Terms of Use

What this covers

These terms apply to VC Writer — the desktop application for Windows and macOS, this website at vc-writer.com, the Writers Room, and VC Writer Notes, the phone app for iPhone and Android. One agreement for all of them, because they are one product with one account. Using any of them means accepting these terms.

How your information is handled is a separate document and the one most people want first: the privacy policy.

Your writing is yours

You own everything you write. Your manuscripts, research, outlines, characters, boards and notes are yours; we claim no ownership of them and no licence to use them. We do not publish them, sell them, share them, or use them to train any model. Nothing in these terms gives us a right to your work.

What we do is store it where you ask us to, so that it reaches your other machines and the collaborators you invited — and nothing else. That is enforced by the database rather than by anybody here remembering, which is the difference between a promise and a mechanism.

The desktop application

Buying VC Writer gives you a licence to use it. The licence is yours personally, or your organisation’s where an organisation bought it, and it covers a set number of computers — your account page lists the machines it is on and lets you free a seat from a computer you no longer have, without asking us.

The price and the plan are shown at the checkout before you pay, in your own currency. A subscription renews itself at the end of each period until you cancel it.

If a subscription lapses, your work is not taken away. Your projects stay on your machine and go on opening, printing and exporting. What stops is changing them, installing on another computer, and the parts that reach vc-writer.com. A copy whose subscription has ended goes on opening, printing and exporting every project on the machine, indefinitely, with no time limit and no further payment. Subscribing again makes it writable straight away.

Please do not share your licence key, rent the application out, take it apart to republish it, or work round the activation. If a purchase is refunded or charged back, the licence it paid for ends — which the software does by itself, the moment the payment processor says so.

VC Writer Notes, on your phone

Notes is a subscription — $49.99 a year or $4.99 a month — bought inside the app because both app stores require it to be. The price you are shown in the app is the one your store will charge, in your currency.

• It renews itself at the end of each period unless cancelled at least twenty-four hours before. Your store account charges the renewal.
• You cancel it there too — in your Apple ID or Google Play subscription settings. We cannot cancel it for you, and the app cannot either.
• What the subscription covers is sending notes from the phone and keeping them synced to your account. Reading what you have already sent is never part of it.
• If it lapses, what stops is sending new notes, and nothing else. Nothing you have already captured is affected by this. Every note you have sent stays readable here and on your desk, and anything already filed into a project is part of the project.

VC Writer for Windows and macOS is a separate purchase. It has carried syncing for your own projects since before Notes existed and goes on doing so — a Notes subscription adds to what you have and takes nothing away from it.

Refunds

A purchase made in the phone app is Apple’s or Google’s to refund, not ours — they take the payment and we never see your card, so a refund has to be asked for where the money went. Apple’s is requested at reportaproblem.apple.com and Google’s in the Play Store.

For anything bought on this website, write to support@vc-writer.com and say what happened. A person reads it, and where you are entitled to a refund under the law where you live, you will get one.

The Writers Room

A room is somebody’s project with other people invited into it. If you invite collaborators, you are responsible for who you invite and for what they may do with what they see. If you are invited, what you contribute stays in that room — including after you leave or delete your account, with your name removed, because it is part of somebody else’s work by then.

One writer’s work is never destroyed by another’s. A merge adds a version beside the one before it rather than overwriting anything, which is a property of the software and not a rule anybody has to follow.

The AI features

A few features send text to be read by a model — a scene reading, a suggested summary, suggested category names. They run only when you press the button that runs them, only the text that feature needs is sent, and none of them can rewrite your prose: what comes back has no field that could carry replacement text. Nothing suggested is applied until you accept it, and what a model suggests is a suggestion rather than a statement of fact. If you would rather nothing left your machine, do not use them; the rest of the application works without them.

Using it properly

Do not use VC Writer to break the law, to infringe somebody else’s copyright, or to store or distribute material that is illegal where you are. Do not attack the service, try to reach another customer’s account, or scrape or load the site in a way that degrades it for other people. We may suspend an account that does any of these, and we will say why.

What we do not promise

The software is provided as it is. We work hard on it and we do not promise it is free of faults, that the website and sync will never be down, or that it will suit a particular purpose you have in mind.

Keep your own backups. On the desktop your projects are files on your own computer and you can copy them anywhere — File ▸ Save a copy… is there for exactly this. Sync is a convenience, not an archive, and no software should be the only place a manuscript exists.

Where something does go wrong, what we owe you is limited to what you have paid us in the twelve months before it happened. Nothing here limits anything that cannot be limited under the law where you live — including, in many places, liability for death, injury or fraud.

Ending it

You can stop whenever you like: cancel a subscription in your store or account, and delete the account itself from the same place, from any device, including the phone. Deleting is immediate and permanent, and it does not touch the copies on your own computer — those are yours and we cannot reach them.

We would only end your access for one of the things under Using it properly, or if we stopped selling the product — in which case anyone with a licence would be told, and a desktop copy already activated would go on opening your work.

If you got the app from the App Store

Apple’s Licensed Application End User License Agreement also applies to VC Writer Notes obtained from the App Store, and where it says something different from this page about that app, Apple’s wording governs. Apple is not a party to this agreement and has no obligation to support the app; anything you need is ours to answer, at the address below.

Changes

If these terms change in a way that matters, the date at the top changes and anyone with an account is emailed. A change does not apply retroactively to a purchase already made.

Asking us something

Write to support@vc-writer.com. A person reads it.