ESSENCE Terms of Service

1. Who we are

ESSENCE is operated by ESSENCE APP LLC, a Florida limited liability company ("ESSENCE," "we," "us," or "our"). Our principal address is 610 W Las Olas Blvd, #513, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33312. You can reach us at help@essencevault.app.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and ESSENCE APP LLC governing your use of the ESSENCE website at essencevault.app and the ESSENCE application (together, the "Service").

By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms, to our Privacy Policy, and to our Acceptable Use Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

2. What ESSENCE is, and what it is not

What the Service does today. ESSENCE lets you record your own voice by reading a series of scripted prompts aloud. We send those recordings to a third-party voice provider, which creates a synthetic model of your voice. You can then create messages inside your account. Each message is generated from a fixed template plus a short personalized note you write, and is rendered as audio in your synthetic voice. You can play back your saved messages inside your account at any time.

What the Service does not do. Please read this section carefully, because it is the most important thing to understand about ESSENCE today:

• We do not deliver messages to anyone. There is no email, text message, mail, or other delivery of your messages to any other person, at any time, under any circumstance.
• No one else can listen to your messages. Messages are played back only by you, from inside your own authenticated account.
• "Recipients" are private labels, not delivery targets. When you tag a message with a person's name and relationship, that label is stored privately in your own account. We do not collect that person's email address, phone number, or any other contact information, and we never contact them.
• There is no scheduled or posthumous release. ESSENCE has no scheduling feature, no death or incapacity verification, no dead man's switch, no trusted contact, and no release trigger of any kind. Nothing in your account is released to anyone upon your death or at any future date.

If we ever build a delivery feature, we will describe it in updated Terms before it is turned on. Do not use ESSENCE on the assumption that your messages will reach anyone. They will not. ESSENCE is, today, a private voice keepsake vault for your own use.

3. ESSENCE is not a will, trust, or estate service

ESSENCE is not a will, a trust, an estate-planning service, a digital estate custodian, an executor, a trustee, a fiduciary, a probate tool, or a legal or financial advisor. Nothing you create in ESSENCE has legal effect as a testamentary document, a bequest, a power of attorney, an advance directive, or any other legally operative instruction.

Do not use ESSENCE as the only place you store legally or practically important information. That includes wills and codicils, asset inventories, account numbers, passwords, cryptocurrency seed phrases or private keys, funeral or burial instructions, medical or end-of-life directives, guardianship wishes, and insurance details. Keep that information with an attorney, a fiduciary, or another system built to preserve and act on it. ESSENCE will not surface, transmit, act on, or honor any such instruction, and we are not responsible if information stored only in ESSENCE is never seen or acted upon.

4. Eligibility and your account

You must be at least 18 years old to use ESSENCE. The Service is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly create voice models from the voices of minors.

You are responsible for the security of your account and for everything that happens under it. We sign you in with a one-time email link, so keeping control of your email account is what keeps your ESSENCE account secure. Tell us at help@essencevault.app if you believe someone else has accessed your account.

You may hold one account. You may not share your account, sell it, or transfer it to another person.

5. Your voice and your recordings

5.1 You own your content

You own your voice recordings, the messages you create, and the personalized notes you write ("Your Content"). We do not claim ownership of any of it.

5.2 The permission you give us

To operate the Service for you, you grant ESSENCE a limited, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, transmit, process, and display Your Content, and to transmit your recordings to the service providers listed in our Privacy Policy, solely in order to provide the Service to you. This license exists only so the software can work. It ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies retained in routine backups for the limited windows described in our Privacy Policy.

We will not sell Your Content, license it to third parties for their own purposes, use your voice in marketing, or use Your Content to train artificial intelligence models. See the Privacy Policy for how we have configured our voice provider to support this.

5.3 Consent to create a synthetic voice

Creating a synthetic voice is optional, and it does not happen unless you affirmatively consent to it in the app. Before we create your voice model, you must confirm:

I consent to ESSENCE and its service providers creating and operating a synthetic model of my voice from these recordings, and generating audio in that voice for me.

