Terms of service

These terms are the agreement between you and fencepost, governing your use of the fencepost website and web application (together “the Service”). fencepost is operated as a sole trade by an individual based in Ireland (“fencepost,” “we,” “us”). By creating an account you accept these terms.

1. What fencepost is

fencepost is an eight-week, self-guided digital reflection program for adults thinking about whether to have children. Each week presents short prompts and exercises that you complete in your own time, on your own device. The Service stores your answers so you can return to them, lets you optionally share your answers with a single chosen partner (a friend, family member, or romantic partner you invite), and lets you optionally ask an AI assistant for a reflection question on individual exercises.

fencepost is an educational and personal-reflection product. It is not therapy, not counselling, not psychotherapy, not medical care, not a diagnostic tool, and not a substitute for advice from a qualified mental-health professional. See Section 11.

2. Validation phase: free access, no charge

fencepost is currently in a free validation phase. All eight weeks of content are accessible at no cost to anyone who creates an account. There is no subscription, no auto-renewal, no payment, no charge to your card, and no obligation to pay anything later.

We are open about why the Service is free right now: we want to know whether the program is genuinely useful to people before asking them to pay for it. When we have enough evidence to make that judgement, we plan to re-open fencepost as a paid product with continued content and additional features. We will not change the terms or pricing of any existing free account without notice; existing accounts that have completed the program during the free phase will keep lifetime free accessto v1 whatever happens next. We’ll publish updated terms covering payment, refunds, and consumer-protection rights at that time, and we’ll notify existing users by email before any change takes effect.

If you’d like a heads-up when paid access becomes available, you can leave your email on the waitlist page. Adding yourself to the waitlist is not a purchase, a pre-order, or any other kind of commitment.

3. Who can use the Service

You may use the Service if you are at least 18 years old and able to enter into a binding contract under the laws of your country. The Service is designed for individuals; we do not support organisational, team, or shared-credential accounts.

The Service is not appropriate for people who are currently in acute psychological crisis, who are at imminent risk of harming themselves or others, or who are being actively treated for a mental-health condition where their care provider has advised against this kind of self-guided work. If that describes you, please speak to your care provider before using fencepost, and please consult the resources on our crisis support page if you need immediate help.

4. Your account

You sign in by entering your email address; we send a one-time magic link to that address. You are responsible for keeping access to your email account secure, since anyone with access to it can request a magic link and sign in as you. Do not forward your magic links. We will never ask you for a password, because there is no password.

You may have only one account at a time, and each account belongs to a single individual. Sharing one account between two people would also break the partnership feature, which is designed for two distinct accounts.

Before any of your exercise responses are stored, we ask you to give three separate consents (terms acceptance, journal-storage consent, and an optional AI-reflection consent). These consents and their timestamps are recorded on your account; you can review them and, for the AI consent, change it at any time from settings.

5. Your content and what you own

You own everything you write in the program: your exercise responses, the journal-style entries, the answers your partner might see. We do not claim ownership over your responses, we do not republish them, and we do not sell them. We do not use your responses (or any other data you produce on the Service) to train AI models, ours or anyone else’s.

We do need a narrow licence to operate the Service on your behalf: you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, revocable licence to host, store, display, transmit, and process your content solely to provide the Service to you and your chosen partner. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account.

The program itself (the structure, the exercises, the wording of prompts, the visual design, and the underlying code) is owned by fencepost. You may not copy, redistribute, or build a derivative product from the program content without our written permission. You may, of course, share your own answers with anyone you like, and you may quote short excerpts of the program in conversation, a personal journal, or a review.

6. The partnership feature

The Service lets you invite one other person to work through the program alongside you. Once they accept, your two accounts are linked: each of you can see the other’s submitted answers on non-private exercises, side by side. A partnership is symmetric (there is no “owner”) and either of you can dissolve it at any time from settings, which immediately stops further sharing in both directions.

Some exercises are marked private in the program and are never shared, regardless of partnership status. The private flag is enforced at the database query layer; it is not a UI convenience.

You may not use partnership to deceive, coerce, or harass someone else, for example by repeatedly inviting an unwilling recipient, or by using a partner’s answers to manipulate them. Partnership is intended for a relationship of mutual consent and care.

7. The AI reflection feature

On certain exercises you can choose to ask an AI assistant for a reflection question. The feature is doubly opt-in: you must enable it at the account level (default off; toggleable from settings), and you must click a button on each exercise to invoke it. The text you wrote on that exercise (and only that text, with the exercise’s title) is sent to Anthropic’s Claude API along with a fixed system prompt that constrains how the model is allowed to respond. Numeric fields, private-exercise fields, and structured data are never sent.

