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.

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may only use Famvaults with the involvement of a parent or guardian. 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 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 produces a complete copy of your vault at any time. 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, on at least 30 days' notice to account holders — enough time to export everything first.
• Email addresses are not verified. An account can be opened with any address, so the address on an account 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 we introduce paid plans in future, we will tell you before anything you already have starts costing money, and we will never convert a free account into a paid one without you actively choosing it.

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 can restore access for the others. A vault shared with nobody has exactly two doors.
• 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.

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.

“Kept beyond your lifetime” describes what we are building towards and what the export and family-sharing features are for. It is not a guarantee that the service, the company, or any particular vault will exist at a future date.

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, so treat them like keys. If you invite someone, you are responsible for that choice and for what they can then see.

During the beta we do not verify email addresses, so the address on an account is a label rather than something we have confirmed. 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, on at least 30 days’ notice to account holders. After that period, vaults and their contents may be deleted. Clauses 4, 5, 9, 10, 13 and 16 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, 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.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, nor for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, or anticipated savings. In particular, and without limiting clause 5, 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.

Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you for all claims taken together is limited to S$100. That figure reflects that Famvaults is supplied free of charge and in beta.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited — and if you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, in which case those exclusions apply only as far as that jurisdiction permits.

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.

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. If a change is significant, we will tell account holders by email or by a notice in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use Famvaults after that means you accept the updated terms; if you do not accept them, export your vault and close your account.

These terms are governed by the laws of Singapore, and the courts of Singapore have jurisdiction — except where consumer law in your own country gives you the right to bring a claim locally.

Questions about these terms: hello@famvaults.com.

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.