📄 Terms & Subscriptions

Family Roots is operated by [trading name][, a company registered in England and Wales under number XXXXXXX / trading as a sole trader].

Postal address: [full geographic address]

Contact email: [support@yourdomain.com]

VAT: [not VAT registered / VAT number GB XXX XXXX XX]. All prices shown on the site are in pounds sterling and [include / exclude] VAT where it applies.

In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean the operator named above. "You" means the person using the site. "Family" or "family group" means a group of accounts sharing content inside Family Roots.

By creating an account or using Family Roots you agree to these terms. If you do not agree to them, please do not use the service.

These terms work alongside our Privacy & Data Use page, which explains what is stored and who it is shared with. Please read both.

If you are using Family Roots as a consumer — which almost everyone will be — you have legal rights that these terms cannot take away. Nothing here is intended to limit your statutory rights, and where anything below conflicts with them, your statutory rights win.

You need an account to use Family Roots. You must be 18 or over to create one and to take out a paid plan. Younger family members can be given an account by a family admin, who takes responsibility for their use of it.

You are responsible for keeping your password to yourself, and for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has got into it.

A family group has one or more admins. Admins can invite and remove members, change family-wide settings, hide pages, delete family content, and start or change a paid plan. Ordinary members can change their own name, photo and password, but not family-wide settings. Think carefully about who you make an admin.

Your content stays yours. Photos, documents, diary entries, stories, family tree records and messages you add belong to you (or to whoever owned them already). Taking a subscription does not give us ownership of any of it.

You give us only the permission we need to actually run the service: to store your content, to copy it for backups, and to show it to the other members of your family group. We do not use your content for anything else. We do not sell it, mine it, or use it to train anything.

You are responsible for having the right to upload what you upload. Old family photographs are usually straightforward, but if you upload something created by someone outside your family — a photographer's print, a published document, a piece of music — make sure you are entitled to.

You can export your family's data at any time from Admin → Data & Export, on any plan including the free one. We do not hold your archive hostage.

Family Roots is for recording and sharing family history. Please do not use it to:

• store or share anything unlawful, or any image that sexualises a child
• harass, threaten or defame anyone, inside your family group or outside it
• upload material you have no right to upload
• upload malware, or deliberately try to break, overload or probe the service
• attempt to reach another family's content, or any account that is not yours
• resell access, or use the service as general-purpose bulk file storage unrelated to family history

Family groups are private, but remember that everything you add is visible to every member of your family group. Be thoughtful about information concerning living relatives — particularly anyone who does not have an account and has not chosen to take part.

Every family group starts on the free plan, which includes 2 GB of storage and every feature of the app. There is no trial period that expires, and no card is needed.

Storage is shared across the whole family group and covers photos, scanned documents and object pictures.

We may change what the free plan includes in future. If we reduce it, we will tell existing families in advance and will not apply the reduction in a way that puts you over your limit without notice.

Paid plans raise the storage limit. They do not unlock features — every feature is available on every plan, including the free one.

Storage figures are binary gigabytes (1 GB = 1,024 MB). The price you will be charged is always shown on the checkout page before you confirm; if anything on this page ever disagrees with the checkout page, the checkout page is what governs.

A paid plan belongs to the family group, not to the individual who paid. Only a family admin can start, change or cancel one.

Payments are taken by Stripe, a payment provider. You enter your payment details on a page hosted by Stripe — card details never reach this site, and we never see or store them. Which methods are available (card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Bacs Direct Debit and others) depends on what Stripe offers for your location.

Receipts and invoices are issued by Stripe to the paying admin's email address. Past invoices are available from the billing portal, reached from Admin → Plan & Storage.

Changing plan mid-term. If you move to a larger plan while subscribed, the change takes effect immediately and Stripe charges the difference for the rest of the current period. If you move to a smaller plan, the change also takes effect immediately and the unused balance is credited against future invoices. We do not charge a fee for changing plan.

If moving to a smaller plan would leave your family above the new storage limit, the change still goes ahead and nothing is deleted — you simply cannot add anything new until you are back under the limit.

Because you are buying at a distance, you have a legal right under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 to change your mind within 14 days of starting a paid plan, without giving a reason.

Strictly, where a service has already started at your request, a trader may keep a proportionate amount for the period already supplied. We do not do that. If you cancel a new paid plan within 14 days, we will refund what you paid in full, and your family simply returns to the free plan.

