Terms of Service

1. Who We Are and How These Documents Fit Together

mindate is operated by mindate Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17202076, with its registered office at [to be added]. You can reach us about these Terms at support@mindate.app, or about anything legal at legal@mindate.app. “The App” means the mindate iOS application; “the Service” means the App and everything we provide through it. A “Subscription” is a paid plan you buy through the Apple App Store. “Content” is anything shown in the Service, and “User Content” is the part you create — your profile text, the answers you give, and your messages. mindate runs on three documents, and they work together: these Terms set the rules for using the Service; the Privacy Policy explains what we do with your personal data; and the Community Guidelines spell out how to behave. If they ever genuinely conflict, the Privacy Policy governs your personal data, the Community Guidelines govern conduct, and these Terms govern everything else. The App is supplied to you through the Apple App Store. Apple is not a party to these Terms — these Terms are between you and us, and we, not Apple, are responsible for the App and for supporting you (see “Apple’s Role and Third-Party Links”).

2. You Must Be 18 or Over

mindate is strictly for adults. You must be at least 18 years old, and by using the Service you confirm that you are 18 or over and legally able to enter into this contract. There are no exceptions. We do not rely on you simply ticking a box: we check age at sign-up against the date of birth you give us, and our liveness and face check helps confirm you are a real, present adult. If we have reasonable grounds to believe an account belongs to someone under 18 — from their stated age, our checks, a report, or any other signal — we will suspend the account, delete it and its data, and keep only the minimum needed to stop the same person re-registering. This is how we meet our duties under the Online Safety Act 2023 to keep children off an adult service. How we handle age-assurance data, and how long we keep it, is set out in the Privacy Policy; we do not keep it longer than we need to.

3. Your Account, Identity and Security

To use mindate you create one account, and only one. It is personal to you — you cannot share it, sell it, or transfer it to anyone else, and you must be a real individual acting for yourself, not a company, agency or bot. The information you give us must be accurate and honest: misrepresenting your age, identity or who you are is a breach of these Terms and undermines the whole point of mindate. You are responsible for keeping your sign-in secure and your device safe. Tell us at support@mindate.app as soon as you can if you think someone has accessed your account without permission. You can close your account at any time from within the App (see “Ending Your Subscription or Account”); what happens to your data when you do is explained in the Privacy Policy.

4. How mindate Works — and What We Don’t Promise

mindate matches people on personality before appearance. You answer questions that place you on a set of “wavelength” dimensions, and we suggest people whose answers line up with yours. Photos stay blurred to a match until you have both earned the reveal — roughly twenty meaningful conversations in — which is a deliberate choice to let minds meet first. Chat is text only: no one can send a photo or file in a conversation, ever. We give you the platform and the tools, and we will run them with reasonable care and skill (see “Our Quality Promises”). What we honestly cannot promise is an outcome. We do not guarantee any matches, dates, relationships, or that compatible people exist near you at any given time, and we cannot guarantee how other people will behave or that everyone is exactly who they say they are. We verify that users are real, live people and that their photos are genuinely them — that is real and meaningful — but it is not a criminal background check, and we do not represent it as one. Please use the same good sense you would meeting anyone new, and take care when deciding whether and how to meet someone in person.

5. Subscriptions, Prices and Apple Billing

mindate offers four tiers, including a free tier and paid tiers that unlock more of the Service. The current tiers, exactly what each one includes, and the full price including VAT are shown in the App on the App Store purchase screen before you confirm — we show the total you will pay up front, with no surprise add-ons. We don’t list prices here because the App Store is always the live, accurate source. Paid Subscriptions are billed by Apple through your Apple ID. Apple is the merchant of record: we never see or store your card details, we cannot take payment ourselves, and we cannot directly cancel or change an Apple-billed Subscription on your behalf. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period at the price shown (or a new price we have properly notified to you) unless you turn off auto-renewal at least 24 hours before the period ends. You manage and cancel a Subscription in your Apple ID settings (Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions). If we ever offer a free trial, we will show you its length, the price when it converts to paid, and your cancellation deadline before you start. We will give you advance notice of any price change, and you can cancel before it takes effect if you do not accept it.

