1. Who we are
StoryStepper is a serialised-fiction service operated by StoryStepper Limited ("StoryStepper," "we," "us"), a company incorporated in Hong Kong. When you use the website, the mobile app, or any related service (the "Service"), you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.
2. Your account
- You must be at least 18 years old to create an account.
- You are responsible for keeping your login credentials safe. You are responsible for activity on your account.
- One account per person. You may not share accounts, sell accounts, or impersonate someone else.
- We may suspend or close an account that violates these Terms, harms other readers, or is used to abuse the Service.
3. Your story, your prompts, your choices
Everything you enter into StoryStepper — the kind of story you ask for, the name you give the protagonist, the choices you make in each chapter — belongs to you. We do not sell it. We do not show it to other readers. We do not use it to train third-party models.
We do need a limited, non-exclusive licence to your inputs so we can actually run the Service for you: store your story, generate the next chapter, send the morning email, surface your reading circle to the people you invited. That licence ends when you delete the content.
Generated chapters and posters
The chapters and posters StoryStepper generates from your prompts are yours: to the extent we hold any rights in them, we assign those rights to you when the content is created. In return, you agree not to resell generated content, package it as a competing product, or present the underlying model or our writing system as your own work. Personal use — reading, saving, printing, sharing with people you care about, quoting — is always fine.
4. Our intellectual property
The Service itself belongs to us. The StoryStepper name and logo, the apps and the website, our editorial and writing system, the design, and all software and content we created are the property of StoryStepper Limited or its licensors, protected by copyright, trademark, and other intellectual-property laws. These Terms give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the app and website to enjoy the Service — nothing more. They do not give you the right to copy, modify, distribute, sell, or lease any part of the Service, or to use the StoryStepper name or logo, without our written permission.
If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may use them to improve the Service without any obligation to you — though we will probably say thank you.
5. AI disclosure
StoryStepper's prose is written by a large language model, guided by editorial rules and a writing system our team built — pacing, continuity, voice, style. We do not hide this. We try to make it the kind of AI writing that's actually worth reading.
Because the model is statistical, chapters may occasionally contain factual mistakes, plot inconsistencies, or sentences you wouldn't have chosen. The character poster, when you generate one, is also model-produced. Treat all generated content as fiction.
6. Subscriptions
- Every story starts with free chapters. The current number of free chapters is shown in the app (at the time of writing, the first two).
- After that, the daily chapter is unlocked by a monthly or yearly subscription. The exact price is shown to you before you confirm.
- Subscriptions auto-renew at the end of each billing period unless you cancel beforehand. You can cancel at any time from the account settings (web), from link.com, or from your platform's subscription manager (App Store, Google Play). Cancelling stops the next renewal; you keep access until the end of the period you paid for.
- Refunds and withdrawal rights are described in section 8.
7. Payments and merchant of record
How your payment is handled depends on where you subscribe or buy:
- On the web, payments are handled by Stripe Managed Payments, and Link (a Stripe service) acts as the merchant of record for those purchases. Your purchase appears as Sold through Link, and your bank statement shows
LINK.COM*followed by our descriptor. This means Link completes the sale to you: it processes your payment and is responsible for calculating, collecting, and remitting applicable indirect taxes (such as VAT, GST, or sales tax) in the countries it covers, and for payment-related compliance. Stripe's and Link's own payment terms apply to the transaction alongside these Terms. We never see your full card number. - In the iOS app, purchases go through Apple's App Store, and Apple is the merchant of record.
- In the Android app, purchases go through Google Play, and Google is the merchant of record.
Prices shown in the app are exclusive of tax. Any VAT, GST, or sales tax that applies to your location is calculated and added at checkout, and the full price, currency, and billing period are always shown to you before you confirm. Checkout may also present the price converted into your local currency.
Web purchases are not available in every country. Link does not currently support customers in China, Russia, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Kosovo, Ascension Island, or Tristan da Cunha.
8. Refunds
- Purchases through Apple: refunds are handled by Apple under Apple's refund policy — request one at reportaproblem.apple.com.
- Purchases through Google Play: refunds are handled by Google under the Google Play refund policy.
- Purchases on the web (Link): because Link is the merchant of record, refund requests go to Link support, which can issue refunds within 60 days of the original transaction. You can also write to [email protected] and we will arrange it. Approved refunds are returned to your original payment method and include any tax you paid.
- EU/UK right of withdrawal: if you are a consumer in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you have a 14-day right to withdraw from a purchase made on the web. As merchant of record, Link applies the statutory cooling-off rules that apply where you live. For subscriptions, you may withdraw within 14 days of purchase and receive a refund, less a proportionate amount for the service already supplied.