You may withdraw that consent at any time by deleting your account, which instructs our voice provider to delete the voice model. Withdrawing consent does not undo processing that already took place.

5.4 It must be your own voice

You may only create a voice model from your own voice. Before recording, you must confirm:

This is my own voice. I am not recording, imitating, or submitting the voice of any other person, living or deceased.

We do not currently support creating a voice model from another person's voice, including a family member's, even with their permission and even for preservation reasons. We know that is a real and sincere thing people want. We are not equipped to verify that kind of consent yet, so we do not allow it. If we build a supported path for it, we will publish the process and the consent requirements before enabling it.

You are solely responsible for the audio you record. We do not perform speaker verification, liveness detection, or biometric matching, which means our systems will accept any audio your microphone hears. That technical fact does not grant you permission. Submitting another person's voice is a breach of these Terms and of our Acceptable Use Policy, and may violate biometric privacy laws, right-of-publicity laws, and criminal impersonation and fraud laws where you live.

5.5 Third-party material

Do not record copyrighted material you do not have rights to, including song lyrics, published works, speeches, and audiobook or film dialogue. Read the prompts in your own words. We do not screen recordings for copyright, so this obligation is yours.

6. AI-generated content

Messages in ESSENCE are generated by artificial intelligence. Two things follow from that:

• The audio is synthetic. It is a machine-generated approximation of your voice, not a recording of you saying those words. It may contain errors in pronunciation, emphasis, or tone.
• The words are partly generated. Your personalized note is rewritten by an AI model into a short passage, and is not spoken back verbatim. The rest of the message is fixed template text. Generated output may not reflect your exact intent. Review a message before saving it.

We make no representation that generated audio is indistinguishable from your real voice, suitable for any particular purpose, or acceptable as proof of identity, consent, or intent. Never use ESSENCE audio for voice authentication, identity verification, or any other security or legal purpose.

Messages are immutable once generated. You can discard a message in progress, but a saved message cannot be edited.

7. Acceptable use

Your use of ESSENCE is subject to our Acceptable Use Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms. In short: no impersonation, no threats or harassment, no fraud, no illegal content, and no using another person's voice.

8. Content removal, suspension, and termination

We reserve the right, but do not assume any obligation, to remove content, restrict features, and suspend or terminate an account, with or without notice, where we reasonably believe it is necessary to comply with law, respond to a legal demand, address a violation of these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, protect the safety of any person, or protect the Service.

We do not review or monitor content proactively, and we have no general obligation to do so. Content review, where it occurs, is manual and complaint-driven. To report a violation, email help@essencevault.app with the details.

You may stop using ESSENCE at any time and may delete your account from Settings. Deletion is immediate and permanent. There is no recovery period, no undo, and no export. What deletion does and does not remove is described in the Privacy Policy, and you should read that section before you delete anything.

9. Subscriptions, trial, and billing

9.1 Plans and price

ESSENCE offers a single paid subscription, Voice Vault, billed at US$12.99 per month or US$119.99 per year. Prices are in US dollars and exclude any taxes that may apply. We may change prices on notice; a price change applies to your next renewal, never to a term you have already paid for.

9.2 Free trial

New subscribers may be offered a 7-day free trial. The trial is available once per customer, on your first subscription only. You must provide a payment method to start the trial, and unless you cancel before the trial ends, the subscription begins automatically and your payment method is charged.

9.3 Automatic renewal

Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period, monthly or annual as selected, and your payment method is charged the then-current price, until you cancel. You consent to this recurring charge when you subscribe.

9.4 Cancelling

You may cancel at any time from the billing portal linked in your account settings. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current paid period, not immediately. You keep full access until that date, and you are not charged again.

9.5 Refunds

If you are unhappy with ESSENCE, email help@essencevault.app within 14 days of your first paid charge and we will refund that charge in full. Beyond that window, payments and renewal charges are non-refundable except where a refund is required by the law that applies to you. Refunds are issued to the original payment method.

To avoid a renewal charge you do not want, cancel before the renewal date. We do not provide partial refunds for unused time in a period you have already started.

