Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of Terms

By using Aftertape you agree to these Terms of Service. If you do not agree, please do not use the service.

2. Permitted Use

Aftertape is an educational tool designed to help you study YouTube video content. You may use it to process publicly available YouTube videos for personal study and educational purposes.

3. Prohibited Content

Aftertape is for studying language. You must not use it to process content that:

• Contains graphic violence, gore or content designed to shock or disturb
• Is sexually explicit or pornographic in nature
• Promotes hate speech, discrimination or violence against any group
• Contains extremist or terrorist ideology
• Is designed to harass, bully or target individuals
• Facilitates or promotes illegal activities
• Exploits, harms or targets minors
• Violates the intellectual property rights of others
• Instructs in, promotes or glamorises the production, sale or use of illegal drugs or other controlled substances
• Instructs in the making, modification or acquisition of weapons, explosives or other items intended to cause harm
• Encourages or gives instruction in self-harm, suicide or disordered eating
• Presents medical, health or financial advice in a way likely to cause harm if followed, including content contradicting established public-health guidance
• Promotes gambling, or is intended to defraud, scam or mislead for financial gain

These categories are drawn deliberately wide. Where a video sits in a grey area, treat it as prohibited: Aftertape exists to help you learn a language, and there is always another video.

How this is enforced. We do not review videos before they are processed, and we make no claim to detect prohibited content automatically. Processing is automated and happens in seconds. What we do is this: the restrictions above are a condition of using the service, we act on reports sent to our contact page, and we may refuse processing, remove generated material or close an account at our discretion and without notice. Saying we screen everything would be a promise we could not keep, and an unkept promise is worse than none.

Aftertape does not host, republish or recommend the videos you choose. It generates private study material from a link you supply, for you alone. Nothing it produces is an endorsement of the video or a statement that its content is accurate, lawful or safe.

4. AI-Generated Content

Vocabulary, summaries and commentary are generated by AI language models. While we strive for accuracy, AI-generated content may contain errors. Do not rely solely on our output for medical, legal, financial or safety-critical decisions.

5. Usage Limits

To ensure fair access for all users and to control our third-party API costs, we apply usage limits:

• Without an account (guest): 3 videos per day per device
• Free registered account: 10 videos per day
• aftertape+ subscribers: unlimited videos
• Specific limits may change as we scale and will be announced in advance

5a. Cancellation & Refund Policy

Cancel anytime, in one click. Manage or cancel your aftertape+ subscription yourself from your account (Manage subscription), which opens our payment provider's secure billing portal where you can also update your card and view invoices. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period and you keep access until then. Once you cancel, your account page shows the exact date your access ends, and you can restart the subscription from the same place at any time before it. Nothing you have saved is deleted when a subscription ends: your vocabulary library, history and packs remain on the free plan.

30-day money-back guarantee. If you upgrade to aftertape+ and are not satisfied, cancel and contact us within 30 days of your first payment for a full refund, no questions asked. After 30 days, subscriptions are non-refundable but you retain access until the end of your billing period.

If you are a consumer in the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland, you also have a statutory right to withdraw from a distance contract within 14 days. By starting to use aftertape+ immediately after subscribing you ask us to begin the service at once; our 30-day money-back guarantee above is more generous than the statutory 14-day right and applies in its place.

5b. Service Continuity & Provider-Initiated Cancellation

Aftertape relies on third-party APIs and infrastructure providers to operate. The pricing of these providers is outside our control and can change.

If our underlying costs become unsustainable - for example, a third-party provider raises its prices materially, withdraws a free tier we depend on, or discontinues a service we use - we reserve the right to either (a) adjust the price of new aftertape+ subscriptions with at least 30 days' notice to existing subscribers, who may cancel before the new price applies, or (b) discontinue the paid service altogether.

If we discontinue aftertape+ during your paid period, we will issue a pro-rata refund of the unused portion of your subscription, calculated from the date the service is discontinued. Annual subscribers receive a proportionally larger refund than monthly subscribers. Refunds are returned to the original payment method via Stripe within 14 business days.

You may cancel your aftertape+ subscription at any time from your account settings or via our contact page. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period; you retain access until that date.

This clause does not override the 30-day money-back guarantee in §5a, which remains the primary remedy for new subscribers who are not satisfied. §5b applies specifically to changes initiated by us rather than by you.

5c. Closing or Changing the Service

Aftertape is an independent project with no guarantee of indefinite operation. We may modify, suspend, limit or permanently discontinue the service, in whole or in part, at any time and for any reason, including deciding not to continue running it. No feature, plan or price is promised to remain available.

If we close the service permanently we will, so far as reasonably practicable: (i) give at least 30 days' notice by email to registered account holders and a notice on the site; (ii) keep the export functions (PDF, Word, Anki CSV and vocabulary download) working during that period so you can retrieve your material; and (iii) refund any unused paid subscription time on the pro-rata basis set out in §5b. Where an immediate shutdown is forced on us by circumstances outside our control - loss of a critical third-party provider, a legal or regulatory requirement, a security incident, or incapacity - notice may be shorter or, if unavoidable, given at the time of closure, and the pro-rata refund remains payable.

