Terms of Service

1. Acceptance

"Froodl", "we", "us" or "our" refers to the operators of froodl.com. "You" means the person reading these Terms and using the service.

By creating an account, publishing, commenting, following anyone, or even browsing logged-out, you accept these Terms and our Privacy Policy. If you don't agree, please don't use Froodl.

2. Who can use Froodl

You must be at least 13 years old to create a Froodl account. If you're under the age of majority in your country, you confirm that a parent or guardian has reviewed these Terms with you.

You may not use Froodl if we've previously suspended or banned you, or if applicable law forbids us from offering the service in your region.

3. Your account

• You're responsible for keeping your password safe. We never ask for it by email.
• Once you start posting, commenting, liking, bookmarking, or following anyone, Froodl requires that your account has a real profile photo. This isn't vanity — it materially reduces spam and impersonation. You'll see an "Add a profile photo" prompt the first time you try one of those actions without one.
• One person, one account. You can't run multiple personal accounts to evade limits or manipulate engagement.
• You're responsible for anything that happens on your account. Tell us right away if you suspect it's been accessed by someone else.

4. Your content

You keep ownership of everything you publish on Froodl. We don't claim authorship and we don't sell your writing.

By posting something to Froodl, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, display, format, transmit, and (in summarised, attributed form) preview your content — for example in feeds, search results, topic pages, social meta tags, RSS, sitemaps, and email digests we send. This license is no broader than it needs to be to run the platform.

You promise that you have the right to post what you post — including any text, images, audio, code, embeds, and links. If you publish someone else's work without permission, we may remove it on request.

When you publish a story, you must include a cover image. This is enforced at publish-time and isn't optional.

5. Acceptable use

You agree not to use Froodl to:

• Post spam, low-effort SEO bait, machine-translated boilerplate, or content designed primarily to manipulate search engines.
• Harass, threaten, defame, or impersonate any person.
• Publish sexually explicit material involving minors, or non-consensual sexual material involving anyone.
• Promote violence, terrorism, or self-harm.
• Sell illegal goods, services, or counterfeit products.
• Distribute malware, phishing pages, or links to either.
• Scrape Froodl programmatically beyond a reasonable rate, or evade our rate limits.
• Reverse-engineer, decompile, or attack the service.
• Reuse our content or APIs to train a machine-learning model without our prior written permission.

We use automated systems (banned-word filters and an AI quality classifier) plus human review to enforce this section. See §7 for what happens when something flags.

6. Plans, payments and credits

Free plan

Free accounts can publish up to 5 stories per calendar month, with full access to the editor, topics, profile, comments, follows, bookmarks, and analytics. Edits to already-published stories don't count toward the limit.

Premium

Froodl Premium is $3 per month or $20 per year. It removes the monthly publishing cap and makes you eligible to attach paid "dofollow" links to your stories (see below).

Dofollow credits

Premium members can buy dofollow credits in packs of 1, 5, or 10. Each new dofollow link you add to a story consumes one credit when the story is published. A given (article, URL) pair is charged at most once — editing the same dofollow link later doesn't re-charge. Free members can't add dofollow links; admins and staff are exempt.

Payments

• All payments are processed by PayPal. Froodl never stores your card or bank details.
• Premium renews automatically until you cancel it from Settings → Billing.
• Prices are shown in US dollars. Local taxes, if applicable, are handled by PayPal.
• Refunds. If you cancel within 7 days of a new Premium charge and haven't used Premium features (no dofollow links published, no more than 5 stories in the cycle), email [email protected] and we'll refund you. Dofollow credit purchases are non-refundable once any credit in the pack has been spent.
• If PayPal refunds or reverses a payment, the corresponding Premium or credit grant is automatically revoked.

7. Content moderation

When you publish a story, it passes through:

1. A banned-word filter that flags clearly disallowed content for review or rejection.
2. An AI quality classifier that scores the story 0–100. Stories below the floor are hidden from feeds; high-scoring ones may be featured.
3. Human admin review for anything flagged by either system, plus user reports.

We may hide, unpublish, edit (typo/copyright fixes only), or remove content that violates these Terms or applicable law. Repeat or egregious violations can lead to suspension or permanent ban without refund.

If you think we got a decision wrong, reply to the notification you received or email us — we'll re-review.

8. Outbound links and dofollow

By default, all outbound links in stories carry rel="nofollow". Premium members with dofollow credits, plus our admin and staff, can mark specific links as dofollow when they add them. Dofollow status survives edits, and admins can revoke a dofollow link at any time from the admin panel.

We don't endorse the sites you link to. You're responsible for the destinations of your own outbound links.

9. Termination

You can delete your account any time from Settings → Account. This permanently removes your profile and anonymises your published content per our retention rules.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you breach these Terms, if your account is used to attack the service or other users, or if keeping it would expose Froodl to legal risk. We'll tell you why unless doing so would compromise an investigation.

10. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

Froodl is provided "as is" and "as available". We don't warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any specific story will reach any particular audience.

To the maximum extent allowed by law, Froodl's total liability to you for any claim related to the service is capped at the amount you've paid us in the 12 months preceding the claim, or US$50 if you're on a free account.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability for things that can't be limited by law — like fraud, gross negligence, or death or personal injury caused by our negligence.

11. Changes to these Terms

We can update these Terms when the service changes. For material changes we'll post a notice on the homepage and email registered users at least 14 days before the new version takes effect. Continued use of Froodl after a change means you accept it; if you don't, please close your account before the effective date.

12. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Email [email protected] or use the contact form.