Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are an agreement between you and Cardinal Automation Partners, LLC (“Cardinal Automation Partners,” “we,” “us,” or “our”), the company behind FirstRead. They cover our marketing site at firstread.app and the FirstRead application at studio.firstread.app (together, the “Service”). You accept these Terms when you check the box agreeing to them as you create your account, and each time you use the Service.

Please read section 19. It requires that most disputes between us be resolved by individual arbitration rather than in court, and it waives your right to a jury trial and to take part in a class action. You can opt out of arbitration within 30 days.

1. What FirstRead is

FirstRead is an AI editorial assistant for novelists. You upload or write a manuscript, and the Service produces editorial feedback on it — a developmental assessment, line edits and copyedits, character notes, diction analysis, and a chat with an AI editor — using AI models operated by Anthropic on our behalf. FirstRead is a tool that gives you an editor’s read to consider. It is not a human editor, a publisher, or a provider of professional editorial, legal, or publishing advice.

FirstRead is early software. Features change, arrive, and occasionally break. During our alpha and any other pre-release period, access may be invite-only, limits may be adjusted, and parts of the Service may be unavailable or unreliable.

2. Who can use FirstRead

You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service. FirstRead is meant for individual authors; if you use it on behalf of a company, you confirm you may bind that company to these Terms.

FirstRead is not offered to residents of, or people located in, the European Union or the wider European Economic Area. This is a deliberate decision about the markets we are ready to serve, not a judgment about those authors. By creating an account you confirm that you are not an EU or EEA resident and are not located there. We may block or close accounts that do not meet this requirement.

You also confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a comprehensive U.S. embargo, and that you are not on a U.S. government restricted-party list.

3. Your account

Accounts are created and secured for us by Clerk, our authentication provider. You agree to give accurate information, to keep your sign-in credentials to yourself, and to tell us promptly if you think someone else has reached your account. An account is for one person — don’t share it, and don’t run other people’s manuscripts through it on their behalf.

You are responsible for what happens under your account. To close it, email us and we’ll delete the account and the manuscripts in it.

4. Your manuscripts and other content

Your work is yours. You keep every right you already have in the manuscripts, chapters, notes, and other material you upload to or create in FirstRead (“Your Content”). We claim no ownership of it.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, and process Your Content solely to operate the Service for you: to store your manuscripts on our servers so you can reach them from any browser you sign into, to send the relevant text to Anthropic from our servers when you ask for editorial feedback, to keep backups, and to keep the Service secure and working. This licence exists only to run the product for you, and it ends when you delete the content or your account.

We do not use Your Content to train AI models, ours or anyone else’s, and our providers do not train on it. We don’t publish it, sell it, or show it to other users. Our staff don’t read your manuscripts except where you ask us to look at a specific problem, where we must to investigate abuse or a security incident, or where the law requires it. Our internal administration tools show account information such as email addresses and plans — they do not show manuscript text.

You confirm that you hold the rights needed to upload and process Your Content, and that doing so infringes nobody else’s rights and breaks no law.

5. AI-generated output

Assessments, suggestions, chat replies, and other material the Service generates from Your Content (“Output”) are produced by AI models. They are suggestions for you to consider, nothing more. Output can be wrong, incomplete, or wrong for your book, and it is no substitute for your own judgment or for a human editor. You decide what to accept, what to dismiss, and what to publish, and you are responsible for the result.

As between you and us, Output generated for you belongs to you, and to the extent we hold any rights in it we assign them to you. Similar Output may be generated for other authors; neither we nor you can claim exclusivity over text an AI model produces. Whether AI-assisted text can be copyrighted, and what you must disclose to a publisher, an agent, or a contest, are questions of law and of their rules — they are yours to answer, not ours.

6. Acceptable use

You agree not to use FirstRead to:

• Upload or process content you have no right to use, or content that is illegal — including any sexual content involving minors, which we act on and report without exception.
• Generate material meant to harass, defame, defraud, or impersonate someone.
• Work around usage limits, plan caps, or metering — for example with multiple accounts, shared accounts, or automated clients.
• Scrape the Service, reverse engineer it, or try to extract its underlying software, models, or editorial prompts, except where the law says you may.
• Disrupt, overload, probe, or gain unauthorised access to the Service or the systems behind it.
• Resell the Service, or use it to build or improve a competing AI or editorial product.
• Break the terms of the third-party services described in section 14.

7. Plans, usage limits, and metering

FirstRead is sold as monthly subscription plans, alongside a free plan. Each plan grants a fixed allowance of the actions that consume AI capacity — book assessments, chapter reads, editing passes, and chat turns — together with limits on how many manuscripts you can keep and how large they can be. The plans, their prices, and their current limits are shown on our pricing page, and those figures are part of these Terms.

Allowances reset at the start of each billing period and don’t roll over. When you reach a limit, that action stops until the period resets or you upgrade — we never bill you silently for overage. Our own records of your usage are what count. If a request fails part-way through, we return the allowance it consumed. We may adjust plan limits as we learn what the Service costs to run, and we will tell you before a change reduces what you already pay for.

8. Billing, renewal, and cancellation

Paid plans are billed in U.S. dollars through Stripe, our payment processor. We never see or store your full card number.

A paid plan renews automatically each month, and your payment method is charged each month, until you cancel. You can cancel at any time from the billing page in your account, in about as many clicks as it took to subscribe. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for; you keep the plan until then and return to the free plan afterwards. Your manuscripts are not deleted when a plan ends, but the free plan’s limits then apply, so you may not be able to add new manuscripts until you are back under them.

