Terms and Conditions

Draft — not in force. This document is a draft awaiting the owner's review.

These terms are the agreement between you and the company that runs VACUUM. We have written them to be read. Where the law needs a precise word we use it; everywhere else we use the plain one.

The operator. VACUUM is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], a company registered in Brazil under CNPJ [CNPJ], with its registered address at [REGISTERED ADDRESS]. Throughout this document, "we", "us" and "VACUUM" mean that company. VACUUM is a Skip the BS product.

Contact. support@vacuum.social for anything about your account, your data, or your subscription. abuse@vacuum.social to report content or conduct.

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1. What VACUUM is

VACUUM is a private, invite-only app for sharing photos and short videos with people who already know you. You connect to someone by handing them an invite code. There is no search, no discovery, no public profile, no follower count, and no way for a stranger to find you or your content.

Everything you share expires. A moment lasts 30 days from the time you post it, and then it is deleted — from our servers and from the phones it was delivered to. There is no archive, no memories feature, and no way to bring an expired moment back.

VACUUM is not storage and not a backup. Do not use it to keep anything you want to keep. Keep your own copy of your own photos.

VACUUM is not end-to-end encrypted. We say what we do instead — and the one place anything ever touches your content — in the Privacy Policy. We will never describe VACUUM as end-to-end encrypted before it is.

2. Your account

You sign in with your email address. We send you a link; opening the link signs you in. There is no password, because we would rather not hold one.

Your email address is how you sign in and nothing else. It is never shown to another member, never used to put you in touch with another member, and never sent to anyone else's app.

Two devices. An account can be signed in on up to two devices at a time, free or paid alike. If you try to sign in on a third, we refuse and tell you to sign a device out first. We never sign a device out for you as a side effect of something else.

Signing out deletes that device's copies. Sign-out purges the media cached on that device. If that device holds the only remaining copy of a moment, it is gone. We warn you before you do it.

Losing both devices. If you lose access to both, you can sign everything out yourself using a second, separate email link whose only power is to sign out all devices. You then sign in fresh and receive whatever is still inside its 30-day window.

Your account is yours. Do not share it, sell it, or sign in on someone else's behalf. One person, one account.

3. Who can use VACUUM

You must be at least 18 years old to have a VACUUM account. If you are not, do not create one, and do not redeem an invite.

You also must not be barred from using the service under the law that applies to you, and you must not have been banned from VACUUM before.

4. The deal: free to receive, paid to share

Receiving is free forever. Redeeming an invite, generating invites, connecting to people, receiving their moments, viewing them, and replying to them all cost nothing, indefinitely, with no allowance and no time limit.

Posting requires a subscription. $2 per month or $15 per year — your choice, both offered equally. There is no free posting allowance.

Where you buy it. All billing happens on this website. The apps contain no prices, no purchase flow, and no link to one, anywhere in the world.

Paddle is the seller. Purchases are processed by Paddle as Merchant of Record. That means Paddle — not us — is the legal seller of the subscription, issues your receipt and any VAT invoice, and handles sales tax and VAT wherever you are. Paddle's own terms and privacy notice apply to the purchase itself, alongside these terms. We never see or hold your card details.

What lapsing does — and does not do. If your subscription ends, you go back to the free tier. You keep every connection, every invite, every unexpired moment you have already received, and full use of replies. You just cannot post something new. Nothing is held hostage.

A failed payment is not a lapse. If a charge fails, posting keeps working through the payment-retry window and we show you the honest end date. Only when that window runs out does the account lapse.

Moments already uploaded still get delivered. If your subscription ends while a moment is in flight, that moment finishes its 30 days. Uploaded while subscribed means paid for.

Cancelling. One action, from your account page. It takes effect at the end of the period you already paid for. No confirmation funnel, no retention offer, no survey. Refunds are covered in the Refund Policy.

5. Price changes

The price follows what VACUUM actually costs to run, in both directions. If our costs drop, the price drops.

We commit to all of this:

• At most two price changes in any 365 days, counted from when we announce them.
• At least 60 days' notice before a change takes effect, sent by email to every subscriber.
• Applied at your next renewal, never mid-cycle. You are never charged, credited or prorated because a price changed.
• Every change substantiated in the annual transparency report.
• No legacy prices. Everyone pays the current honest price. There is no grandfathered rate to lose and none to protect.

If a price change is one you do not want, cancel before it applies. The 60 days exist so that is a real choice.

6. Your content stays yours

You own what you share. Nothing in these terms transfers ownership of your photos, videos, captions or messages to us.

To run the service we need a narrow permission, and it is the only one we take:

You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, transmit and deliver the content you post solely in order to deliver it to the connections you chose, and solely for as long as we hold it — at most 30 days, and usually much less.

That licence ends when the content does. It does not let us publish your content, show it to anyone you did not choose, use it in marketing, sell it, license it onward, or train anything on it. We do not do any of those things and this licence would not permit them.

