Terms of Service

Famvaults (“we”, “us”) provides a private wiki service for families and small groups. These terms apply whenever you use it, together with the Privacy Policy and the Acceptable Use Policy, which form part of them. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the service.

Famvaults is for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to hold an account, and if the age of majority where you live is higher, you must have reached it. We ask for your date of birth when you open an account, and the date you give must be true. If we learn that an account belongs to someone below the minimum age, we will close it and delete its account information. Do not invite anyone below that age to a vault, open an account on their behalf, or let them use yours. Children may be written about, and shown a vault by an adult; they may not hold an account. By opening an account you confirm you have the capacity to agree to these terms, and that if you are setting up a vault for a family or group, you have the authority to accept these terms on behalf of the members you invite.

Famvaults is not intended for, offered to, or marketed to people in the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom. We do not advertise there, and the service is not designed for those markets. If someone there is invited to a vault and uses it anyway, nothing in these documents takes any right away from them: everything we promise here applies to them exactly as it does to everyone else.

Famvaults is in open beta. It is provided free of charge, and it is not finished software. Nothing on our website, in any email, or in any conversation with us varies the following, and by using Famvaults you accept each of them:

• No uptime guarantee, and no support promise. Famvaults may be slow, interrupted or unavailable without notice. We answer what we can, when we can; there is no guaranteed response time.
• Keep your own copy of anything irreplaceable. Data can be lost, and we do not promise otherwise. Settings → Export & backups produces your whole wiki as a printable volume at any time, and Export GEDCOM on the family tree downloads the tree as a file genealogy programs can open; the chat and the original photograph files are not yet part of either, and you can ask us for a copy of those. Treat Famvaults as one copy of your family's records, never the only one.
• A lost vault passphrase cannot be recovered. Once you set a vault passphrase, your wiki is sealed with a key we do not hold. If the passphrase, the recovery code and every other member's access are all lost, the contents are gone — to us exactly as much as to you. Nobody at Famvaults can reset it or read it back.
• Features may change, break, or be removed. This is unfinished software under active development. Anything in it may change or disappear while the beta runs.
• The beta itself may end. We may end the beta, or the service. We will normally give account holders at least 30 days' notice — enough time to export — unless something outside our control forces an earlier end, when we will give as much notice as we reasonably can.
• Older accounts were not email-verified. Since 29 September 2026 we confirm every new account's email address with a code sent to it. Accounts opened before then were not asked to, so on those the address is a label and not something we have checked. Joining an existing vault still needs a signed invitation from its owner.

Beta software is offered for evaluation. If any of the above is not acceptable for the records you had in mind, please do not put them here yet — and in every case, keep the copy the second item above asks you to keep.

There are no paid tiers, no subscriptions, and no payment details are collected or stored. Every account has the same features and the same 5 GB storage limit. If paid plans are ever introduced, they apply only to people who actively choose one; a free account does not become a paid one on its own.

Because the service is supplied free of charge, you are not a paying customer of ours, and the protections in these terms that depend on what you paid are calculated on that basis — see clause 13.

You keep all rights to everything you upload or write — your articles, photographs, family tree, and files. We claim no ownership of it.

You grant us only the narrow permission we need to actually run the service: to store your content, to transmit it to the members you have invited, and to make backups. That permission exists for no other purpose. Specifically, we do not sell your content, share it with advertisers, use it to train machine-learning models, or read it except where strictly necessary to fix a fault you have reported or to comply with the law.

When you set a vault passphrase, your wiki is encrypted in your browser under a key derived from it. We store the result and cannot read it. That is the point of the feature, and it has a consequence you must understand before you rely on it:

• We cannot reset your vault passphrase, recover it, or open your vault for you. It is not the same thing as your account password, and resetting your account password does not touch it.
• The recovery code is the second door, and the last one. Print it or write it down and keep it somewhere your family will find it. We do not keep a copy.
• Sharing the vault with members is the third. Any member who holds the vault passes it on automatically to the others on the vault’s member list whenever they have it open. A vault shared with nobody has exactly two doors.
• Members who joined someone else’s vault have no passphrase. Their key is kept by their own browser. If it is lost — a new device, signing out, cleared site data — another member who has the vault open lets them in again. Their access depends on that, not on anything they can type.
• If the passphrase, the recovery code and every other member’s access are all lost, the contents cannot be recovered by anyone, including us. We are not liable for that loss, and no support request can undo it.