- Managing web purchases: your order history, subscription, payment method, and billing address for web purchases are managed at link.com. Receipts, invoices, and renewal reminders are sent to you directly by Link.
- Ember refunds are covered in section 9.
Nothing in this section limits the statutory consumer-protection rights you have in your country. If local law gives you a stronger refund right than this section, local law wins.
9. Embers
Embers are a small in-app currency used for optional rituals — generating a character poster, lighting an episode early, and a few other things we may add. Embers are not money: they have no cash value, cannot be exchanged for real currency, and cannot be transferred between accounts.
- You receive a welcome grant of embers when you sign up, and we may grant more from time to time. Current amounts are shown in the app.
- You can also buy embers. The price is shown before you confirm, and payment is handled by the payment provider shown at checkout.
- Embers do not expire while your account is open.
- Granted (free) embers are not refundable.
- Purchased embers: unspent purchased embers are refundable where consumer law requires it (see section 8, Refunds); spent embers are not.
- If we close your account for a serious Terms violation, granted embers are forfeited. We will refund unspent purchased embers unless the law permits us not to.
- If you delete your account, any remaining ember balance — granted or purchased — is forfeited and cannot be restored, refunded, or transferred, except where the law requires otherwise. The deletion screen reminds you of this before you confirm.
10. Reading circles
A Reading Circle is a private group of up to six people you choose to read along with your story. The host (you) controls who is in the circle and what choice is made each chapter. Members can read the chapters you have unlocked, but cannot edit your story or take it with them when they leave.
Anyone you invite must be at least 18 and must accept the invitation. You are responsible for who you invite. We may remove members who are abusive, or close a circle that is being misused.
11. Acceptable use
Do not use StoryStepper to:
- Generate sexual content involving minors, real-world violence against identifiable people, or material that is illegal in your country.
- Impersonate a real, identifiable person without their consent.
- Infringe someone else's intellectual-property or privacy rights — for example, by feeding in someone else's unpublished work as your own story input.
- Attempt to extract, copy, or reverse-engineer the underlying model or our editorial system.
- Probe the Service for vulnerabilities, scrape it, upload malicious code, or run automated requests at a rate that affects other readers.
- Circumvent payment, free-chapter limits, or ember accounting, or buy, sell, or transfer accounts or embers outside the Service.
- Send spam or unsolicited advertising through reading-circle invitations or messages.
- Use the Service to harass, threaten, or harm another person.
We may remove content, suspend accounts, or close circles that break these rules; section 12 explains how termination works.
If you find a security issue, please write to [email protected] — we will thank you, not sue you.
12. Termination
You can close your account at any time from settings. When you do, your stories, chapters, posters, and circles are deleted from active systems within 30 days. Backups are purged within a further 30 days. Any remaining embers, granted or purchased, are forfeited when your account is deleted (see section 9).
We may suspend or terminate access if you materially breach these Terms, if your account is used fraudulently, or if we are required to by law. Where possible, we will tell you what happened and give you a chance to respond.
13. Service availability and disclaimers
We work hard to keep StoryStepper running reliably, but we offer the Service "as is". We do not promise that the Service will be uninterrupted, that every chapter will arrive precisely at dawn, or that the prose will please every reader on every morning.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, StoryStepper is not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages. Our total liability to you for any claim arising from the Service is capped at the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose.
Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law — for example, liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
14. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms when the Service changes, the law changes, or we find a clearer way to say something. If a change is material — for example, affecting subscriptions or your rights — we will tell you by email and inside the app at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you do not agree, you can cancel and close your account before the change applies.
15. Governing law
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. If you are a consumer resident in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or another jurisdiction with mandatory consumer-protection rules, you also have the protections of those rules — these Terms do not take them away.
Disputes that cannot be resolved by writing to us first will be heard by the competent courts of your country of residence (where local law requires) or, otherwise, by the courts of Hong Kong.
16. General
- Severability: if part of these Terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies.
- Entire agreement: these Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy, are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service.
- Assignment: you may not transfer your rights under these Terms to someone else. We may transfer ours to a successor of the business, who must honour them.
- No waiver: if we do not enforce a clause today, we can still enforce it tomorrow.
- App stores: if you downloaded the app from the Apple App Store or Google Play, these Terms are between you and us — not with Apple or Google. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and may enforce them against you; Apple has no obligation to provide maintenance or support for the app.
17. Contact
Write to us at [email protected]. We read every message. We answer the ones that need answering.