Terms of use

Cottage helps you read seed packets, organize seeds, and plan garden dates. We aim to make the app honest, calm, and useful.

We will not hide charges, manufacture urgency, make cancellation harder than signup, or use other anti-consumer dark patterns. If Cottage ever offers a paid feature, its price and renewal terms will be clear before you agree.

You may use Cottage for personal, household, educational, or other lawful gardening purposes. We give you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the app on devices you own or control, subject to the app store’s rules.

Please do not attack or overload the service, bypass security or usage limits, use automation to consume the packet reader at scale, reverse engineer protected service components where law forbids it, or use Cottage to violate someone else’s rights. These limits protect gardeners and keep the service affordable.

You keep ownership of your packet photos, garden records, and anything else you enter. When you choose an online feature, you give Cottage and its service providers permission to process only the content needed to provide that feature, synchronize a shared garden, secure the service, and comply with law. This permission is not a sale and does not let us advertise with your content.

Inviting someone to a shared garden gives that editor access to view, change, and delete all of its records and photos. Editors cannot manage members. You are responsible for choosing people you trust and for content you add. See the Privacy Policy for storage, retention, and deletion details.

Local gardens work anonymously. Creating or joining a shared garden requires a durable Apple or other supported sign-in shown in the app. A shared garden may be changed offline, so simultaneous edits can be merged and the last server-accepted change to the same field may prevail.

• Owners can invite or remove editors, revoke pending invitations, and stop sharing.
• Editors can change all garden content and may leave the garden, but cannot manage membership.
• Access ends when an owner removes a member, an editor leaves, the owner stops sharing, or the relevant Cottage cloud account is deleted. A device must reconnect before Cottage can clear its offline copy and reflect that change.

Gardening involves weather, living things, regional conditions, and sometimes unclear packet print. Automatic reading and calculated dates can be wrong. NOAA normals describe historical averages, not a forecast or frost guarantee.

• Review extracted text against the physical seed packet.
• Adjust dates for your microclimate, current forecast, and local guidance.
• Do not rely on Cottage to identify whether a plant is edible, safe, or free from allergens, or for pesticide, medical, or other safety instructions.

Cottage is a planning aid, not professional agricultural, medical, safety, or emergency advice.

The local library and manual entry are designed to work without the online service. Shared-garden synchronization, packet reading, and frost lookup may be limited, interrupted, changed, or retired—for example because a provider, security issue, or reasonable cost limit requires it. We will try to give fair notice of a major planned change and avoid taking away access to local-only garden records.

We will use reasonable care in providing Cottage, but we cannot promise it will always be uninterrupted, error-free, or suitable for every garden. To the extent the law allows, Cottage is provided “as is,” without implied warranties.

We are not responsible for indirect or unforeseeable losses, failed crops, or decisions made without checking the original packet and local conditions. Nothing here excludes responsibility that cannot legally be excluded, or limits consumer guarantees, privacy rights, or other rights you have under the law where you live.

You can stop using Cottage whenever you like; there is no hidden cancellation process. You can delete a Cottage cloud account from the app’s Cottage account settings. Account deletion removes the active cloud account and associated active cloud data as described in the Privacy Policy; local gardens remain on your device until you delete them or remove the app and its data.

We may block online features when reasonably necessary to protect the service, investigate abuse, comply with law, or enforce these terms. When practical, we will explain why and allow an appeal through the support contact. A block on online features does not transfer ownership of or permission to sell your local content.

Email hello@getcottage.app so we have a chance to help. This informal step is optional and does not shorten a legal deadline or take away your right to contact a regulator or court. These terms do not require individual arbitration or waive participation in a class action. The law that applies is determined by ordinary legal rules, including mandatory consumer protections where you live.

You must be at least 13 to use Cottage. If you are under the age of legal majority where you live, a parent or guardian should review these terms with you. Apple, Google, and your device platform may also apply their own store or operating-system terms.

We may update these terms as Cottage changes. We will explain material changes in plain language and give notice in the app or store listing before they take effect when practical. Changes are prospective; they do not rewrite the past. If you disagree, you may stop using Cottage before the new terms take effect.

Cottage is provided by the developer identified on its App Store listing. Email hello@getcottage.app with a question about these terms or visit the support page.