Encryption also cannot protect you from a device someone else can use, a passphrase that is easy to guess, or a member you invited who turns out to be the wrong person to trust. Those choices are yours. Because members are let in from the member list we store, encryption also relies on that list being right; check who is under Members, and remove anyone you do not know.

Famvaults is a place to keep family records. It is deliberately not several other things, and you must not rely on it as though it were:

• Not a backup service, and not a system of record. It is one copy. Anything that matters legally, financially or medically should be held wherever it is properly held, with Famvaults as a record of the story rather than the original.
• Not a legal repository. Storing a will, a deed, a power of attorney or an instruction to your family here gives it no legal effect whatsoever, and we do not execute, witness, verify or act on anything in a vault — including after a member dies.
• Not advice. Nothing in Famvaults or from us is legal, medical, financial or genealogical advice, and we do not verify that anything written in a vault is true.
• Not certified. We hold no compliance certification and can offer none — see the Privacy Policy for the kinds of regulated records that must not be kept here.

Nothing on our website, in our marketing, in the wording of the product or in anything we say to you is a promise that the service, the company, or any particular vault will exist at a future date, or that anything kept here will be kept for any particular length of time.

You are responsible for keeping your password and your vault passphrase safe, and for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access to it.

A vault owner controls who joins, and at what level. Invitation links grant access to whoever holds them until they expire, and a link made while your vault is unlocked carries the vault’s key itself, so whoever joins with it can read the vault straight away. Treat them like keys, and send each one only to the person it is for. If you invite someone, you are responsible for that choice and for what they can then see.

We confirm the email address of every account opened from 29 September 2026 by sending a code to it. Accounts opened earlier were not checked, so on those the address is a label rather than something we have confirmed. Either way, invite people you know, by a route you trust.

Because family records describe people other than yourself, please read the Acceptable Use Policy, which covers your obligations towards those people.

The Acceptable Use Policy forms part of these terms. Broadly: do not use Famvaults to break the law, to store material you have no right to store, or to harm anyone. We may suspend or remove an account that does, and we will explain why unless we are legally prevented from doing so.

Because vaults are private and encrypted, we do not monitor their contents and have no general obligation to do so. We act on what is reported to us.

You are responsible for the content you put in a vault, for having the right to put it there, and for the people you give access to. That includes information about other people, which a family archive is mostly made of.

If someone brings a claim against us because of your content, your use of Famvaults, or your breach of these terms — for example a relative who says a vault holds their personal information, or a rights holder whose material was uploaded — you agree to cover the reasonable losses, costs and legal fees we incur as a result. We will tell you promptly about any such claim, will not settle it without talking to you, and will let you take over the defence of it if you want to. This does not apply to anything caused by our own breach of these terms, and if you are a consumer it applies only to the extent the law allows.

A beta runs on feedback, and we would like yours. If you send us suggestions, bug reports or ideas, you allow us to use them freely to improve Famvaults, without obligation, payment or confidentiality on our side. Please do not send us anything you consider confidential or want to keep the rights to — and never send us vault content to illustrate a bug unless you mean for us to read it.

You may stop using Famvaults at any time. Deleting your vault from Settings removes its content and files from our live systems immediately, and from backups within 30 days. Deletion is permanent and we cannot undo it for you, so export first if you might want the records later.

We may suspend or terminate an account that seriously or repeatedly breaches these terms. Except where the law or an ongoing investigation prevents it, we will give you a chance to export your data first.

We may also end the beta or the service entirely. We will normally give account holders at least 30 days’ notice, so there is time to export. If something outside our control forces an earlier end — a provider in clause 12 closing our account, for example — we will give as much notice as we reasonably can. After that, vaults and their contents may be deleted. Clauses 4, 5, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19 and 20 survive the end of these terms.

Famvaults runs on services operated by other companies — our host, our database provider, our mail provider — on their free or standard tiers. If one of them is unavailable, suspends an account, changes its terms or loses data, Famvaults may be interrupted or degraded, and we are not liable for that.

Nor are we liable for delays or failures caused by anything genuinely beyond our reasonable control: network and power failures, outages at a provider, government action, industrial action, or a natural event.

Because Famvaults is supplied free and in beta, it is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties or conditions of any kind, express or implied, to the fullest extent the law allows — including any implied warranty of merchantable quality, satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or that data will never be lost.

What we never limit. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence; for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; for harm we cause intentionally or through gross negligence; under product liability law; or for anything else that the law does not allow to be excluded or limited. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected — including any rights over digital content and digital services that the law where you live gives you.

