Terms of use

Last updated 23 August 2026

Plain terms for a reading app. Where a sentence could be read two ways, read it the way that favours you.

Your work is yours

You keep every right in the books you upload and the notes you write. Using RisoRead grants us permission to store them, transmit them, and process them for the sole purpose of providing the features you use — rendering a page you asked to read, unpacking a chapter, sending an extract you asked to have tagged. That permission covers nothing else, and it ends when you delete the content.

We do not train models on your books, ours or anyone else’s, and we do not licence them to anyone who does.

What our administrators may access

This is a term of the agreement rather than only a description of the software, so that it binds us:

• Our administration console provides no means to read the content of your books, your bookmarks, or your reading positions. Administrator accounts are subject to the same row-level access controls as every other account.
• Administrators may see account and billing records, and aggregate counts and storage totals for a shelf — how much, never what.
• Our personnel hold infrastructure credentials capable of reaching stored data. We will use them to access your content only with your request or consent, where necessary to maintain or restore the service, or where legally compelled — and we will notify you of a legal compulsion unless prohibited from doing so.

The privacy page explains how each of these is enforced.

Plans and payment

Free is a plan and not a trial. It does not expire. We may change what it includes for new accounts, and will not reduce it under an account already using it without 60 days’ notice.

Pro is $18 a month or $180 a year, charged in advance and cancellable at any time. Cancelling stops the next charge and leaves you on the plan you paid for until it runs out. We do not pro-rate part-months, and we will refund a subscription within 14 days of a charge if you ask.

Lifetime is $288 once, or $88 for waitlist members at launch. It covers everything in Pro, including features added later, for as long as the service operates. It carries no renewal and no expiry. If we discontinue it we will give at least 90 days’ notice and keep downloads working throughout.

“Lifetime” means the lifetime of the service, not of a person, and we would rather say so here than have you discover it later. Prices exclude any tax we are required to collect.

Fair use of the plans

Unlimited means unlimited for reading done by you and the people on your shelf. It does not cover reselling access, sharing one account across an institution, distributing books you have no right to distribute, or using storage as a general file host. If usage looks like one of those, we will write to you before doing anything about it.

Getting your books out

Every book downloads as the file you uploaded, on every plan, including free and including after a paid plan lapses. If your plan lapses, your books are not deleted — you keep reading and downloading them, and adding new ones is what stops.

One account, two applications

RisoRead and RisoDesk share an account, a database and a plan. These terms apply to both, an action taken in one is an action on the same account, and closing the account closes it in both. If you only ever use one of them, nothing here changes for you.

Ending it

You can delete your shelf at any time, which deletes its content. We may suspend an account that is being used to break the law, to attack the service, or to store material we are required to remove; short of that, we will contact a person before disabling anything.

What we do not promise

RisoRead is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and our liability is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before a claim. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

Suggested tags are an aid, not an authority. A model reading the first page of a book is guessing at what the book is about, and it is worth looking at what it guessed before relying on it.

Changes

If we change these terms materially we will give 30 days’ notice by email, and the previous version continues to apply to you until then. Continuing to use RisoRead after that is acceptance.

Questions: hello@risoread.com