Terms of Service — the Satin Spoon

1. Who we are

the Satin Spoon ("we", "us", "our") is a meal planning service operated online at thesatinspoon.com. Reach us anytime at support@thesatinspoon.com.

2. What the service does

We help you plan meals using AI-generated recipes and your own saved recipes, build automatic grocery lists, and share planning with people in your household. The service is delivered via the website and any companion apps.

3. Eligibility and your account

You must be at least 19 years old to create an account. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 19 — if we learn that we have, we'll delete the account and the associated data. We may ask you to re-verify your date of birth at any time and may suspend or close accounts that don't meet the age requirement.

Restricted jurisdictions. The service is not available to residents of, or persons accessing it from, countries subject to comprehensive sanctions or where we cannot lawfully operate, including China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and Syria. We may also decline to offer the service in regions that require local data hosting, in jurisdictions where we cannot reliably honour deletion or privacy requests, or where local law otherwise prevents us from delivering the service. By signing up you confirm you are not located in, ordinarily resident in, or signing up on behalf of someone in, a restricted jurisdiction.

You agree to provide accurate information (including your date of birth and country at sign-up), keep your password secure, and let us know if you suspect unauthorised access. You're responsible for activity that happens under your account.

4. Subscriptions and billing

New accounts get a 14-day free trial. No payment is required to start.
Paid subscriptions are billed monthly or yearly through Stripe, our payments processor.
Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel.
You can cancel anytime from Settings → Billing. Cancelling stops the next renewal — you keep access until the current period ends.
If we change pricing, we'll notify you by email before the change takes effect.

5. Refund policy

Our 14-day free trial is designed as your "try before you buy" — you won't be charged until you actively choose to subscribe. Beyond that, the following applies:

All subscription fees are non-refundable once charged, including for any unused time after cancellation.
We don't offer pro-rated refunds for partial billing periods or mid-cycle cancellations.
We don't issue refunds for forgotten cancellations, accidental renewals, or simply not using the service.
Exceptions. We'll consider refunds case-by-case within 14 days of a charge for: duplicate charges, billing errors on our end, or extended service outages that prevented you from using the service.
Where local consumer law (for example, EU/UK statutory withdrawal rights) gives you refund rights beyond this policy, those rights apply and are not waived by anything here.
How to request a refund. Email support@thesatinspoon.com with the charge date and the email on your account.
Filing a chargeback with your bank or card issuer without first contacting support may result in your account being suspended.

6. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

Resell, repackage, or scrape the service or its outputs.
Reverse-engineer, attack, or attempt to gain unauthorised access to the service or other users' accounts.
Use the service to harass, defraud, or harm others.
Upload content that infringes someone else's rights or violates the law.

7. AI transparency, limitations, and disclaimer

Recipes, meal plans, grocery lists, and the learned "taste profile" feature are generated by third-party large language models (for example, Google Gemini and OpenAI). We want you to understand how this works so you can use the service safely.

How the AI works. When you ask for a meal plan, recipe, or swap, we send a structured prompt to a third-party AI provider. That prompt includes the inputs needed to personalise the result, such as your dietary tags, allergens you've listed, household size, cuisine preferences, recent swap history, and the learned taste profile. The provider's model returns text, which we parse into recipes, ingredients, and shopping list entries. The model does not "know" you between calls — every request is built from data we store on your account.

Known limitations. AI output is probabilistic, not deterministic. Two requests with the same inputs can produce different results. The model can be inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, biased, or occasionally fabricate facts ("hallucinate"), including ingredients, quantities, cooking times, nutrition estimates, allergen tags, and cultural or regional claims about a dish. The model has no real-time access to product packaging, store inventory, your kitchen, or your medical records.

Please read the points below carefully before relying on anything the service produces.

Not professional advice. AI-generated content is not medical, nutritional, dietary, allergen, or food-safety advice. Do not rely on it to manage allergies, intolerances, medical conditions, pregnancy, infant feeding, or any other health-related decision. Consult a qualified professional for those.
Allergen warning. AI may omit or misidentify allergens, cross-contamination risks, or trace ingredients. Always read product packaging and verify every ingredient before serving food, especially to children, pregnant people, or anyone with allergies or intolerances.
Food safety. Cooking times, temperatures, and storage instructions in AI-generated recipes must be independently verified against trusted food-safety sources before you use them.
No originality guarantee. AI output may unintentionally resemble existing recipes or other works. We don't claim ownership of AI output on your behalf and make no representation that it is free of third-party rights.
Data sent to AI providers. To generate recipes and your taste profile we send relevant inputs (such as preferences, dietary tags, and swap history) to third-party AI providers under their terms. See our Privacy Policy for details.
Use at your own risk. You accept full responsibility for any decision to prepare, serve, or consume food based on AI-generated content. Our liability for AI output is limited as set out in Section 11 (Disclaimer and liability).

