The basics of using Patternarium.

Thank you for using Patternarium. These Terms of Service explain the rules of the road for using the website and the application. We have tried to keep them readable.

When we say “Company,” “Patternarium,” “we,” “our,” or “us,” we mean Plague Inc, doing business as Patternarium. When we say the “Service,” we mean the Patternarium website, the iOS application, and the application as a whole. When we say “you” or “your,” we mean the person or organization that owns or uses a Patternarium account.

We may update these Terms in the future. When you use the Service, now or in the future, you are agreeing to the latest Terms. If we ever choose not to enforce a right or provision, that is not a waiver of that right or provision. These Terms do contain a limitation of our liability.

If you violate these Terms, we may suspend or terminate your account. That is a broad statement and it means you need to place some trust in us. We try to deserve that trust by being clear about how Patternarium works and by keeping an open door to your feedback.

Account Terms

1. You are responsible for keeping your account credentials secure. Patternarium cannot and will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by a failure to do so.
2. You may not use the Service for anything illegal, abusive, harassing, fraudulent, or designed to interfere with the Service's normal operation. You may not attempt to gain access to accounts or data that do not belong to you, probe for vulnerabilities for reasons other than reporting them in good faith, or use the Service to distribute malware.
3. You are responsible for all content you submit to the Service and for all activity that occurs under your account.
4. You must be a human. Accounts created by automated means are not permitted.
5. You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. By creating an account you confirm you meet this minimum age requirement. If we learn an account belongs to a user under 13, we will close it and delete the associated personal data.

Payment, Refunds, and Plan Changes

1. Patternarium offers a free Starter plan and a paid Pro plan. The free Starter plan is genuinely free — we do not ask you for a credit card, and we do not sell your data.
2. Current Pro pricing is always shown on our pricing page before you are charged. If you upgrade from a free plan to a paid plan, we will charge your card immediately and your billing cycle begins on the day of upgrade. For other changes in plan level, the new rate begins from the next billing cycle.
3. Paid orders are processed by our reseller Paddle, which acts as Merchant of Record. Paddle handles the transaction, applicable taxes, billing inquiries, and refund processing.
4. You may request a full refund on any Patternarium Pro purchase within 14 days of the date of that purchase, for any reason. To request one, contact us and Paddle, our Merchant of Record, will process the refund to your original payment method. The full details live in our Refund Policy.

Cancellation and Termination

1. You are responsible for canceling your own subscription when you are ready to stop. We provide a no-questions-asked cancellation path inside your account. If you need help canceling, please contact our support team.
2. After canceling a paid subscription, you keep access to the paid features through the end of the current billing cycle. After that, your account reverts to the free tier (where applicable) or becomes inactive.
3. We reserve the right to suspend or terminate any account, refuse service, and remove or refuse content for any reason at any time. We do not exercise this lightly, but we have it because there are uses we will not enable.
4. Verbal, physical, written, or other abuse — including threats — directed at Patternarium staff will result in immediate account termination.

Modifications to the Service and Prices

1. Patternarium is being actively developed. Features may be added, changed, redesigned, or removed at any time. We will give reasonable notice for changes that meaningfully affect how you use the Service.
2. Pricing structures may change. When that happens, we typically honor existing customers' current rates and give at least 30 days notice for any pricing change that affects them, sent to the email address on file.

Uptime, Security, and Privacy

1. Your use of the Service is at your sole risk. We provide the Service on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We do not offer service-level agreements during the beta period, but we work to keep Patternarium reliable.
2. We may temporarily limit account activity that significantly exceeds the usage of other users, if that activity is degrading the Service for everyone else. Where time allows, we will reach out before taking action.
3. We use modern security practices to protect your data — encrypted connections in transit, password hashing handled by our authentication provider, row-level access rules that gate each record to its owner, and regular updates to our dependencies.
4. When you use the Service, you trust us with your data. You agree that we may process that data as described in our Privacy Policy, and not for any other purpose. We rely on a small set of third-party subprocessors to actually run the Service; those are listed in the Privacy Policy.

Copyright and Content Ownership

1. The content you submit to the Service — your pattern records, photographs, measurements, notes, and other catalog details — remains yours. You grant us a limited license to store, display, process, and operate on that content as needed to provide the Service back to you (for example, to display your collection, run the optional AI-assisted scan, or generate exports).
2. When you photograph commercial pattern envelopes and instruction sheets and store them in your private collection, you are responsible for ensuring your use complies with applicable copyright law. Patternarium is designed for personal, non-commercial organization of patterns you own; nothing in this Service grants you the right to commercially redistribute third-party pattern designs.
3. We do not pre-screen content, but we reserve the right (and not the obligation) to remove content that is illegal, infringing, or violates these Terms.
4. Patternarium owns the website, the application, the brand, and the original design, code, and visual elements of the Service. You may not duplicate, copy, scrape, or reuse any portion of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or visual design without our written permission. The Patternarium name and logo may not be used for promotional purposes without permission.
5. You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell, or exploit any portion of the Service or access to the Service without our written permission.

Features and Bugs

We design Patternarium with care, based on our own experience as pattern collectors and on feedback from the people who use it. However, there is no such thing as a service that pleases everyone. We make no guarantee that the Service will meet your specific requirements or expectations.

We also test features before shipping them. As with any software, Patternarium will have bugs. We track reported issues and work through them in order of impact, prioritizing anything related to security, privacy, or data loss. Not every bug will be fixed and we do not guarantee an error-free Service.

Liability

We mention liability throughout these Terms but to put it all in one place:

You expressly understand and agree that Patternarium shall not be liable, in law or in equity, to you or to any third party for any direct, indirect, incidental, lost profits, special, consequential, punitive, or exemplary damages, including but not limited to damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data, or other intangible losses (even if Patternarium has been advised of the possibility of such damages), resulting from: (i) the use or the inability to use the Service; (ii) the cost of obtaining substitute goods or services as a result of any data, information, or services purchased or obtained or transactions entered into through the Service; (iii) unauthorized access to or alteration of your transmissions or data; (iv) statements or conduct of any third party on or in connection with the Service; or (v) any other matter relating to these Terms or the Service, whether framed as breach of contract, tort (including negligence whether active or passive), or any other theory of liability.

In plain English: choosing to use the Service means making a bet on us. If the bet does not work out, that is on you. We do our best to be a safe bet — careful management of the business, investment in security and infrastructure, and caring deeply about what we are building. If you choose to use the Service, thank you for trusting us with your collection.

Contact

Questions about these Terms? Please get in touch — we read every message.