HanziTales — Terms of Service

Effective date: 22 September 2026 Last updated: 30 October 2026

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and Rifta Studio LLC, a limited liability company registered in the State of Washington, United States ("Rifta Studio", "we", "us"), governing your use of the HanziTales application and website (together, the "Service").

By creating an account, or by using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Related documents, which form part of these Terms:

• Privacy Policy
• Subscription, Credits and Refund Terms
• Acceptable Use and Content Policy
• Copyright and DMCA Policy

1. Who we are and how to reach us

2. What the Service does

HanziTales helps you learn Chinese. It provides spaced-repetition vocabulary practice, reading material, audio, and tools that use artificial intelligence to generate stories and books adapted to the vocabulary you know.

The Service is offered on a free tier and on paid subscription plans. Some features consume credits, described in the Subscription, Credits and Refund Terms.

We may change, add or withdraw features. If we withdraw or materially reduce a feature you are paying for, section 13 applies.

3. Eligibility and age requirements

You must be at least 13 years old to create your own HanziTales account. The Service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13 through consumer accounts.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or another region that sets a higher digital age of consent (up to 16, depending on your country), and you are below that age, you may use the Service only with the consent of a parent or legal guardian, who must accept these Terms on your behalf.

If you are under 18, you may use the Service only with the involvement of a parent, legal guardian, or a school acting under section 4.

If we learn that we hold personal information from a child under 13 without a lawful basis, we will delete it. Contact support@hanzitales.com if you believe this has happened.

4. School, classroom and organisational accounts

HanziTales does not currently offer School accounts. If and when we do, and a school, district, tutoring organisation or other institution ("School") signs up for HanziTales and creates accounts for its learners, the School — not the individual learner — is our customer, and the School and Educator Addendum applies in addition to and, where it conflicts, in place of these Terms.

In that arrangement the School is responsible for obtaining any consents required by law from parents or guardians, including consent under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act ("COPPA") where learners are under 13, and we act as a service provider to the School. Learner accounts created by a School have no purchasing ability and are not offered subscriptions or credits in-app.

Nothing in these consumer Terms authorises you to create accounts for other people, including your own students, outside such an arrangement.

5. Your account

You are responsible for the accuracy of the information you give us, for keeping your password confidential, and for activity under your account. Tell us promptly at support@hanzitales.com if you believe your account has been compromised.

One person, one account. Do not share your account credentials, and do not let anyone else use your paid entitlements.

You may delete your account at any time in the app, under Account › Delete account, or by following the instructions at https://hanzitales.com/delete-account.html. What happens to your data on deletion is described in the Privacy Policy.

6. Your Inputs

"Your Inputs" means the material you yourself write or choose and submit to the Service: plot ideas and prompts, titles, character names and descriptions, settings, your edits to text, the photos and text you submit for a private text (section 7), your ratings, reviews and feedback.

You keep ownership of Your Inputs. To the extent they are capable of ownership, they remain yours.

You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, sublicensable and transferable licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt, translate, modify, create derivative works from, transmit, display, perform, publish and distribute Your Inputs, and any part of them incorporated into Generated Output, (a) for the purpose of operating, securing and improving the Service, including sending them to the AI and speech providers listed in the Privacy Policy so that a story, translation or audio track can be produced, and (b) for the purposes of publication described in section 7, in any medium now known or later developed. Part (b) does not apply to a private text: we use it only under part (a), to provide it to you.

To the extent permitted by law, you waive, and agree not to assert against us or anyone acting with our permission, any moral rights or equivalent rights of attribution and integrity in Your Inputs, so that the material can be edited, retitled, abridged and published. You are not entitled to any payment, royalty or credit for this licence, except as described in section 7.

We do not use Your Inputs to train our own foundation models, and we contract with our AI providers so that they do not use them to train theirs. See the Privacy Policy.

You are responsible for Your Inputs. You promise that you have the rights necessary to submit them and that they do not break the Acceptable Use and Content Policy.

7. Generated Books — ownership and what you may do with them

"Generated Output" means the material the Service produces in response to Your Inputs and your learning profile: chapter text in Chinese and in translation, pinyin, word-level annotations and glosses, vocabulary mappings, chapter plans, cover images, and synthesised audio — together with the assembled book that contains them.