To use this right, either cancel from Admin → Plan & Storage and email us at [support@yourdomain.com] within the 14 days, or just email us and we will handle it. Refunds are made to the original payment method, normally within 14 days of us accepting the cancellation.

This 14-day right applies to a new paid plan. It does not restart each time a subscription renews automatically, or each time you change between paid plans — but see Refunds, which is more generous than the law requires.

You can cancel at any time, with no notice period and no cancellation fee, from Admin → Plan & Storage → Billing & invoices.

Cancelling stops the next renewal. Your plan — and its full storage allowance — continues until the end of the period you have already paid for, and the site shows you the date it ends. After that the family returns to the free plan.

If you want your data removed entirely, that is a separate action: a family admin can delete family content or the whole family group from Admin → Danger Zone. See the Data Retention & Deletion section of the privacy page for what that does.

Beyond the 14-day right above:

• Something went wrong with the service. If Family Roots was not of satisfactory quality, not fit for purpose, or not as described, you are entitled to a repair, a price reduction or a refund under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. Email us and we will sort it out.
• An accidental renewal. If a yearly plan renewed and you had meant to cancel, contact us within 30 days of the charge and, provided you have not made significant use of the new period, we will refund it and cancel. We would rather do that than argue.
• Part-used periods on cancellation. We do not normally refund the remainder of a period you chose to cancel part-way through, because you keep the full allowance until it ends.

Refunds go back to the original payment method via Stripe.

If a renewal payment is declined, Stripe retries it over a short period and emails the paying admin. The site also shows a notice in Admin → Plan & Storage.

Your plan keeps working while this is happening — we do not cut a family off at the first failed payment. You can update the payment method from the billing portal at any point.

If the payment still cannot be taken after Stripe has finished retrying, the subscription ends and the family returns to the free plan. As everywhere else: nothing is deleted, and you can take out a plan again whenever you like.

Family Roots has a "Share the cost" feature that lets members say they will chip in, and divides the plan price between everyone who has.

Saying you will chip in is not a contract with us and creates no obligation to us. The admin who set up the payment is the person responsible for the subscription.

We may change our prices. If we increase the price of a plan you are already on, we will email the paying admin at least 30 days before it takes effect, and it will only ever apply from your next renewal — never mid-period.

If you do not want to pay the new price, cancel before the renewal date and you will not be charged it.

We will try to keep Family Roots available and working well, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted. It sometimes needs maintenance, and it depends on third-party infrastructure that can have its own outages.

We may add, change or remove features. If we remove or materially reduce something you are paying for, we will tell you, and if the change significantly disadvantages you we will offer you a cancellation with a proportionate refund.

Keep your own copies of anything irreplaceable. We take backups, but Family Roots should not be the only place a precious photograph exists. The export tool in Admin → Data & Export is there for exactly this.

If we ever decide to shut the service down, we will give at least 60 days notice, stop taking payments, refund any period paid for beyond the closure date, and keep the export tool working throughout.

We may suspend or close an account or family group that breaches the Acceptable Use section. Where it is reasonable to do so we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right. For serious matters — unlawful content in particular — we may act immediately.

If we close a paid family group for a breach, we will refund any unused period unless the breach was deliberate and serious. If we close one for any reason other than a breach, we will refund the unused period.

You can close your own account at any time. A family admin can delete a family group from Admin → Danger Zone.

If we fail to comply with these terms, we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of that failure. We are not responsible for loss or damage that is not foreseeable.

We do not exclude or limit our liability in any way where it would be unlawful to do so. That includes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, and for your rights as a consumer under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

Subject to that, our total liability to you arising out of the service is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or £100.

We are not liable for business losses. Family Roots is supplied for private, family use; if you use it for any commercial purpose we have no liability to you for lost profit, lost business or business interruption.

If something is wrong, please email [support@yourdomain.com] and tell us what happened. We aim to acknowledge within 3 working days and to resolve matters within 14 days.

If we cannot sort it out between us, you may be able to take the matter to an alternative dispute resolution scheme, and you can always go to court. Nothing in these terms stops you doing either.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes may be brought in the courts of England and Wales.

If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you can also bring proceedings in your own country's courts. If you live elsewhere, you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protections in your own country.

We may update these terms. The "last updated" date at the top of this page always shows when they last changed.

For minor corrections we will simply update the page. For changes that materially affect your rights or what you pay, we will email the paying admin at least 30 days in advance, and you can cancel before they take effect if you do not accept them.

Continuing to use Family Roots after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms.