Terms of Use

1. Eligibility and Age

You must be at least 18 years of age and able to form a binding contract to use the Service. The Service is not directed to and may not be used by, anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18; if we learn we have, we will delete it. By using the Service you represent that you are at least 18 years of age.

2. What Spiral Is and Is Not

• You are talking to artificial intelligence, not a human. The Service uses generative AI to provide general emotional wellness and self-reflection support through text-based conversation (by SMS text message and through the Spiral app). It does not diagnose, treat or address any specific mental, emotional or behavioral health condition. You are not communicating with a therapist, counselor, physician or any licensed professional.
• The Service is not therapy, not psychotherapy, not medical or mental health care and not a diagnosis or treatment of any condition. It is a wellness and informational support tool.
• No professional relationship is created. Using the Service does not create a therapist-patient, doctor-patient or any professional-client relationship between you and Spiral or between you and any therapist whose communication style and general professional approach may have informed the AI. The AI may reflect a real therapist’s general communication style, but it is not that therapist, does not act on their behalf and does not provide their clinical judgment or care.
• AI outputs can be wrong. The AI can misunderstand you and may produce inaccurate, incomplete or inappropriate responses, including fabricated statements. Do not rely on it for factual, medical, legal, financial, safety-critical or other significant personal or life decisions.
• Not a substitute for care. The Service is not a substitute for professional diagnosis, therapy, counseling, psychiatric care or in-person treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified professional for any health concern.

3. Crisis and Emergency

Spiral operates a safety process that may attempt to detect crisis-related messages and direct you to these resources (see the Spiral Crisis and Safety Protocol), but you must not rely on the Service to detect a crisis, to summon help or to intervene. The AI is not monitored in real time by a clinician and detection is not guaranteed.

4. Accounts and SMS

You register using a mobile phone number. You are responsible for your account and for all activity on it. By enrolling you consent to receive text messages from the Service; message and data rates may apply; message frequency varies; reply STOP to cancel and HELP for help. Consent to receive texts is not a condition of any purchase. Mobile carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. Message delivery is subject to carrier network availability and effective transmission from your carrier. For assistance with text messaging, reply HELP or contact admin@talktospiral.com. Our collection and use of your information, including your phone number and opt-in consent, is described in the Spiral Privacy Policy.

5. Acceptable Use

You agree not to: use the Service for anyone under 18; use it in an emergency in place of 911 or 988; attempt to extract, reverse-engineer or replicate the AI models, training data or any therapist’s persona; impersonate others; use the Service unlawfully, abusively or to harm others; or attempt to make the AI provide diagnosis, treatment, prescriptions or professional advice.

The Service is provided solely for your personal emotional wellness support. You agree not to use it for unrelated purposes, including as a general-purpose assistant or search tool, for automated or bulk querying, to test, benchmark or degrade the Service or to deliberately submit content intended to distort or poison the AI or its training processes. We may limit, suspend or terminate accounts engaged in such use.

6. Your Content

You retain ownership of the messages you send (“User Content”). You grant Spiral a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable license to host, process and use your User Content to operate, secure, personalize and improve the Service and to create de-identified or aggregated data, in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Because your User Content may include information about your mental, emotional or physical health, we treat it as sensitive information and apply the heightened handling and security measures described in our Privacy Policy. Except for the separate, controllable use of your User Content to train and improve our AI systems described below, this operational license ends when you delete your account; de-identified or aggregated data that no longer identifies you, and any content we must retain to comply with law, may survive account deletion as described in the Privacy Policy.