6. Your 14-Day Cancellation Right and Starting Straight Away

As a consumer buying at a distance, you have a statutory right to cancel within 14 days, starting the day after your Subscription contract is made — this is the legal cooling-off period. A mindate Subscription is a service: you are paying for ongoing access to the features of your tier, delivered over the period you have paid for. Paid features become available the moment you subscribe, so by buying a Subscription you expressly ask us to begin supplying the service straight away, during the 14-day period. Asking us to start early does not take your cancellation right away. If you cancel within the 14 days after asking us to start, you keep your right to cancel; we will simply charge you a fair, proportionate amount for the part of the service already supplied up to the moment you cancel, and refund the rest. Your 14-day right ends only once the service has been fully performed. None of this removes your other consumer rights, and it does not affect your right to a remedy if something is faulty (see “Our Quality Promises”). Because Apple takes the payment, any refund of an App Store charge is requested through Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com, and Apple’s refund policy applies to that charge. But we remain the trader you contracted with, so if you want to exercise a statutory cancellation right, you can also contact us at legal@mindate.app — including by a clear statement such as “I cancel my mindate subscription contract” with your account details — and we will deal with it properly.

• To cancel future renewals: turn off auto-renewal in your Apple ID settings.
• To request a refund of an App Store charge: reportaproblem.apple.com.
• To exercise a statutory cancellation right with us as the trader: email legal@mindate.app.

7. Your Licence to Use the App

We give you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable licence to use the App on a device you own or control, for its intended purpose and in line with these Terms and the Apple App Store usage rules. Please do not copy, sell, rent out, scrape, reverse-engineer, decompile or tamper with the App, build derivative works from it, or try to defeat the liveness check, the moderation tools, the matching system or the photo reveal — except for the narrow things the law says you are always allowed to do (such as limited decompilation rights you cannot be signed out of). This licence is between you and us, not Apple, and Apple may enforce the App Store licence terms against you as a third-party beneficiary.

8. Your Content, and the Permission You Give Us

You own what you create on mindate — your profile text, your answers, and your messages. To run the Service, we need your permission to handle that content, so you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, adapt and display your User Content, but only as far as we need to operate, secure, moderate and improve mindate. This licence is deliberately narrow: we will not use your messages, profile or anything you share in advertising or external marketing without your separate, clear consent. The licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for limited copies we must keep for moderation or legal reasons, as described in the Privacy Policy. You promise that what you post is yours to share, does not break the law or infringe anyone’s rights, and follows our Community Guidelines — and you agree we can review and remove content that does not. Your messages and any images are personal data, and some of what a dating profile reveals is sensitive, so we handle all of it under the Privacy Policy.

9. Acceptable Use and the Community Guidelines

mindate only works if people feel safe, so our Community Guidelines are part of these Terms and are binding on you. In short, you must not harass, threaten or stalk anyone; post hate speech or unlawful, abusive or harmful content; send sexual content to someone who has not welcomed it (sending unsolicited explicit images can be a criminal offence); solicit money, gifts, investments or sex; impersonate anyone or run scams or grooming; share another person’s private information; spam; or use bots or automation. The Community Guidelines set this out in full. If you break these rules we may remove content, restrict features, suspend or remove your account, and where the law requires it we will report illegal activity to the authorities. You can report or block another user at any time from within the App; we treat reports confidentially and do not tell someone who reported them.

10. Suspension, Termination and Appeals

You can close your account at any time from within the App. We may suspend or end your access too, and we try to be fair about how. For serious matters — illegal content, a genuine risk to someone’s safety, fraud, or where the law requires it — we may act immediately and without prior notice. For less serious breaches we will normally give you reasonable notice and a chance to put things right first. When an account ends, your licence to use the App stops and you lose access to the Service and your content within it. If you have a paid Subscription, ending your mindate account does not by itself cancel your Apple Subscription — you still need to turn that off in your Apple ID settings — and any refund for an Apple-billed period is handled by Apple. If you think we got a moderation or termination decision wrong, you can appeal it by emailing support@mindate.app, and a person will review it.

11. Our Quality Promises (Your Statutory Rights)

You have rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that we cannot and do not take away. The App, as digital content, will be of satisfactory quality, fit for its purpose, and as we have described it. The dating service we provide will be carried out with reasonable care and skill. If the App is faulty, you are entitled to the statutory remedies — which can include having it repaired or replaced and, where appropriate, a price reduction — and if faulty digital content we supply damages your device or other content, you have a remedy for that too. These rights sit alongside everything else in these Terms, and nothing here reduces them. The “no guarantee of matches” point in section 4 is about outcomes we genuinely cannot control; it does not water down these quality promises in any way.

