Terms of Service

The short version

Tender Years helps parents of young children hold the everyday load of family life: routines, tasks, upcoming things, and who’s covering what. We don’t claim ownership of what you put in. We use it to run and improve the app for you and the people you invite, and we don’t sell it. Tender Years is a tool for organizing, not a replacement for your judgment about your family. It’s a young product run by a very small team, so things will change and occasionally break.

The rest of this page is the full version. It’s an agreement between you and Tender Years, so please read it.

Who you’re agreeing with

Tender Years (“we,” “us,” or “our”) is currently operated by Liz Voeller, an individual based in California. If Tender Years is later formed into a company, that company will take over this agreement and we’ll update this page to name it.

By creating an account, accepting an invitation to a household, or otherwise using Tender Years, you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy, which explains what data we collect and how we use it. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the app.

Who can use Tender Years

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account or join a household. Tender Years is made for parents and caregivers, not for children to use directly.

Your account

You sign in with a link or code sent to your email, so access to your email inbox is access to your account. Keep that inbox secure, give us an email address you actually control, and let us know right away at hello@thetenderyears.com if you think someone else has gotten in. Each account is for one person. You’re responsible for activity under your account, except where it results from our own failure to keep it secure.

Your household

Your account lives inside a household: the shared space that holds your routines, tasks, and notes. You can invite a partner or another caregiver into it. Everyone in a household can see, edit, and delete the household’s content, so only invite people you trust with it.

Household content is shared, so it doesn’t leave with any one person. If you leave a household, remove someone from it, or delete your account while others are still in it, the routines, tasks, and notes you added stay with the people still there. If you want something removed, delete it before you go, or email us and we’ll help.

Your content is yours

You keep whatever rights you have in what you put into Tender Years: routines, tasks, notes, events, and anything else you add (“your content”). We don’t claim any ownership of it.

To run the app, you give us permission to store, process, copy, and display your content, and to share it with the people in your household and anyone else you choose to share it with (see below). This permission exists only so we can provide and improve Tender Years for you. It ends when your content is deleted, except for routine backups that are overwritten on their normal schedule. We do not sell your content or use it for advertising.

You’re responsible for your content and for having the right to add it. That includes information about other people, like your children, your partner, or your caregivers. Please add only what you need to run your household.

Sharing outside your household

Some features let you share things with people who don’t have an account:

Links you share. Some features create a private link you can send to someone, like a calendar feed of your household’s schedule. Anyone who has one of these links can see what it shows, and some let them respond, without signing in. Share them only with the people they’re meant for. You can turn off a calendar feed or replace its link in Settings.

Assistants you connect. If you create a key for an outside assistant (for example Muse), that assistant can read your household’s data whenever it asks. What happens to the data once it reaches that assistant is governed by its provider’s terms, not ours. You can revoke a key at any time in Settings.

Suggestions are suggestions

Some features organize what you’ve written or suggest what to look at next. Those suggestions are generated automatically, including by an AI model as described in our Privacy Policy, and they can be wrong, incomplete, or badly timed. Please check them before you act on them. You can edit, dismiss, or delete anything they produce.

Tender Years is an organizing tool. It is not medical, childcare, legal, financial, or any other kind of professional advice, and it does not watch over your children. You stay responsible for your family’s care and for the decisions you make. Reminders, notifications, and calendar entries can be late or fail to arrive, so please don’t rely on Tender Years as the only safeguard for anything time-critical, like medication, pickups, or appointments.

Using Tender Years fairly

Please don’t:

• use Tender Years to break the law or to harass, threaten, or harm anyone;
• access another household’s data, or try to get around our security or rate limits;
• overload the service, scrape it, or send automated traffic beyond what the features you’re using are built for;
• reverse engineer the app or copy it to build a competing product;
• upload malware or anything designed to damage the service or other people’s devices; or
• resell access to Tender Years or pretend to be someone you’re not.

If you find a security problem, please tell us at hello@thetenderyears.com instead of testing it on real accounts. We’re grateful for the heads-up.

Price

Tender Years is free to use today. If we introduce paid plans, we’ll tell you the price and what it includes before you’re ever charged, you’ll choose whether to subscribe, and you’ll be able to cancel at any time. We’ll never start charging an existing account without your explicit agreement. Specific billing terms will be added here when paid plans launch.

Our part

The Tender Years app, its design, its name and logo, and the software behind it belong to us. These terms give you a personal, non-transferable right to use the app for your own household. They don’t give you any other rights in it.

If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them to improve Tender Years without owing you anything for them. We’re always glad to hear them.

A young product

Tender Years is in active development. We regularly add, change, and remove features, and some features may be labeled early or experimental. We work to keep the app running and your data safe, but we can’t promise it will always be available, error-free, or unchanged.

Ending things

You can stop using Tender Years at any time. To delete your account, email us at hello@thetenderyears.com and we’ll take care of it. Our Privacy Policy explains exactly what deletion removes, what stays with the rest of your household, and what it can’t recall.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, puts other people or the service at risk, or is required to be closed by law. Where it’s reasonable, we’ll tell you first and give you a chance to fix the problem.

If we ever decide to shut Tender Years down, we’ll give you at least 30 days’ notice by email and help you get a copy of your household’s content before we do. If circumstances outside our control make that impossible, we’ll give as much notice as we can.

Disclaimers

To the fullest extent the law allows, Tender Years is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. Some places don’t allow these exclusions, so some of them may not apply to you.

Limits on liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we won’t be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost profits, or missed events, arising from your use of Tender Years or your inability to use it.

Our total liability for any claim related to Tender Years is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose or $50. These limits don’t apply where the law doesn’t allow them, including for liability that can’t be limited, such as for fraud or gross negligence.

Disputes

If something goes wrong, please email us first. Most problems can be sorted out quickly and informally, and we’d much rather fix it with you.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute that can’t be resolved informally will be handled in the state or federal courts located in California, and you and we both agree to those courts’ jurisdiction. Nothing here takes away rights you have under the consumer protection laws of the place where you live.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as Tender Years grows. When we do, we’ll change the date at the top, and for meaningful changes we’ll tell you by email or in the app before they take effect. Continuing to use Tender Years after a change means you accept the updated terms.

The rest

These terms and our Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about Tender Years. If any part of them turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies. If we don’t enforce a part right away, we haven’t given up the right to later. You can’t transfer these terms to someone else; we can transfer them as part of a reorganization, merger, or sale, and we’ll let you know if that happens.

Contact

Questions about these terms? Reach us at hello@thetenderyears.com.