8. AI audits, testing, and bias mitigation

We take responsibility for the AI features we ship. To keep the service safe and useful — particularly for neurodivergent users, who are a core part of our audience and may rely on routine, predictable food choices, and sensory-friendly suggestions — we commit to the following practices:

Regular review. We periodically review prompts, sample outputs, and user reports to check for accuracy regressions, unsafe instructions, allergen handling errors, and other harmful behaviour.
Pre-release testing. Material changes to AI prompts, models, or features are tested against representative inputs (including common allergen, dietary, cultural, and accessibility scenarios) before they're rolled out to all users.
Bias mitigation. We design prompts and post-processing to reduce stereotyping of cuisines, cultures, body sizes, dietary patterns, and neurotypes; to avoid moralising language about food; and to respect sensory preferences (for example, texture, repetition, "safe foods") that matter to many neurodivergent users. We do not guarantee bias-free output — no AI system can — but we treat reported bias as a defect to investigate and fix.
Provider safeguards. We rely on the safety filters and abuse-monitoring of our AI providers in addition to our own controls. We may change providers or models at any time to improve safety or quality.
No human review of every output. Recipes and meal plans are generated on demand and are not individually reviewed by a person before you see them. You remain the final decision-maker.

9. Reporting issues and user feedback

If you encounter inaccurate, unsafe, biased, offensive, or otherwise problematic AI output — or any other issue with the service — please tell us. Reports help us improve the product for everyone.

Email support@thesatinspoon.com with a description of the issue and, where possible, the recipe, meal plan, or screenshot involved.
For urgent safety concerns (for example, a recipe that mishandles an allergen or recommends an unsafe cooking practice), mark your email "URGENT — safety" in the subject line.
We review reports, and where appropriate update prompts, filters, or features. We may contact you for more detail. Submitting feedback does not entitle you to compensation, but we appreciate it.

10. Your content

Recipes, meal plans, and other content you create or save stay yours. You grant us a limited licence to store and process them so we can run the service for you and your household. We don't sell or share your content.

11. Our content

The Satin Spoon name, logo, design, and software are ours and protected by copyright and trademark law. You may use them only as part of using the service.

12. Termination

You can cancel and stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or close accounts that violate these terms or put the service or other users at risk. If we close your account for non-violation reasons, we'll refund any unused portion of a prepaid period.

13. Disclaimer and limitation of liability

The service, including all AI-generated content, is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness, non-infringement, or that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free.

AI-specific disclaimer. You acknowledge and agree that:

AI-generated recipes, meal plans, grocery lists, taste profiles, nutrition estimates, allergen tags, cooking instructions, and substitutions are suggestions only, not professional advice or instructions you must follow.
You are solely responsible for any decision to purchase, prepare, serve, or consume food based on AI-generated content, and for verifying ingredients, allergens, food-safety practices, and suitability for anyone in your household, including children, pregnant people, and people with medical conditions or allergies.
We are not liable for any illness, allergic reaction, injury, property damage, financial loss, emotional distress, or other harm arising from your reliance on AI-generated content, third-party AI provider behaviour, or any inaccuracy, omission, hallucination, or bias in the output.
We do not guarantee that AI features will remain available, that a previously generated recipe can be regenerated identically, or that any specific model or provider will continue to be used.

Limitation of liability. To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or loss of goodwill, arising out of or related to your use of the service. Our total cumulative liability for any and all claims related to the service is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) USD 50.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. In those jurisdictions, the exclusions and limitations above apply to the fullest extent permitted by law, and nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited (for example, for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud).

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. If a change is material, we'll notify you by email or in the app before it takes effect. Continued use after changes means you accept the updated terms.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction where the Satin Spoon is operated. Any disputes will be resolved in the courts of that jurisdiction.

16. Contact

Questions about these terms? Email support@thesatinspoon.com. To report an AI safety or content issue, see Section 9.