Three specific uses you should know about:

• Safety and fidelity review. Samples of Service conversations are reviewed in de-identified form, with identifying details removed first, to check that outputs are accurate and safe. This review is performed by the licensed therapist whose communication style informs the AI or, if that therapist no longer performs reviews, by Spiral’s own quality and safety monitoring.
• For purposes of these Terms, “de-identified” means information from which direct and indirect identifiers have been removed so that it does not identify, and cannot reasonably be used to identify, you, using methods consistent with recognized de-identification standards (including, where applicable, HIPAA Safe Harbor ). We maintain reasonable measures to prevent re-identification and do not attempt to re-identify de-identified data except as permitted by law to test our de-identification methods.
• Summary sharing, which you control. If you subscribe to that therapist’s AI Persona and turn on summary sharing, your therapist can request a short written summary of your recent Service conversations at any time. Any summary covers a period of at least one week (from the past week up to the full time since you signed up) and never a single day; it is a summary only and never includes your individual messages. You control whether summaries can be requested at all and can turn summary sharing off at any time in settings; if you turn it off, your therapist can no longer request a summary for any period, past or future. Any summary they have not already opened is no longer available to them, though a summary they already requested and viewed stays with them. Summary sharing is only available when your persona is based on a licensed partner therapist; a general Spiral persona is not based on any real therapist and cannot share summaries.
• Support and troubleshooting access. When you ask us for help, report a problem or when we need to investigate a delivery failure, a technical fault, a safety concern or suspected abuse, authorized Spiral personnel may view your account information and the content of the affected conversation in identified form, only to the extent necessary to diagnose and resolve the issue. This access is limited to the people who need it for that purpose, is logged and is not used to train or improve the AI. It is separate from the de-identified safety and fidelity review described above, which stays de-identified.
• Usage overview for your therapist. The licensed therapist whose communication style informs your AI Persona can see general, non-content information about how the people who subscribe to that AI Persona use the Service, such as how many messages are exchanged and over what period, when an account was last active and how long it has been a subscriber. This is activity and engagement information only. Your therapist never sees the content of your conversations through this overview.

AI training, which you control. Separately from operating the Service, we use your User Content to train and improve our AI systems. This use is on by default. Your acceptance of these Terms and our Privacy Policy is your consent to this use, including wherever applicable law requires consent. Identifying details are removed from your User Content before it is used for AI training, as described in our Privacy Policy. You can turn this use off at any time in settings and turning it off does not affect your ability to use the Service. If you turn it off, we stop using your User Content for new AI training; models and de-identified or aggregated data already created cannot be reversed. Turning off AI training does not change how de-identified or aggregated data that does not identify you is used, as described in our Privacy Policy.

7. Subscriptions and Billing

Certain features of the Service require a paid subscription.

• What you agree to. Before you purchase, we show you the price of your plan, the billing cycle, the fact that the subscription renews automatically and the amount that will be charged on renewal. By completing the purchase you affirmatively consent to automatic renewal on those terms and authorize us and our payment processor to charge your payment method the then-current fee, plus applicable taxes, on a recurring basis in U.S. dollars. Unless you cancel, your subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period and the then-current fee is charged to your payment method.
• How to cancel. You can cancel at any time through the subscription management option in your account settings, without speaking to anyone; cancellation is processed promptly and takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and you keep access until then. If we ever offer you a pause, discount or similar option when you go to cancel, that option never replaces, delays or obstructs your ability to complete the cancellation.
• Texting STOP is not cancellation. Replying STOP to a text stops text messages from the Service, but it does not cancel your paid subscription. To cancel, use your account settings as described above.
• Changes and refunds. We will give you at least fourteen (14) days advance notice of any price increase or other material change to your subscription terms, in a form you can retain, and the change will apply only to billing periods after the notice. Except where required by law, fees are non-refundable. If your plan term is one year or longer, we will send you a reminder of the renewal terms and how to cancel before each renewal.

8. Third-Party Services

The Service relies on third-party service providers, including SMS carriers, cloud hosting and data storage providers, AI infrastructure providers and payment processors. These providers act as our service providers or subprocessors, and their handling of your information is described in our Privacy Policy and subject to the safeguards described there. Your use of certain features may also be subject to the separate terms and policies of the applicable third party, including your mobile carrier, app store and payment processor, and you are responsible for complying with them.