Your material is yours and you should keep your own copies. Every document Aftertape generates is downloadable at the moment it is created, and your vocabulary can be exported at any time. We are not a backup or archival service, and we are not liable for material you did not download before an account, a feature or the service ended.

Free accounts. Free and guest access is provided at our discretion, without charge and without any commitment as to continued availability. We may change the limits of, restrict, or withdraw free access at any time. Because no payment is made for free access, no refund arises in respect of it.

Access codes. We sometimes give aftertape+ away through an access code. Redeeming one requires a registered account, so you will always have given us an email address to use it. Code-granted access is free, may be limited to a set number of days, and takes no payment at any point: there is no card on your account and nothing renews automatically. By redeeming a code you agree that we may contact you at that address about the code and the access it gives, for example to tell you before it ends, that your account is returning to the free plan, or that a code has been withdrawn. You can ask us to stop at any time via our contact page, and you can delete your account, which removes the address entirely. We may withdraw a code and, in exceptional cases, end access already granted under it. Because nothing is paid for code-granted access, no refund arises in respect of it, and withdrawing it never affects a paid subscription you have separately taken out.

Individual accounts. This section is about the service as a whole. For when we close a single account - the grounds, the notice you get, and what happens to money you have already paid - see §5d.

Nothing in this section limits any right you have under mandatory consumer law that cannot be excluded by agreement, including your statutory rights as an EU, EEA, UK or Swiss consumer. It sets out how we would wind the service down, not an attempt to exclude those rights.

5d. Closing an individual account

Almost every account that closes is closed by the person who owns it, from Settings on their account page. This section is about the other case: when we close one.

When we would. We may suspend or close an account that: (i) breaches these terms, in particular the prohibited content rules in §3; (ii) is used unlawfully, or to harass, threaten or abuse another person or us; (iii) abuses the usage limits or tries to evade them, for example by opening several accounts to take the same free offer more than once; (iv) attempts to disrupt, overload, probe or reverse-engineer the service; or (v) is used to obtain payment or free access dishonestly, including by reversing a payment for access that has been used.

Notice. Where the problem is not serious, and where telling you first is not itself a risk, we will normally contact you and give you a chance to put it right. Serious cases - unlawful use, harm to another person, or anything that puts the service or its other users at risk - may be closed at once and without prior notice. Either way we will tell you, at the address on the account, that it has been closed and why, unless the law prevents us from saying.

Money you have already paid. If your account had paid time left on it when we closed it, we refund the unused part on the pro-rata basis in §5b, to the original payment method, normally within 14 days. We do this even when the reason for closing is a breach. We do not keep payment for a period you can no longer use: an account can be closed for good reason and the money for the unused weeks still returned, and those are two separate questions. The only exception is money that never reached us or has already been reversed - a fraudulent or charged-back payment - because there is then nothing to return. Access given by an access code is free, so no refund arises in respect of it (§5c).

Your material. Closing an account deletes it and the data described in §6, in the same way as deleting it yourself. Every document Aftertape generates can be downloaded the moment it is created and your vocabulary can be exported at any time, but where an account is closed immediately there may be no chance to export first. Keep your own copies.

Opening another account. Where an account was closed for a breach we may decline to open a new one for the same person. Closing an account does not by itself settle anything owed either way.

If you think we got it wrong. Write to us on the contact page and we will look at it again.

Nothing in this section limits any right you have under mandatory consumer law that cannot be excluded by agreement, including your statutory rights as an EU, EEA, UK or Swiss consumer and your right to complain to a supervisory authority or to bring a claim before the courts of your own country.

6. Privacy

We store your email address and a hashed password, your processed video history, your vocabulary library, the channels you follow, any vocabulary packs you share, your feedback, and - if you subscribe to aftertape+ - a payment-provider customer reference and your subscription status. We never see or store your card details. Video transcripts are never stored: they exist only in memory while your job runs.

We do not sell your data to third parties. Your history is private and visible only to you. Your account, history and vocabulary are stored outside Switzerland - see section 3a of the Privacy Policy for where, and section 4 for how long. You may delete your account and its data yourself at any time from your account page, or ask us to do it via our contact page. For full details see our Privacy Policy.

7. Intellectual Property & Fair Use

Third-party content. Aftertape processes publicly available YouTube content to generate derivative study materials. YouTube content accessed through Aftertape remains subject to all intellectual property rights of its original creators. Aftertape does not claim ownership of any content derived from YouTube videos and is not affiliated with or endorsed by YouTube or Google LLC.

Fair use / fair dealing basis. The vocabulary flashcards, summaries, idiom lists and timed commentary we generate are transformative derivative works intended solely for personal, non-commercial study by the individual user. We rely on fair use (17 U.S.C. § 107 for US users), the EU text-and-data-mining exception (Directive (EU) 2019/790, Article 4 for EU users) and fair dealing for research and private study (UK CDPA 1988, §§ 29–29A) for this transformation.