Two exceptions, both stated plainly rather than buried:

1. Abuse-material matching at upload. Every upload is checked against a list of known child sexual abuse material and known harmful abusive material before it can be published. This is a match against known material, not analysis of your content, and it is the only place anything in VACUUM touches what you shared. It is described in full in the Privacy Policy and the Acceptable Use Policy, and it is non-negotiable.
2. A report. If someone you shared with reports a moment, that moment is re-uploaded from their device for a human to review. That is the one circumstance in which a person outside your connections can see your content, and the person reporting is told so before they do it.

Responsibility. You are responsible for what you share and for having the right to share it — including the right to share images of other people. If a moment contains someone else, that is between you and them, but it is your responsibility, not theirs and not ours.

7. What you may not do

The Acceptable Use Policy is part of these terms and is incorporated into them by this reference. Read it. It is short.

The short version: VACUUM is for moments from your real life, shared with people who know you. It is not a place to publish, sell, promote, harass, or distribute anything illegal. Child sexual abuse material carries zero tolerance and a permanent ban.

8. Enforcement, and the part that is harsh

If content is reported, one person — the operator — reviews it. Our target is 24 hours on weekdays and 48 hours at worst. We say "one person" because that is true, and staffing it theatrically would be a lie.

A ban is permanent, and there is no appeal.

When we ban an account: the account is disabled, any subscription is cancelled with a prorated refund, and outstanding invite codes are revoked. The ban does not expire. There is no appeal process — not because we think we are infallible, but because we have no capacity to staff an appeals process honestly, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying this.

We think you should know that before you sign up, which is why it is here and not in an annex.

Nobody is told. A ban is deliberately indistinguishable from a block or a disconnect to everyone connected to the account. That is a safety property: nobody should be able to work out who blocked them.

9. Blocking and disconnecting

You can disconnect from someone, or block them, at any time, from the People list. Both sever the connection, cancel anything in flight between you, and delete already-shared content between the two of you immediately, in both directions. Block additionally prevents any future invite code between the two accounts from ever connecting.

Neither one notifies the other person. There is no signal, no count, and no way for them to tell which one you used, or whether you did anything at all.

10. What we do not promise

Availability. We work to keep VACUUM running, but we do not promise uninterrupted or error-free service. It is a small service run by a small company.

Delivery. Delivery is pull-based: a moment reaches someone when their app next opens and syncs. If they never open the app inside 30 days, they never see it, and it expires anyway. That is by design, not a failure.

Timing. "30 days" is 30 days plus a little operational slack on the server side, not a stopwatch. We would rather say that than pretend to a precision the infrastructure does not offer.

Recovery. There is no restore, no undelete, no support ticket that brings back an expired or deleted moment. We cannot do it; the data is gone.

To the extent the law allows, the service is provided as-is, and our liability to you for any claim connected with these terms is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim. Nothing in these terms limits or excludes any right you have under consumer-protection law that cannot be limited or excluded — in Brazil, the Código de Defesa do Consumidor (Law 8.078/1990), and wherever else mandatory local consumer law applies to you.

11. If VACUUM shuts down

If we ever close VACUUM down, we will say so publicly and give at least 60 days' notice before the service stops.

Here is the honest part: by design, there is nothing to lose. There is no archive, no back catalogue, no library of your photos held anywhere. Anything live at shutdown expires on its normal 30-day schedule or sooner. Active subscribers will not be charged for a period the service will not exist for.

VACUUM stops if the bills stop being paid. Subscribers deserve to hear that out loud rather than discover it.

12. Our own commitments

These are not legal obligations we are required to publish. We publish them because they are the product.

• No ads. No dark patterns. No subscriptions without a reason. This is the Skip the BS company promise and VACUUM is held to it.
• No advertising, ever, and no advertising identifiers.
• No selling your data. There is no data to sell, which is the strongest form of that promise.
• An annual transparency report, saying roughly what came in, what infrastructure cost, what was paid to the maintainer, and any donations — with receipts.
• Cancellation stays one action. If we ever add a step, we have broken a promise.

13. Changes to these terms

If we change these terms materially, we will say so on this page and email account holders before the change takes effect. Price changes follow the separate, stricter rule in section 5 — 60 days, at most twice a year.

Continuing to use VACUUM after a change means you accept it. If you do not, cancel and stop using the service; the Refund Policy says what you get back.

14. Law, and where disputes go

These terms are governed by the laws of Brazil, and the courts of [REGISTERED ADDRESS — the operator's domicile] have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer, this does not take away any protection you have under the mandatory law of the country you live in, and it does not stop you bringing a claim in your local courts where that law gives you the right to. Brazilian consumers keep every right in the Código de Defesa do Consumidor, including the right to bring proceedings in their own domicile.

Personal data is handled under Brazil's Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (LGPD, Law 13.709/2018). If you are in the EEA or the UK, we also honour the equivalent rights under the GDPR. Both are set out in the Privacy Policy.

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