What we will not do
These are not values. They are refusals we have already built into the software, so that we could not change our minds later and quietly do the profitable thing instead.
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Every free story is a whole story. It ends. It does not stop at a wall.
enforced as A free beat must be a complete short story with a real ending, never a truncated tease that stops at a paywall.
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We never ask you for money in the middle of a scene, or between a choice and what it costs.
enforced as Payment is never requested inside a scene or between a choice and its consequence.
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No countdowns, no expiring offers, no invented shortages. Nothing here is running out.
enforced as No countdown timers, expiring discounts, or fabricated stock limits on reading.
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We will never threaten your progress to make you buy. What you have read is yours.
enforced as Prompts may state what a purchase provides; they may not threaten the loss of progress, streaks or state.
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Cancelling takes no more steps than subscribing, in the same place.
enforced as Cancelling is available wherever subscribing is, in the same number of steps or fewer.
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We do not know who you are. There is no account, no identifier, and nothing that links what you read here to you.
enforced as Telemetry stays aggregate by construction: no reader identifier, no cross-edition join.
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We do not sell, license or broker anything about you, and we do not hand it to anyone to train anything.
enforced as Reader data is never sold, licensed, brokered or used to train anything for a third party.
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No story ships that fails our own quality checks, and nothing we learn from readers is allowed to lower them.
enforced as The optimiser may never lower the QA, craft or length gates.
And what we will not drift into
A promise is easy to keep in one step and easy to lose in a hundred small ones. So there are limits on how far any of this can move from where it started, no matter what the numbers say:
- The price will never be more than 25% above the price it started at ($7.99).
- The free stories will never be shortened by more than a fifth, and there will never be fewer than three of the four.
- A full story will never be shorter than an hour. This one has no permitted movement at all.
- Purchase prompts will never be more than one an hour of reading, doubled at the absolute most.
If we ever break one of these, it will not be by accident and it will not be quiet. The rules are in the same repository as the stories.
What we know about you — which is almost nothing, and that is also on purpose.