Terms of Service

Last updated: May 17, 2026

These Terms of Service (the "Terms") govern your access to and use of HelloFriendo (the "Service"). Please read them carefully. They are a legally binding agreement between you and the operator of the Service identified in our Imprint.

Acceptance of Terms

By creating an account, accessing, or otherwise using HelloFriendo, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms and by our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, you must not use the Service.

Eligibility

HelloFriendo is intended for adults and older teenagers. By using the Service you represent that you meet all of the following:

You are at least 16 years old.
You have the legal capacity to enter into a binding contract in your jurisdiction.
You will maintain only one personal account. Duplicate or shared accounts are not permitted.
You are not located in, or a national of, a country subject to comprehensive sanctions, and you are not on any restricted-party or terrorist list.

The Service

HelloFriendo provides anonymous, structured group conversations and mutual-reveal friendship matching. The Service is designed to help adults meet new friends through guided prompts and consent-based identity reveals. Features and functionality may evolve over time.

The Service is a social platform, not a dating service, a counselling service, an emergency service, or a substitute for professional advice. If you are in crisis or in danger, contact your local emergency services.

Account Responsibilities

When you register and while you use the Service, you agree to:

Provide accurate information. Your registration details and profile information must be truthful and kept up to date.
Not impersonate anyone. Do not pretend to be another person, misrepresent your age, or use another person's identity, photos, or credentials.
Keep your credentials confidential. You are responsible for the security of your password, recovery codes, and any third-party login providers connected to your account.
Accept responsibility for activity on your account. All actions taken through your account are presumed to be yours.
Notify us promptly if you suspect any unauthorised access or use of your account.

Acceptable Use

These rules describe how you may and may not use the Service. They replace any separate acceptable-use policy. You agree not to do, attempt, or facilitate any of the following:

Harassment, hate speech, threats, doxxing, or violence. Targeted abuse, slurs, incitement, or content that attacks people based on protected characteristics is prohibited.
Zero tolerance for content sexualising or endangering minors. Any such content will result in immediate permanent ban and, where required by law, reporting to the competent authorities (e.g., NCMEC, national CSAM hotlines).
No sharing of personal contact information before a mutual reveal. Do not share or solicit phone numbers, social handles, addresses, or other off-platform identifiers prior to a consensual reveal.
Respect other users' privacy. Do not share, screenshot, record, or republish another user's personal information, messages, photos, or audio without their explicit consent.
No spam, scams, MLM, or unsolicited advertising. Do not use the Service to promote products or services, recruit for schemes, run frauds, or solicit money.
No impersonation, catfishing, or fake profiles. Your profile must represent you authentically.
No automated access, scraping, or reverse engineering. Do not use bots, scrapers, or unauthorised clients, and do not attempt to derive source code or circumvent security controls.
No circumventing bans, rate limits, or paywalls. Creating new accounts to evade enforcement, or bypassing technical or commercial restrictions, is prohibited.
No unlawful content or conduct. Do not use the Service in any way that violates applicable law in your jurisdiction or in ours, including infringement of intellectual property, defamation, or invasion of privacy.

We may, at our sole discretion and without prior notice, remove content, suspend features, restrict accounts, or take any other action we consider appropriate to enforce these rules and protect the community.

User-Generated Content

You retain all ownership rights in the messages, profile content, photos, and other material you submit to the Service ("User Content"). HelloFriendo does not claim ownership of your User Content.

You grant HelloFriendo a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable licence to host, store, reproduce, transmit, display, adapt for technical reasons (e.g., resizing or format conversion), and otherwise use your User Content solely to the extent necessary to operate, provide, secure, and improve the Service. This licence ends when your User Content is deleted from our active systems, except for backups, anonymised analytics, and content we are required to retain by law.

We may remove or restrict access to User Content that we reasonably believe violates these Terms, our community rules, or applicable law, or that may expose us or our users to legal or safety risk.

Reveal and Contact Exchange

HelloFriendo offers a mutual-reveal feature that allows two users to exchange identity details and the contact links each of them has chosen to share. A reveal occurs only when both users consent. Once a reveal has taken place, the information shared is in the hands of the other user, and HelloFriendo cannot recall or revoke it. Use the reveal feature deliberately.

You acknowledge that contacting other users off-platform, meeting in person, or sharing additional personal information is your own decision and at your own risk. Apply ordinary safety precautions when interacting with people you have not met before.

Subscriptions, Billing, and Refunds

Paid subscription tiers are billed on a monthly or annual basis through our payment providers, currently Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, and/or PayPal. Available plans, prices, and features are described at checkout and may be updated from time to time.

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period until cancelled. You can cancel at any time from /settings/billing. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period; access continues until then.

EU Right of Withdrawal (Cooling-Off Period)

If you are a consumer in the European Union, you have the right to withdraw from a paid subscription within 14 days of the conclusion of the contract, without giving any reason. To exercise this right, send a clear statement of withdrawal to our support email. If you withdraw in time, we will refund the amount paid, less a pro-rated deduction for any portion of the Service already supplied up to the time you notified us.

By starting to use a paid feature during the 14-day period, you expressly request that performance begin immediately and acknowledge that you will lose your right of withdrawal once the Service has been fully performed, in accordance with Article 16(m) of Directive 2011/83/EU.