The reflection produced by the model is an open-ended question intended to help you think further. It is not advice, not a diagnosis, not a treatment recommendation, and not a professional opinion. The model can be wrong, can produce content that does not fit your situation, and can occasionally produce content that is unhelpful or upsetting. If a reflection lands badly, ignore it and reach out to a human you trust.

To protect against misuse and to manage operating costs, AI reflection requests are rate-limited on a per-user, rolling-window basis. If you hit the limit, the Service will tell you and you can try again later.

8. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the Service for anything illegal, including but not limited to fraud, harassment, doxxing, threats, or distribution of unlawful content;
• attempt to access another user’s account or data, including through partnership invites under false pretences;
• probe, scan, or test the Service for vulnerabilities without our written permission, or interfere with its operation (denial-of-service, traffic floods, resource abuse);
• scrape, copy, or reverse-engineer the program content for the purpose of building a competing product;
• use automated agents to interact with the Service beyond what a normal person doing the exercises would generate, or to artificially inflate AI reflection requests;
• use the Service in a way that infringes anyone else’s intellectual-property, privacy, or other rights.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these rules.

9. Account deletion and ending your use

You can stop using the Service at any time. To delete your account and the data we hold about you, sign in, open Settings, and use the Delete account button. Deletion is immediate from production and propagates to backups within 7 days. Deletion is permanent; we cannot restore a deleted account afterwards.

If you have an accepted partnership at the time of deletion, we notify your partner by email that the partnership has ended. We do not tell your partner why or share your email beyond what they already knew.

More detail on deletion, retention, and your statutory rights is in the Privacy policy.

10. Service availability and changes

We aim to keep the Service running reliably. We do not guarantee uninterrupted availability, and we may from time to time take the Service offline for maintenance or updates; we will try to schedule any significant downtime considerately. During the free validation phase the Service is provided on a best-effort basis, so please don’t rely on it as critical infrastructure for anything.

We may revise the program content (improve wording, add or remove exercises, fix mistakes) without notifying you, provided that revisions remain consistent with the overall character and length of the program. We will preserve your existing responses across content revisions wherever technically possible.

If we discontinue the Service entirely, we will give existing users at least 30 days’ notice and a way to export your responses in a machine-readable format before shutdown.

11. Not therapy. Not medical advice.

fencepost is not a healthcare service. It is not therapy, not counselling, not psychotherapy, not medical care, and not a diagnostic or treatment tool. Nothing on the Service should be taken as professional advice. The exercises are designed for self-reflection by adults in ordinary circumstances; they are not designed to manage psychiatric conditions, crisis states, or risk to life.

If you are experiencing significant distress, intrusive thoughts, thoughts of harming yourself or others, or a mental-health emergency, please stop using fencepost and contact a qualified professional or one of the resources on our crisis support page. In an immediate emergency, call your local emergency number (112 in Ireland and most of the EU, 999 in the UK, 911 in the US and Canada).

Your use of fencepost does not create a doctor/patient, therapist/client, or other professional relationship between you and fencepost or anyone associated with it.

12. Disclaimers

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available.” To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, whether express, implied, or statutory, including the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will meet your requirements, that it will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that any AI reflection will be useful or correct.

Nothing in this section limits or excludes liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable consumer-protection law (including your statutory rights as a consumer in the EU, UK, or your country of residence).

13. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, and given that the Service is provided to you free of charge in this validation phase, we will not be liable to you for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenues, data, or goodwill, arising out of or in connection with your use of the Service. Our aggregate liability to you for any claim arising out of or in connection with the Service will not exceed €100.

Nothing in this section limits or excludes liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and for any other liability that cannot be excluded under the consumer-protection law of your country of residence.

14. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of Ireland, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. The courts of Ireland have jurisdiction over any dispute, except that, if you are a consumer resident in the EU or UK, you may also bring proceedings in the courts of your country of residence, and you have the benefit of any mandatory consumer-protection provisions of the law of your country of residence that the parties cannot derogate from by agreement.

The European Commission provides an online dispute-resolution platform at ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr, though we hope you would write to us at [email protected] first.

15. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. When we do, we will change the “Last updated” date at the top of this page and, for material changes (in particular the introduction of paid access), notify existing users by email or via an in-app notice at least 30 days before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms; if you do not agree, you may stop using the Service and delete your account.

16. Contact and operator identification

For anything (account questions, data requests, complaints, or general feedback), please email [email protected]. We aim to reply within a few working days.

fencepost is operated as a sole trade by an individual based in Ireland. Identification details required for service of process or regulatory complaints (full name, postal address, and PPSN where appropriate) are available on written request to [email protected] and will be provided within 14 days. We will publish full identification when fencepost transitions to a paid product.