As between you and Rifta Studio, Rifta Studio LLC owns all right, title and interest in the Generated Output, to the extent such rights exist and are capable of ownership, including the compilation, arrangement, annotation and audio layers produced by the Service. Where any such right vests in you by operation of law, you assign it to Rifta Studio LLC, and where an assignment is not possible, you grant us an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to it. This does not affect your ownership of Your Inputs under section 6.

You are aware that under the law of some countries, including the United States, material generated by an artificial intelligence system without sufficient human authorship may not be protected by copyright at all. This section allocates rights between us as a matter of contract and is not a representation that any particular output is protected by copyright, or that it is original.

Your licence. Subject to these Terms and to your account remaining in good standing, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable licence to read, listen to, study, quiz yourself on and privately enjoy the Generated Output produced from Your Inputs, within the Service, for your own non-commercial language learning. Where a School licence applies, that licence extends to classroom use within the School.

What you may not do. You may not, and may not permit anyone else to:

• publish, post, distribute, broadcast, sell, licence, rent or otherwise make the Generated Output available outside the Service, in any medium, including self-publishing platforms, marketplaces, print, websites and social media;
• present the Generated Output, or any part of it, as your own original work, or register any copyright in it;
• remove or obscure any attribution, watermark or notice;
• extract, scrape, or bulk-export the Generated Output, or use it to create, train, fine-tune, evaluate or benchmark any machine-learning model or competing dataset or product;
• use the Generated Output for commercial purposes, including in paid teaching materials, without our prior written permission.

Personal copies. Nothing above prevents you from listening to or reading your books offline in the app, or from keeping a personal copy for your own study, including a copy obtained through a data export we provide. Personal copies remain subject to the restrictions in this section.

Private texts. You can photograph, choose or paste a Chinese text — a page of a book you own, a menu, a sign, a letter — and have the Service make it readable for you as a private text, with pinyin, translation and audio. A private text is yours alone: we never show it to other users, add it to the shared library or publish it, and "Publication by Rifta Studio" below does not apply to it or to anything made from it. We claim no rights in the text you submit; whoever owned it still does, and you are responsible for having the right to use it for your own study (see the Acceptable Use and Content Policy). The pinyin, translation, annotations and audio made from it are Generated Output under your licence above. You can delete a private text at any time from its page.

Publication by Rifta Studio. Because Rifta Studio owns the Generated Output and holds the licence in section 6 over Your Inputs, we may edit, adapt, illustrate, combine, retitle and publish books generated through the Service — including for sale — in print, ebook, audiobook or any other form, on our own platforms or through third-party retailers and distributors, without further permission from you and without payment to you. A published book is our own commercial product: it typically involves substantial additional work by us on structure, editing, artwork, formatting, narration and metadata, and it may differ considerably from what you saw in the app.

When we do this:

• we will not publish your display name, account name or any other detail identifying you as author, contributor or otherwise without your prior consent;
• we will remove personal details about you or about identifiable real people before publication, and we ask you not to put such details into prompts (see the Privacy Policy);
• if you would like to be credited, or would prefer that books generated from your prompts are not published, write to support@hanzitales.com — we will honour a credit request where we publish, and once you ask us not to publish, we will not publish any book generated from your prompts that we have not already published;
• we may, entirely at our discretion and with no obligation to do so, recognise a contribution with credits, complimentary access or a goodwill payment.

Commercial and publishing permission for you. You may not publish or commercially exploit a book you generated (section 7, "What you may not do"). If you want to, write to support@hanzitales.com; we consider requests case by case and may grant written permission on terms, which may include a separate agreement and a fee or revenue share.

Sharing into the library. If you choose to share a book into the HanziTales shared library, you agree that we may make it available to other HanziTales users to read, listen to and study within the Service. Shared books remain available after you delete your account, with your name removed (see the Privacy Policy). You may unshare a book at any time; copies already downloaded to other users' devices may persist for a period.

If you stop paying. Books you generated stay in your library and remain readable in accordance with the plan you are on. Your licence under this section ends if your account is terminated for breach.

8. AI-generated content — important limitations

Large parts of the reading material in HanziTales are generated by artificial intelligence systems, on request, from Your Inputs and your vocabulary profile.

