Terms and Conditions

Last updated: 29 September 2026

These Terms and Conditions ("Terms") are a legal agreement between you and Apologea ("we", "us", "our") and govern your access to and use of the Apologea website, applications and services (together, the "Service").

By creating an account, browsing the Service or publishing content, you confirm that you have read, understood and accepted these Terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the Service.

How we collect and use personal data is described separately in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

About the Service
Eligibility
Your account
Acceptable use
Your content
Debates, responses and other users
Apologia quota, publishing and payments
Copyright and intellectual property complaints
Third-party services
Availability and changes to the Service
Suspension and termination
Disclaimers
Limitation of liability
Indemnity
Changes to these Terms

1. About the Service

Apologea is a platform for structured, long-form intellectual exchange. It lets you:

read articles, debates and resources published by other people;
respond to a published article with an article of your own, and vote once on a completed debate;
write articles, run debates and keep a library of reusable resources once you hold the publisher role;
upload images to your own media library and reuse them in your writing; and
follow other people and receive notifications about activity that concerns you.

The Service is provided to you for personal, non-commercial use. You may not resell, sublicense or otherwise make the Service available to third parties.

2. Eligibility

To use the Service you must:

be at least 16 years old, or older where your country requires a higher age of digital consent; and
be able to enter into a binding contract with us.

If you use the Service on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to accept these Terms on its behalf.

We ask you to verify your email address before you can publish. Accounts that fail verification may be limited or removed.

3. Your account

3.1 Registration and accuracy

You must provide accurate, current and complete information when you register, and keep it up to date. One person, one account: you may not create accounts to evade a suspension.

3.2 Account security

You are responsible for everything that happens through your account and for keeping your credentials confidential.

3.3 Closing your account

You may close your account at any time. Closing it removes your access to the Service; content you have already published may remain visible where other people have replied to it or where we must keep it for legal reasons, as described in section 11.

4. Acceptable use

Apologea exists for deliberate written argument. Disagreement, including blunt criticism of ideas, is the point. Abuse of the people making the argument is not.

When using the Service you must not:

publish content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, threatening, hateful, sexually explicit, or that incites violence;
impersonate another person or misrepresent your affiliation;
publish another person's private information without their consent;
upload malware, attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Service, other accounts or our infrastructure, or probe, scan or test the security of the Service without our written permission;
scrape, harvest or bulk download content or user data, or use automated means to create accounts, publish content or cast votes;
reverse engineer or copy any part of the Service, or use it to train a machine-learning model on other people's content without their permission;
interfere with the normal operation of the Service, including by overloading it or evading rate limits; or
use the Service to send unsolicited commercial messages.

We may remove content and restrict or end access for conduct that breaches this section, as described in section 11.

5. Your content

5.1 Ownership

You keep all rights you hold in the articles, debate turns, resources, images and profile information you submit ("Your Content"). We do not claim ownership of it.

5.2 License you grant us

To operate the Service we need permission to store, copy, format, transmit and display Your Content. You therefore grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, reproduce, distribute, publish and adapt Your Content solely for the purpose of operating, providing, promoting and improving the Service. This license covers the content you publish publicly, and it ends when you delete Your Content or your account, except:

to the extent copies remain in backups for a limited period; and
for content other people have already replied to or quoted, which stays visible in the form it had when it was answered.

You confirm that you hold all rights needed to grant this license, and that Your Content does not infringe anyone else's rights.

5.3 Your responsibility for what you publish

You are solely responsible for Your Content. Published articles and debate turns are fixed once someone has answered them: you cannot silently rewrite a position that has already been replied to. Do not publish anything you are not prepared to stand behind in writing.

5.4 Moderation

We are not obliged to review content before it is published, but we may review, refuse, hide or remove content that breaches these Terms or the law. We may also preserve content and disclose it where the law requires it.

6. Debates, responses and other users

A debate is issued against a specific person and only begins once they accept it. By accepting, you agree to take your turns in the fixed order and within the time the debate sets out.
Votes on a completed debate are for onlookers only. The two rivals cannot vote in their own debate, and every onlooker has exactly one vote.
You interact with other users at your own risk. We do not endorse, verify or guarantee anything another user publishes, and we are not responsible for their conduct.