We do not control, endorse or assume responsibility for third-party services, including their availability, acts, omissions, changes to their services or their handling of data outside our control. Because the Service depends on these providers, a third-party interruption, change or failure may delay, degrade or interrupt the Service, and any charges from your carrier or other third parties are your responsibility. This does not limit the “as is” and “as available” disclaimer in the Disclaimer of Warranties Section.

9. Intellectual Property

The Service, including its software, AI systems and models and all content we provide (excluding your User Content), is owned by Spiral or its licensors and protected by intellectual property law. We grant you a limited, revocable, non-transferable license to use the Service for your personal, non-commercial use under these Terms.

10. Disclaimer of Warranties

11. Assumption of Risk

You understand the nature and limits of an AI wellness tool as described in Sections 2 and 3 and you choose to use the Service at your own risk with that understanding.

12. Limitation of Liability

13. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold Spiral harmless from third-party claims arising out of your misuse of the Service or your breach of these Terms.

14. Termination

You may stop receiving text messages at any time by replying STOP; as described in the Subscriptions and Billing Section, this stops texts but does not cancel a paid subscription. To delete your account, use the account deletion option in the app where available or email admin@talktospiral.com. Our handling and retention of data after deletion is described in the Privacy Policy. We may suspend or terminate access for any violation of these Terms or to protect the Service or users. Sections 6 (Your Content), 9 (Intellectual Property), 10 (Disclaimer of Warranties), 11 (Assumption of Risk), 12 (Limitation of Liability), 13 (Indemnification), 15 (Dispute Resolution) and 16 (Governing Law) and any other provision which by its terms or nature is intended to survive, survive termination.

15. Dispute Resolution: Arbitration and Class Action Waiver

ANY DISPUTE BETWEEN YOU AND SPIRAL WILL BE RESOLVED BY BINDING INDIVIDUAL ARBITRATION ADMINISTERED BY JAMS UNDER ITS RULES APPLICABLE TO CONSUMER DISPUTES AND ITS CONSUMER MINIMUM STANDARDS OF PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS, NOT IN COURT. YOUR FILING FEE WILL NOT EXCEED THE AMOUNT SET BY THOSE STANDARDS; SPIRAL PAYS THE REMAINING COSTS OF THE ARBITRATION AS THEY REQUIRE. YOU AND SPIRAL WAIVE THE RIGHT TO A JURY TRIAL AND THE RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION OR CLASS ARBITRATION.

NOTWITHSTANDING THE FOREGOING, EITHER PARTY MAY (A) BRING AN INDIVIDUAL CLAIM IN SMALL CLAIMS COURT IF IT QUALIFIES AND (B) SEEK TEMPORARY OR PRELIMINARY INJUNCTIVE RELIEF IN A COURT OF COMPETENT JURISDICTION TO PREVENT ACTUAL OR THREATENED INFRINGEMENT, MISAPPROPRIATION OR VIOLATION OF A PARTY’S INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OR CONFIDENTIALITY RIGHTS, WITHOUT WAIVING THE RIGHT TO ARBITRATE THE REMAINING CLAIMS.

YOU MAY OPT OUT OF THIS ARBITRATION AGREEMENT WITHIN 30 DAYS OF FIRST ACCEPTING THESE TERMS BY EMAILING admin@talktospiral.com WITH YOUR NAME, THE PHONE NUMBER OR EMAIL ON YOUR SPIRAL ACCOUNT AND A STATEMENT THAT YOU ARE OPTING OUT OF ARBITRATION. OPTING OUT WILL NOT AFFECT ANY OTHER PART OF THESE TERMS.

16. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of Pennsylvania, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules, except where a consumer protection law of your home state applies and cannot be waived.

17. Changes; Miscellaneous; Contact

We may update these Terms; we will post the new date and, for material changes, provide notice. Continued use after notice means acceptance. These Terms are the entire agreement between us on this subject. If any provision is unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.

Questions: admin@talktospiral.com or Time Machine Automation LLC, 3706 Butler Street, Suite 208, Pittsburgh, PA 15201.

Cross-references: Spiral Privacy Policy; Spiral End-User Informed Consent Acknowledgment; Spiral Crisis and Safety Protocol.