Everything else. Subject to the paragraph above, and because Famvaults is given free of charge:

• we are not liable for loss caused by ordinary (slight) negligence;
• we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill or anticipated savings;
• we are not liable for loss of, damage to, or inability to recover any data or content — including loss caused by a forgotten vault passphrase, a lost recovery code, a deletion you or a member of your vault carried out, or a failure at one of the providers in clause 12 — which is why clause 2 asks you to keep your own copy;
• and where we are liable at all, our total liability to you for all claims taken together is limited to US$100.

If you are a consumer and the law of the country where you live does not allow one of these exclusions or limits, it applies to you only as far as that law permits, and the rest of this clause still applies.

Please email us first. Most problems are quicker to fix than to argue about, and we ask that you give us 30 days from the date you write to us at hello@famvaults.com to resolve it before starting formal proceedings. This is a request, not a condition: it does not take away any right the law gives you to go to a court, a regulator or a consumer dispute body.

Any claim arising out of these terms or your use of Famvaults must be brought within one year of the date you first knew, or reasonably should have known, of the facts giving rise to it — except where the law gives you a longer period that cannot be shortened by agreement.

We may update these terms as the product changes. A significant change is announced to account holders by email or in the app before it takes effect. If you do not accept it, you may print your wiki and close your account at any time, at no cost; continuing to use Famvaults after the change takes effect means you accept it.

If you are a consumer, nothing in these terms takes away the protection of the mandatory consumer laws of the country where you live. You may bring proceedings in the courts of that country, and any proceedings against you as a consumer can only be brought there.

Because Famvaults is free and you can close your account whenever you like, you may leave at any time — including within any withdrawal period consumer law gives you — and nothing is owed either way.

Questions about these terms: hello@famvaults.com.

Famvaults stores and transmits what families write. We do not choose it, commission it, review it in advance, or hold it out as ours. In law we are a hosting provider of content supplied by our users, and we rely on the protections the law gives that role.

We have no general obligation to monitor vaults and we do not monitor them — a private, encrypted archive could not be monitored in any case. What we have instead is a way for anyone to tell us, and a practice of acting once we know: see the Acceptable Use Policy, which sets out how to report content and what we do about it.

Copyright. If you own rights in material you believe is stored here without permission, write to hello@famvaults.com with the details listed in the Acceptable Use Policy. We remove or disable access to material once we have what we need, we tell the person who posted it, and they may reply explaining why it should be restored. We close the accounts of repeat infringers.

Acting on a report is not an admission that anything was wrong, and declining one is not a judgement that it was right — in most cases we cannot read the content at all and are relying on what the people involved tell us. We are not liable to you for what we remove, restrict or restore in good faith under this clause, nor for what another member of your vault does with what they can see.

A vault owner decides who joins their vault and who stops being in it. We are not the arbiter of a family’s disagreements and we will not be drawn into one: we do not grant, restore or transfer access to a vault on the request of a member, a relative, an executor or anyone else who is not the owner, and we do not verify who is related to whom.

If a member dies, the vault is unchanged and stays with its owner. We cannot open a vault for a family, and where a vault passphrase is set we could not, even if a court ordered it — clause 5 explains why. Nothing in Famvaults has any legal effect over an estate, and we do not act on instructions left in a vault. If you want your family to be able to read your vault after your death, the way to arrange it is inside the product, while you can: share the vault with someone you trust and leave the recovery code where they will find it.

We act on a valid court order or a lawful request from an authority, and on nothing else. Where the law allows, we will tell the account holder first.

Clause 4 is about your content. This one is about ours. The Famvaults name and logo, the software, the design, the wording of the product and the example wiki are ours or our licensors’, and nothing in these terms transfers any of it to you. We do not claim rights in any other company’s name, and where we mention another product it is to describe ours, not to suggest any connection with theirs.

What you get is permission to use Famvaults for your own family’s records, for as long as these terms are kept: personal, revocable, and not transferable. Within that, please do not copy or resell the software, present it as your own, use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse you, scrape or bulk-download the site, or take it apart to build a competing service — except where the law gives you a right to do something on this list anyway, which we are not trying to take away.

These terms, with the Privacy Policy and the Acceptable Use Policy, are the whole agreement between us about Famvaults, and replace anything said before. If a court finds any part unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.

You may not transfer your rights under these terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours to a company that takes over the operation of Famvaults, and will tell account holders if that happens. Nobody other than you and us has rights under these terms.