12. Liability — What We Can and Can’t Limit

We want to be straight about this rather than hide behind boilerplate. Some liability can never be excluded, and we do not try to: we remain fully liable for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for your non-excludable statutory consumer rights (including the quality and care promises above), and for anything else the law says cannot be limited. Subject to that, and because mindate is a consumer service used for personal reasons, we are not liable for business losses, lost profits, lost opportunity or goodwill, or for losses that were not reasonably foreseeable when you started using the Service. Where our liability can lawfully be limited, our total liability to you for claims connected with these Terms or the Service in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for your Subscription in that period and £100 — except, again, for the liabilities above that cannot be limited. Nothing in this section limits our liability where it would be unlawful to do so, and none of it affects your statutory rights.

13. Apple’s Role and Third-Party Links

Apple operates the App Store and bills your Subscription, but Apple is not responsible for the App or its content. We — not Apple — are responsible for the App and for providing support and for any warranty claims about it; if the App does not work as it should, contact us at support@mindate.app, not Apple. The one exception is App Store billing itself, which Apple handles. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of the App Store licence terms and may enforce them against you. The Service may sometimes link to third-party websites or services we do not control; we are not responsible for them, and your use of them is at your own risk and subject to their terms.

14. Complaints and Resolving Disputes

If something has gone wrong, please tell us first — most things we can sort out quickly. Email support@mindate.app and we will acknowledge your complaint and aim to respond within 30 days. We operate an internal process for complaints, including appeals against moderation or account decisions, and you can raise safety concerns through the reporting tools in the App. We are not currently signed up to an alternative dispute resolution (ADR) scheme, so we do not refer disputes to an ADR provider; if that changes we will say so here. You can also get free, independent consumer advice from Citizens Advice (citizensadvice.org.uk). None of this affects your right to take a matter to court, and none of it affects your statutory rights.

15. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time — for example as the Service grows or the law changes. For any material change we will give you advance notice by a clear, durable method, such as an in-app notice or email, with the effective date and a reasonable notice period before it applies. If you have a Subscription and do not accept a material change, you can cancel before it takes effect; where money is owed back for a period you have paid for but will not use, a refund is handled through Apple for App Store charges. We will not make unfair, unannounced changes to the core deal. Minor changes that do not affect your rights — fixing a typo, clarifying wording, updating a contact detail — may be made without separate notice, and the current version always lives here with its version number and date.

16. Governing Law and Where You Can Bring a Claim

These Terms, and any dispute arising out of them or the Service, are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. But if you are a consumer living elsewhere in the UK, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory consumer-law rules of the part of the UK where you live, and you keep the right to bring proceedings in your local courts. We are not trying to push you into an inconvenient forum or strip away protections you are entitled to.

17. Privacy and Your Data (See the Privacy Policy)

How we handle your personal data is governed by the mindate Privacy Policy, which is part of this agreement. A dating service necessarily touches sensitive information — for example, details that reveal your sexual orientation are special category data under UK data protection law, and we process those only with your explicit consent or another lawful basis, as the Privacy Policy explains. Your liveness data and face-hash are biometric data, and we process them only with your explicit consent, given at sign-up, exactly as set out in the Privacy Policy. We keep the substantive data terms in the Privacy Policy rather than buried here, and nothing in these Terms overrides it. To exercise your data-protection rights — such as asking for a copy of your data, correction, or deletion — please contact privacy@mindate.app, which is the dedicated route in the Privacy Policy; if the two ever conflict on a question of personal data, the Privacy Policy wins.

18. A Few Final Points

These housekeeping terms keep everything tidy.

• Entire agreement — these Terms, the Privacy Policy and the Community Guidelines are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service.
• Severability — if any part is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force.
• No waiver — if we don’t enforce a right straight away, we haven’t given it up.
• Assignment — you can’t transfer your rights without our consent; we may transfer ours on reasonable notice, for example in a reorganisation or sale, without reducing your rights.
• Third parties — apart from Apple’s specific rights mentioned above, no one other than you and mindate Ltd can enforce these Terms.
• Contact — general support: support@mindate.app; contract and legal notices: legal@mindate.app; data-protection and privacy requests: privacy@mindate.app; operator: mindate Ltd, registered in England and Wales (company number 17202076), registered office [to be added].