• Generated content may be wrong. Translations, pinyin, definitions, grammar explanations, cultural detail and audio pronunciation can contain errors, including errors that look confident and fluent. Do not rely on the Service as a sole source of truth for examinations, professional translation, medical, legal, financial or safety-critical purposes.
• Generated content is not unique. Similar prompts may produce similar output for different users. We make no promise that output is original, that it does not resemble existing works, or that it is protectable.
• Output about real people, places and events may be inaccurate or invented.
• You are responsible for how you use output, within the limits of section 7.
• Automated safety filtering is imperfect. Generated content may occasionally be unexpected or unsuitable. Report it with Report this book on the book's page, or to support@hanzitales.com, as described in the Acceptable Use and Content Policy.

The Service is a language-learning aid. It is not education, translation, or any other professional advice.

9. Acceptable use

The Acceptable Use and Content Policy is binding. In summary, you must not use the Service to create or share unlawful, abusive, hateful, sexually explicit, or child-endangering material; must not attempt to defeat the Service's limits, gates or billing; must not scrape, resell or redistribute the Service's content in bulk; must not reverse engineer the Service except where that right cannot lawfully be excluded; and must not use the Service to build a competing dataset or model.

We may remove content, limit features, or suspend or terminate accounts that breach that policy, as described in section 13.

10. Our intellectual property

The Service itself — software, interface, designs, curricula, vocabulary data, scheduling algorithms, logos and the names "HanziTales" and "Rifta Studio" — is owned by Rifta Studio LLC or its licensors and is protected by intellectual property law.

Subject to these Terms, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Service and its content for your own language learning, and, where a School licence applies, for classroom use within that School. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

Third-party texts, dictionaries and datasets incorporated into the Service remain subject to their own licences; see the Copyright and DMCA Policy.

11. Payment

Subscriptions, credits, trials, price changes, renewals, cancellation and refunds are governed by the Subscription, Credits and Refund Terms, which you should read before purchasing.

Prices and credit rates can change. Generating content costs us money with every use, and those costs can rise. We may change subscription prices, what a plan includes, top-up prices and the number of credits that generating a chapter, book, story, audio or other content costs. Credits and plans are not a promise of a fixed amount of content. Changes that are less favourable to you are announced at least 30 days in advance, apply to subscriptions only from the next renewal, and never reduce a credit balance you already hold; you may cancel before they take effect. Details are in section 10 of the Subscription, Credits and Refund Terms.

12. Third-party stores and services

Purchases made in the iOS or Android app are processed by Apple or Google, under their own terms; they, not we, are the merchant of record for those purchases. Purchases made on the web are sold through Link, the merchant-of-record service operated by Stripe, under Link's terms of sale; Link, not we, is the merchant of record for them. We use third-party infrastructure and AI providers to run the Service; they are listed in the Privacy Policy. We are not responsible for third-party services we do not control.

Apple-specific terms

Where you obtained the app from the Apple App Store, the following apply and prevail over conflicting provisions:

1. These Terms are between you and Rifta Studio LLC only, not with Apple. Apple is not responsible for the app or its content.
2. The licence granted is a non-transferable licence to use the app on any Apple-branded device you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules in the Apple Media Services Terms of Service.
3. Apple has no obligation to provide maintenance or support for the app.
4. If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price (if any). To the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation, and any other claims, losses, liabilities, damages, costs or expenses attributable to a failure to conform to a warranty are our responsibility.
5. We, not Apple, are responsible for addressing any claim by you or a third party relating to the app, including product liability claims, claims that the app fails to conform to legal or regulatory requirements, and claims under consumer protection or similar legislation.
6. We, not Apple, are responsible for the investigation, defence, settlement and discharge of any third-party claim that the app or your possession and use of it infringes that third party's intellectual property rights.
7. You represent that you are not located in a country subject to a U.S. Government embargo or designated as a "terrorist supporting" country, and that you are not listed on any U.S. Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
8. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and may enforce them against you.
9. Our contact details for questions or claims are in section 1.

13. Suspension, termination and changes

You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time.