Refunds Outside the EU

Outside the European Union, refunds are provided at our discretion, typically on a pro-rata basis for unused full billing periods. Free trials that are cancelled before the trial ends are not charged.

VAT and Sales Tax

Prices may be shown inclusive or exclusive of taxes, as required by your jurisdiction. Applicable VAT, GST, or sales tax is calculated and collected by our payment provider in accordance with the laws of your country of residence.

Termination

You may terminate this agreement at any time by deleting your account from within the Service. Deleting your account starts the GDPR-aligned data-deletion pipeline described in our Privacy Policy. Some information may be retained as permitted or required by law (e.g., billing records, abuse logs).

HelloFriendo may suspend or terminate your account, or any part of the Service available to you, if we reasonably believe you have materially violated these Terms, created risk or legal exposure for us or our users, or for any other reason permitted by law. Where feasible, we will give you prior notice and a reasonable opportunity to remedy the issue.

On termination, your right to use the Service ends. Sections of these Terms that by their nature should survive termination (including those concerning User Content licences, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, governing law, and miscellaneous provisions) will survive. Data retention after termination is governed by our Privacy Policy.

Suspension and Bans

We may temporarily suspend access to your account or specific features while we investigate a potential violation, security incident, or payment issue. For severe violations - including those affecting the safety of minors, threats of violence, or repeated abuse - we may issue a permanent ban without prior notice.

You may appeal a suspension or ban by writing to [email protected] with your account identifier and a description of the situation. We will review appeals in good faith but make no guarantee of reinstatement.

Trust and Safety

The Service provides in-app reporting tools so you can flag harmful behaviour, content that breaks these Terms, or safety concerns. We encourage you to use them.

We cooperate with law enforcement and other competent authorities when legally required (for example, in response to valid legal process) and where necessary to protect the safety of our users or the public.

We do not pre-moderate all content on the Service. Moderation is performed through a combination of automated systems, user reports, and human review. The absence of moderation action does not imply endorsement of any content.

Disclaimers

The Service is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. To the maximum extent permitted by law, HelloFriendo disclaims all warranties, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, and uninterrupted or error-free operation.

We do not guarantee that you will receive matches, that any specific person will agree to a reveal, that conversations will lead to friendships, or that other users are who they say they are. We do not perform background checks or otherwise vet users.

Nothing in this section affects mandatory consumer rights that cannot be excluded or limited under the law applicable to you.

Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the total aggregate liability of HelloFriendo, its affiliates, and its personnel arising out of or relating to the Service or these Terms in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us for the Service in the 12 months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) EUR 100.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for gross negligence, wilful misconduct, fraud, death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law (including mandatory EU consumer law).

Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold HelloFriendo, its affiliates, and its personnel harmless from and against any claims, damages, liabilities, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to: (i) your misuse of the Service; (ii) your violation of these Terms or of applicable law; or (iii) your infringement of any third-party right, including intellectual-property or privacy rights. This obligation does not apply where prohibited by law.

Intellectual Property

The HelloFriendo name, logos, trademarks, software, design system, brand assets, and the look and feel of the Service are owned by us or our licensors and are protected by intellectual-property and unfair-competition laws. Except for the limited rights expressly granted in these Terms, no licence is granted to you, by implication or otherwise.

If you send us suggestions, ideas, or feedback about the Service, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide licence to use them for any purpose, without any obligation to you.

Copyright and DMCA Notices

If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, send a written notice to [email protected] in accordance with 17 U.S.C. § 512 (DMCA) or the equivalent requirements in your jurisdiction. Your notice should include:

Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed.
Identification of the allegedly infringing material and information reasonably sufficient to locate it on the Service.
Your contact information (name, address, email, telephone).
A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law, and a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are authorised to act on the rights holder's behalf.
Your physical or electronic signature.

We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances.

Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. For material changes, we will notify you at least 30 days in advance by email and through an in-app banner. Non-material updates may take effect immediately. The "Last updated" date at the top of these Terms reflects the latest version. By continuing to use the Service after the effective date of the updated Terms, you accept them. If you do not agree, you must stop using the Service before that date.

Governing Law and Dispute Resolution

These Terms are governed by the laws of State of Delaware, United States (default: Slovenia / European Union), without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Disputes that cannot be resolved informally are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the competent courts of state and federal courts located in Delaware. If you are a consumer in the European Union, you retain the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence, and you may bring proceedings in the courts of that country.

Consumers in the European Union may also use the Online Dispute Resolution platform provided by the European Commission at https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr/. We are not obliged, and are not currently willing, to participate in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.

Miscellaneous

Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and any other policies referenced herein, constitute the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service.
Severability. If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force and effect, and the invalid provision will be replaced by a valid one that most closely reflects the original intent.
No waiver. Our failure to enforce any right or provision of these Terms is not a waiver of that right or provision.
Assignment. You may not assign or transfer these Terms or any rights or obligations under them without our prior written consent. We may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganisation, or sale of assets, on reasonable notice to you.
Force majeure. We are not liable for any failure or delay in performance caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including natural disasters, war, civil unrest, labour disputes, network or hosting provider failures, or governmental action.

Contact

Questions about these Terms? Contact HelloFriendo at [email protected]. The legal entity providing the Service and its registered details are listed on our Imprint.