Output use. You may use Aftertape outputs for your own personal study only. You may not republish, redistribute, resell, share publicly, or commercially exploit content owned by third parties using outputs produced by this service. You may not use Aftertape outputs to train or fine-tune machine-learning models.

7a. User Responsibility

You are solely responsible for ensuring that your use of Aftertape and of any study materials it generates complies with the intellectual property rights of content creators and the Terms of Service of the platforms from which content is sourced (including but not limited to YouTube Terms of Service). Aftertape is a processing tool; it does not authorise any use of third-party content that would otherwise be impermissible. You must not use Aftertape to process content that is private, age-restricted, geoblocked from you, or otherwise unavailable to the public.

8. Service Disclosures & Limitations

The table below describes what Aftertape does and does not do, and which third-party services are involved in delivering the product.

Area	What we do	Limitation
Transcript access	Fetch publicly available YouTube captions	Does not work for private, unlisted, age-restricted or geoblocked videos, or videos without captions. Auto-generated captions may reduce output quality. We do not upload, host or store the video or its audio.
Video length	Process videos up to 4 hours on aftertape+	On guest and free accounts, only the first 15 minutes of a longer video are processed. On aftertape+ the ceiling is 4 hours. Either way the rest is trimmed and we tell you on the results screen.
Vocabulary extraction	AI selects and CEFR-tags key terms from the transcript	AI may miss terms or assign incorrect CEFR levels. Output is a study aid, not a certified language assessment. The number of words returned is a target, not a guarantee: a short video may not contain enough distinct terms.
Summary & commentary	AI generates a paraphrased summary and timed notes	Not verbatim transcription. May omit details or contain inaccuracies. Do not use for legal, medical or safety-critical purposes.
Languages	Detect the video's language and produce output in English, Italian, German, French or Spanish	These five languages are supported end to end. Videos in other languages may still be processed, but detection, CEFR tagging and definition quality are not supported outside this set. The interface itself is English only.
Translation	AI translates vocabulary terms into Italian, German, French or Spanish	Machine translation only. Verify with a native speaker for high-stakes use.
AI-generated word packs	Generate a themed vocabulary pack from a topic you type, without a video	Words are invented by the AI from its own knowledge, not drawn from a curated dictionary, so a term may be off-level or uncommon. Review the preview before saving. Subject to its own separate daily limit.
File storage	Generated PDFs, Word files and Anki exports stored in the cloud and linked from your history	We do not guarantee files remain available indefinitely and may introduce a retention period in future with notice. Download anything you want to keep. Deleting your account deletes the associated data.
Channel following & email digest	Follow YouTube channels and, on aftertape+, receive an email when they publish	Built on YouTube's public feeds, which list only recent uploads and can lag or omit videos. Not a guaranteed notification service. Each channel can be muted individually.
Service availability	Best-effort availability, monitored daily	No uptime guarantee or SLA. Processing may be slower at peak times, and outages at any third-party provider below may interrupt the service.

Third-party services we use. Aftertape depends on the providers below to deliver the service. Each operates under its own terms and privacy policy, and each may change or discontinue its service independently of us. We may substitute a provider with an equivalent one without notice.

Provider	Purpose	What it receives
Supadata	Fetches publicly available YouTube captions	The video ID you submit. No account data.
Google (Gemini)	Primary AI model for vocabulary, summaries and commentary	Transcript text and your processing options. No account data.
Groq	Fallback AI model, used when the primary is unavailable	Same as above, only when the fallback is triggered.
Cloudflare R2	Stores your generated PDF, Word and Anki files	The generated files themselves.
Railway	Application hosting and database	All data stored by the service, as described in our Privacy Policy.
Resend	Sends account, sharing and digest emails	Your email address and the message content.
Stripe	Processes aftertape+ payments and the billing portal	Your payment details, handled by Stripe. We never see or store your card number.
Google Sign-In	Optional sign-in	Your email address and basic profile, only if you choose this sign-in method.

Aftertape is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of the above, nor by YouTube or Google LLC.

8a. Copyright Complaints (DMCA / EU)

If you are a content creator and believe that Aftertape has been used to generate materials that infringe your intellectual property rights, please email us at our contact page with: (i) identification of the copyrighted work; (ii) the YouTube URL processed; (iii) your contact details; and (iv) a statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is unauthorised. We will review and act on valid notices promptly. Repeat infringement of creators' rights by users will result in account termination.

9. Disclaimer of Warranties

Aftertape is provided "as is" without any warranty of any kind, express or implied. We do not guarantee uninterrupted access, accuracy of AI output, or that the service will meet your specific requirements. Aftertape relies on third-party services for transcript access, AI processing, file storage and email delivery. We cannot guarantee continued availability of any specific YouTube video's transcript and bear no liability if such access is restricted or discontinued due to changes in third-party platform policies or technical measures. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all liability for indirect, incidental or consequential damages arising from your use of the service.

10. Changes to Terms

We may update these terms at any time. Continued use of the service after changes constitutes acceptance of the new terms.

11. Contact

Questions about these terms? Contact us.