9.6 What happens if your subscription ends

Today, if your subscription lapses or is cancelled:

• You keep access to messages you have already saved and can continue playing them back.
• You cannot create or save new messages.
• We do not delete your content because of non-payment.

We reserve the right to change this in the future, including restricting playback or removing content after a prolonged period of non-payment. If we do, we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email before any content is removed, and an opportunity to resubscribe.

9.7 Payment processing

Payments are processed by Stripe. We do not receive or store your full card number. Your use of the payment flow is also subject to Stripe's terms. If a payment fails, we retry it according to Stripe's standard schedule; if it continues to fail, your subscription lapses as described above.

9.8 Limits

The Service has usage limits, which are displayed in the app and may change. As of the current version these include a cap on the number of saved messages, one voice profile per account, and rate limits on recording and generation. Limits exist to control cost and abuse. Exceeding a limit blocks new activity; it never deletes existing content.

10. Service availability and changes

ESSENCE depends on third-party infrastructure, including Supabase, Vercel, Stripe, ElevenLabs, and Anthropic. We do not guarantee that the Service will be available, uninterrupted, error-free, or preserved indefinitely. We may modify, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service, and we may discontinue the Service entirely.

If we discontinue the Service, we will make reasonable efforts to give you at least 30 days' notice by email so that you can retrieve your content.

ESSENCE is not an archive, a backup service, or a permanent preservation service, and we make no durability guarantee. If your recordings and messages matter to you, keep your own copies elsewhere.

11. Disclaimers

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.

Without limiting the above, we specifically disclaim any liability for:

• Failed, delayed, or non-existent delivery of any message to any person. The Service does not deliver messages. We are not liable for any consequence of a message not reaching anyone.
• Incorrect, outdated, or mistaken recipient labels. Recipient names are free text that you enter, and we do not verify them.
• The conduct or reactions of any person who at any time hears, obtains, or reacts to content created in ESSENCE.
• Third-party service outages, failures, changes, price changes, or data loss at any provider we depend on.
• Loss, corruption, or non-preservation of content, however caused. We make no guarantee of permanent preservation.
• Emotional distress, grief, or psychological harm arising from the creation, playback, absence, loss, or content of any message, including messages that reference death, loss, or a person who has died.
• Any reliance on ESSENCE for estate, legal, financial, medical, or end-of-life purposes, as described in Section 3.
• Any use of generated audio for authentication, identity verification, or evidentiary purposes.

ESSENCE is not a mental health, grief counseling, or crisis service. If you are in distress, please contact a qualified professional or a local crisis line.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, ESSENCE APP LLC and its members, officers, employees, and agents will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost content, loss of goodwill, or emotional distress, arising out of or relating to the Service, whether based in contract, tort, strict liability, or any other theory, and whether or not we were advised of the possibility of such damages.

Our total aggregate liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) US$100.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages, so parts of Sections 11 and 12 may not apply to you. In that case our liability is limited to the greatest extent permitted by the law that applies to you.

13. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless ESSENCE APP LLC from any claim, demand, loss, or expense, including reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of your content, your use of the Service, your violation of these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, or your violation of the rights of any other person, including any claim that you created a voice model from a voice that was not your own.

14. Governing law and venue

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

You and ESSENCE agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be brought exclusively in the state courts located in Broward County, Florida, or in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and each party consents to the personal jurisdiction and venue of those courts.

There is no mandatory arbitration clause and no class action waiver in these Terms.

If you use the Service from outside the United States, you do so on your own initiative and are responsible for compliance with local law. Nothing in this section removes any right you have under mandatory consumer protection law in your country of residence to bring a claim in your local courts or under your local law.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. If a change is material, we will notify you by email or in the app at least 14 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms. If you do not accept, stop using the Service and delete your account. We will keep prior versions available on request at help@essencevault.app.

16. General

Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and the Acceptable Use Policy are the entire agreement between you and ESSENCE regarding the Service.

Severability. If any provision is unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.

No waiver. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, on notice to you.

Force majeure. We are not liable for failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control.

17. Contact

ESSENCE APP LLC 610 W Las Olas Blvd, #513, Fort Lauderdale, FL 33312 help@essencevault.app