We may suspend or terminate your access, or remove content, if you materially breach these Terms or the Acceptable Use and Content Policy, if required by law, or to protect the Service, other users or third parties. Except where a breach is serious, unlawful, or risks harm, we will give you notice and a chance to put it right. If we terminate your account without cause, or discontinue the Service, we will refund the unused portion of any prepaid subscription period, calculated pro rata, and — where they were bought for money and never used — unused purchased credits.

Changes to these Terms. We may update these Terms. For changes that materially affect your rights or obligations, we will give at least 30 days' notice in the app or by email before they take effect, and the change will not apply retroactively. If you do not accept a material change, your remedy is to stop using the Service and delete your account before the change takes effect; where you have paid in advance, the refund treatment in this section applies.

14. Disclaimers

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free.

We do not warrant that the Service will make you fluent, that it will meet the requirements of any curriculum or examination, or that generated content is accurate.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits rights you have as a consumer that cannot be excluded or limited under the law of your country of residence, including, in the EEA and UK, statutory conformity rights in digital content and services, and in Australia, the Australian Consumer Law guarantees.

15. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

• We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, or data, even if advised of the possibility.
• Our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms is limited to the greater of (a) the amounts you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) USD 100.

These limits do not apply to liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or, where applicable, for gross negligence or wilful misconduct.

Although we take backups, occasional data loss is possible; keep your own records of anything you cannot afford to lose.

16. Indemnity

If you are using the Service for business or professional purposes, you will indemnify and hold harmless Rifta Studio LLC and its members, officers and contractors against claims, damages, liabilities and reasonable legal costs arising from Your Inputs, your breach of these Terms, or your unlawful use of the Service. This section does not apply to consumers using the Service for personal purposes where local law prohibits it.

17. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, United States, excluding its conflict-of-laws rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

If you are a consumer resident in the EEA, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of your country of residence. Section 18 (arbitration) does not apply to you. The European Commission's online dispute resolution platform is available at https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr.

For everyone else, the exclusive venue for any dispute not subject to arbitration is the state and federal courts located in King County, Washington, and you consent to their personal jurisdiction.

18. Arbitration and class action waiver (United States only)

Please read this section carefully. It affects your legal rights, including your right to file a lawsuit in court and to have a jury trial.

This section applies only to users resident in the United States, and does not apply to the consumers described in section 17.

Informal resolution first. Before starting arbitration, you agree to email support@hanzitales.com with a description of the dispute and the relief sought, and to allow 60 days for us to resolve it informally. We will do the same before bringing a claim against you.

Agreement to arbitrate. If the dispute is not resolved, you and Rifta Studio LLC agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be resolved by binding individual arbitration, administered by the American Arbitration Association ("AAA") under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court. The arbitration will take place in King County, Washington, or, at your election, by telephone, video, or on the documents alone. The arbitrator's award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction. The Federal Arbitration Act governs the interpretation and enforcement of this section.

Costs. Where the AAA Consumer Arbitration Rules apply, we will pay the arbitration filing, administration and arbitrator fees for claims under USD 10,000, except where the arbitrator determines your claim is frivolous.

Class action waiver. You and we each waive the right to participate in a class, collective, consolidated or representative action. The arbitrator may award relief only to the individual party seeking relief. If this waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim — and only that claim — must proceed in court.

Exceptions. Either party may bring an individual claim in small claims court, and either party may seek injunctive relief in court for infringement or misuse of intellectual property.

Your right to opt out. You may opt out of this arbitration agreement by emailing support@hanzitales.com with the subject "Arbitration opt-out", including your account email, within 30 days of first accepting these Terms. Opting out does not affect any other part of these Terms, and we will not treat it as a reason to refuse you service.

19. General

Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our consent. We may assign them to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, on notice to you.

Severability. If a provision is held unenforceable, it is modified to the minimum extent necessary, or severed, and the rest remains in force.

No waiver. A failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

Entire agreement. These Terms, with the documents they incorporate, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service.

Force majeure. We are not liable for failure or delay caused by events beyond our reasonable control.

Notices. We may give notice by email to your account address or by in-app message. Notices to us go to support@hanzitales.com.

Language. These Terms are written in English. A translation is provided for convenience only; the English version prevails to the extent permitted by law.