on the strength of a name or drawing in this app. Many garden plants are toxic, and some are dangerous to touch.
• Medical, veterinary, allergy or food-safety advice, including telling you which plants are safe around your children, pets or livestock. Where the plant catalogue records what a named poison-control reference says about a particular species, that is a record of somebody else's published finding, kept so you can go and check it yourself. A record is not a clearance for your animal: it knows nothing about that animal, how much was eaten, or what the plant had been treated with, and a plant no reference happens to name has not been cleared by anybody. Your veterinarian is who to ask.
• Legal compliance. Whether a plant is a permitted, restricted, noxious or invasive species where you live is for you to check with your local authority before you sow it. The same goes for water restrictions, chemical use and anything your tenancy, allotment or homeowners' association requires.
• Professional horticultural, agricultural or structural advice, or any decision with real money or a crop riding on it.

Ask the Garden is subject to every word of this section, and more so. It is a language model. It reads your plans and your journal and answers in confident prose, and it can still be wrong — about a date, about a plant, about what you actually drew. It is built to warn you and never to clear anything as safe, so treat a reassuring answer as no answer at all: if it does not raise a concern, that is not a finding that there is nothing to be concerned about. Nothing it says is horticultural, medical, veterinary or food-safety advice, and the paragraph above about eating and handling plants applies to its answers exactly as it applies to ours.

Gardening is weather, and weather does what it likes. We do not warrant that anything you plan here will germinate, grow, survive a frost, avoid a pest or yield anything at all.

12. Third-party services

Payments run through Stripe, email through Amazon SES, hosting through DigitalOcean, Ask the Garden through OpenRouter and the model providers it routes to, and web fonts are served by Google. Your use of those services is also subject to their own terms, and we are not responsible for their acts or omissions. The full list, and what each receives, is in the Privacy Policy. Links from the Service to other sites are conveniences, not endorsements.

13. Availability and change

We aim to keep the Service up and quick, but it is run by a small operation on rented infrastructure and we offer no uptime guarantee or service-level agreement. Maintenance, backups, failures and third-party outages all happen.

We may add, change or remove features. If we remove something you rely on or discontinue the Service altogether, we will give you at least 60 days' notice by email and keep export working throughout, so you leave with everything you made. Export early and often regardless: your own backup is the only one you control.

14. Ending the agreement

• You, at any time: cancel the subscription, or close the account entirely from the account page. Closing deletes your data as described in the Privacy Policy. Export first — we cannot undo it.
• Us, if you materially breach these terms — most often the acceptable-use section. Where the breach can be fixed we will tell you and give you a fair chance to fix it; where it cannot, or where continuing would put the Service or other gardeners at risk, we may suspend or close the account immediately. If we close a paid account for breach, you get a pro rata refund of the unused period unless the breach involved fraud or abuse.
• Dormancy. If an account has no subscription and has not been signed in to for 24 consecutive months, we may close it to stop paying to store it — but only after emailing you at least 30 days beforehand, with a link to export everything first.

Sections 6 (as to licenses already granted), 8 (as to messages already sent), 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 19 survive the end of this agreement.

15. Disclaimer of warranties

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, eQuill Labs DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, ACCURACY AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE OR ERROR-FREE, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, OR THAT ANY HORTICULTURAL DATA, DATE, ZONE OR RECOMMENDATION IT PRESENTS IS ACCURATE, COMPLETE OR SUITABLE FOR YOUR GARDEN.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you, and nothing in it limits rights that consumer law gives you and does not let us waive.

16. Limitation of liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, eQuill Labs WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, NOR FOR ANY LOST PROFITS, LOST CROPS, LOST PLANTS, LOST REVENUE, LOST DATA, OR COST OF SUBSTITUTE SERVICES, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SERVICE, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY. OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICE IS LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, AND (B) FIFTY US DOLLARS ($50).

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits, in which case they apply to the maximum extent they are permitted.

17. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold eQuill Labs harmless from any claim, damage, loss or reasonable legal cost brought by a third party and arising from Your Content, your use of the Service, or your breach of these terms or of any law. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and let you take conduct of the defense, and we will not settle it without your agreement.

18. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Oregon, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply. You and we agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts sitting in the State of Oregon, except that either of us may bring a claim in small claims court where it qualifies.

If you are a consumer resident in the UK, the EEA or another jurisdiction whose law gives you the right to sue locally and to the protection of your own mandatory consumer law, this section does not take that away from you.

Talk to us first. Before starting formal proceedings, please email equilllabs+cottage-garden-companion@gmail.com with what went wrong and what you want done about it, and give us 30 days to sort it out. Nearly everything can be settled that way, and this one is a gardening app.

19. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the Service changes. The "last updated" date at the top reflects the last real change. For any change that materially affects your rights or what you pay, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email or an in-app notice before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after that means you accept the new terms; if you do not, cancel and export — and if the change is a price rise, your current period runs out at the price you agreed to.

20. General

• Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service, and replace anything said earlier.
• Severability. If a court finds any part unenforceable, the rest stands and that part is narrowed to what is enforceable.
• No waiver. Not enforcing something once does not mean giving it up.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your account or this agreement without our consent. We may assign it to a successor in a merger, acquisition or sale of the Service, on notice to you.
• Force majeure. Neither of us is liable for delay or failure caused by something genuinely outside our control.
• Notices. Ours reach you at the email address on your account or by an in-app notice; yours reach us at the address below.
• No partnership. Nothing here makes either of us the other's agent, partner or employee.

21. How to reach us

eQuill Labs, operator of The Cottage Garden Companion — equilllabs+cottage-garden-companion@gmail.com. A postal address for formal notices is available on request.

See also the Privacy Policy, which covers what we do with your information.