Payments are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise, or where we decide otherwise, and we don’t give partial refunds for an unused part of a period. Taxes are yours where they apply. If a payment fails, we may retry it, restrict paid features while the account is past due, and cancel the subscription if it stays unpaid. If we change a price, we will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email, and the new price applies from your next renewal — if you don’t want it, cancel before then.

9. Changes to the Service

We may add, change, or remove features. If we remove something significant that you pay for, or discontinue the Service, we will give you reasonable notice and time to export your work.

10. Suspension and termination

You may stop using FirstRead at any time. We may suspend or end your access if you break these Terms, if your use puts the Service or other authors at risk, if we must for legal reasons, or if we discontinue the Service. Where the circumstances allow it, we will warn you first.

Export your work before you go — any chapter, or a whole manuscript, downloads as .docx or .txt at any time. After termination your right to use the Service ends, and we delete your manuscripts in line with our Privacy Policy. Sections 4, 5, 11, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 22 survive the end of this agreement.

11. Our intellectual property

The Service — its software, design, editorial prompts, documentation, name, and branding — belongs to Cardinal Automation Partners or our licensors, and is protected by intellectual-property law. These Terms let you use the Service as intended and nothing more; they transfer no rights in our software or trademarks.

12. Feedback

If you send us ideas or suggestions about FirstRead, we may use them freely, with no obligation or payment to you. You keep any rights you have in them.

13. Copyright complaints

FirstRead stores manuscripts privately for their authors and publishes nothing, but if you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, write to us with enough detail to identify the work and the material, your authority to act, your contact details, and a statement that your complaint is made in good faith and is accurate. Send it to support@firstread.app or to Cardinal Automation Partners, 4030 Wake Forest Rd, Ste 349, Raleigh, NC 27609. We remove infringing material and close the accounts of repeat infringers.

14. Third-party services

We run FirstRead on a small number of third-party services: Clerk for accounts and sign-in, Anthropic for the AI models behind the editorial feedback, Stripe for payments, and Loops for waitlist and alpha email. Using the Service means using them too, and their own terms apply to what they do. We are not responsible for their acts, omissions, availability, or output. Our Privacy Policy explains what each one receives.

15. Disclaimers

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free, or that any Output will be accurate, original, or suitable for any purpose. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

Keep your own copies of your work, and export regularly. We take backups and we work hard not to lose anything, but no online service is a substitute for a copy you control.

16. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither Cardinal Automation Partners nor its officers, employees, or suppliers will be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any lost profits, lost revenue, lost goodwill, or lost or corrupted data, arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms, even if we have been advised that such damages are possible. Our total liability for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms will not exceed the greater of (a) the amounts you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred U.S. dollars ($100). Some jurisdictions do not allow these limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

17. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Cardinal Automation Partners from any claim, damage, loss, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from Your Content, your use of the Service, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of any law or of anyone else’s rights.

18. Talk to us first

If something goes wrong, email support@firstread.app with a description of the problem and what you would like us to do. We will do the same before starting any formal proceeding. Most things get settled this way, and both of us agree to try for 30 days before going further.

19. Arbitration agreement and class-action waiver

Read this section carefully. It affects your legal rights, including your right to go to court and to bring a class action.

If the step in section 18 does not resolve a dispute, you and we agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be settled by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court. The arbitration may be held by telephone, by video, on written submissions, in the county where you live, or in North Carolina, as you choose. The arbitrator decides the dispute and may award the same individual relief a court could.

You and we each waive the right to a jury trial, and the right to bring or take part in a class, collective, or representative action. The arbitrator may award relief only to the individual party seeking it. If a court finds this waiver unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim proceeds in court and the rest of this section still applies to every other claim.

Two exceptions. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small-claims court instead, and either of us may ask a court for an injunction to stop misuse of intellectual property or unauthorised access to the Service.

You can opt out. If you don’t want this arbitration agreement, email support@firstread.app from the address on your account, with the subject line “Arbitration Opt-Out,” within 30 days of first accepting these Terms. Opting out costs you nothing else — the rest of these Terms still apply, and we will not treat you differently for it.

Any claim must be brought within one year of when it arose, or it is permanently barred, unless the law says otherwise.

20. Governing law

These Terms, and any dispute under them, are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Where a dispute is not subject to arbitration, you and we agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located in North Carolina.

21. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. When we do, we will change the date at the top of this page, and for material changes we will give you notice by email or in the app before they take effect. If you keep using FirstRead after that, you accept the updated Terms; if you don’t want them, cancel your plan and stop using the Service. We keep a record of which version of these Terms you accepted and when.

22. General

• These Terms and our Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service, and replace anything said earlier about it.
• If any part of these Terms is unenforceable, the rest stays in force and that part is narrowed to what the law allows.
• Not enforcing a right straight away doesn’t waive it.
• You may not transfer these Terms to anyone else. We may transfer them to a company that acquires our business, on notice to you.
• Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely beyond our control.
• Notices to you go to the email address on your account; notices to us go to the address below.
• Nothing here makes us partners, or an agent or employee of the other.

23. Contact us

Cardinal Automation Partners, LLC
4030 Wake Forest Rd, Ste 349
Raleigh, NC 27609
support@firstread.app

Questions about these Terms, a copyright complaint, an arbitration opt-out, and account deletion all go to the same place. A person reads it.