7. Apologia quota, publishing and payments

The essentials of how writing credit works:

Item	How it works
Starting balance	5 credits on a new account
Monthly refill	A balance below 5 is restored to 5 at no cost
Top-up bundle	5 credits per bundle, bought through Stripe
Currency	Euros unless stated otherwise at checkout
Refunds	Final, except where the law requires a refund or billing was incorrect

7.1 The quota

Writing is metered by an apologia quota attached to your account:

a new account starts with 5 credits;
when your balance reaches zero, the editor and publishing are unavailable until you top up; and
at the start of each month, a balance below 5 is restored to 5 at no cost.

We may adjust the size, cadence and mechanics of the quota. We will give notice of changes that materially reduce what you already hold.

7.2 Buying credit

You can buy credit through our payment provider, Stripe. A purchase of one bundle adds 5 credits, and the price, currency and any applicable taxes are shown at checkout before you confirm. Credits are added to your account once payment is confirmed. Credits are a usage allowance linked to your account: they have no cash value, are not transferable, and cannot be exchanged or withdrawn.

7.3 Payments and refunds

Prices are shown in Euros unless stated otherwise, and may change in the future. A change never affects a purchase you have already completed.
Payments are processed by Stripe under its own terms. We do not receive or store your full card details.
Purchases of credit are final and non-refundable, except where a refund is required by applicable law, or where you were charged twice for the same purchase or credited incorrectly. Contact us and we will put it right.
If a payment is reversed or disputed after credits were added, we may remove the corresponding credits.

7.4 What your payment supports

Every amount paid for writing credit is used for the maintenance of the platform and to support charity. A payment is not a fee for the right to publish any particular position, and buying credit does not change your rights or your obligations under these Terms.

8. Copyright and intellectual property complaints

The Service, including its software, design, text and trade marks, is owned by us or our licensors and is protected by intellectual property law. Nothing in these Terms transfers those rights to you.

If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright or another intellectual property right, write us with:

a description of the protected work and the exact location of the material you say infringes it;
your name and email address;
a statement that you believe, in good faith, that the use is not authorised by the rights holder, its agent or the law; and
a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the rights holder or are authorised to act for them.

We will review the notice, remove or disable the material where appropriate, and tell the affected user so that they can respond. Repeated infringement leads to account termination.

9. Third-party services

The Service relies on third parties, including hosting, database, payment, email delivery and analytics providers. We are not responsible for the acts, omissions or availability of those providers, and their own terms apply to your use of their services. Our Privacy Policy names the categories of providers with which we share personal data.

10. Availability and changes to the Service

We do not promise that the Service will always be available, uninterrupted or error-free. Access may be interrupted for maintenance, updates, security work, or events outside our control. We may add, change, suspend or discontinue any part of the Service; where a change is material we will give reasonable notice, and you may close your account if you do not accept it.

11. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or end your access, with or without notice, if you breach these Terms, if we must do so to comply with the law, to protect other users or the Service, or if your account is used fraudulently.
You may stop using the Service and close your account at any time.
When your account ends, your license to use the Service ends immediately. Your content stays subject to the license in section 5.2 to the extent described there.
Sections that by their nature should survive termination, including 5, 8, 12, 13, and 14, continue to apply.

12. Disclaimers

The Service is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We are a platform, not a publisher or an adviser. Content published by users is their opinion, not ours. Nothing on the Service is legal, medical, financial or other professional advice, and you should not rely on it as a substitute for professional advice.

We do not warrant that content is accurate, complete or current, or that the Service is free of harmful components.

13. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, revenue, data or goodwill; and
our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or USD 50.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation.

14. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold us, our officers, employees and agents harmless against any claim, loss, liability or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of Your Content, your use of the Service, or your breach of these Terms.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time, for example to reflect new features or new legal requirements. If a change is material we will give reasonable notice, for example by email or by a prominent notice in the Service, before the new Terms take effect. Continuing to use the Service after the effective date means you accept the updated Terms.