Terms of service

WordCloud+ is run by Poynter Services Limited, company number 12912324, registered in England and Wales and based in 38 South View Road, Carlton, Nottingham NG4 3QL, United Kingdom. In these terms "we", "us" and "our" mean that company, and "you" means the person or organisation using WordCloud+.

These terms apply to the website at https://wordcloudplus.com and everything it does: the no-sign-up preview, accounts, the editor, exports, CloudSync and the paid plans (together, "the service"). By using the service you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use it.

Our privacy notice explains what information we hold and why. It forms part of these terms.

You can try WordCloud+ without an account: the preview on the Create a word cloud page runs in your browser and asks for nothing. An account is needed to save projects, use the full editor and export images. You sign in with an email address or a Google account; sign-in is handled for us by Auth0.

There is no minimum age for using WordCloud+. If you are under 13, please ask a parent, guardian or teacher before creating an account, because an account holds your email address. Schools and teachers can use the service with their classes; the classroom page explains how, including why it is best to paste the words and not the names.

Keep your sign-in details to yourself and tell us if you think someone else has used your account. An account is for one person; please do not share a login between people. You are responsible for what is done with your account.

WordCloud+ turns text you paste or upload into a word cloud, ranking the words and phrases in it, and gives you tools to clean, style, annotate and export the result. The analysis runs in your browser, and your projects are stored in your browser on your device. If you turn on CloudSync (a Premium feature), your projects are encrypted in your browser and saved to your own Google Drive so that you can use them on another computer.

We improve the service continually and may add, change or remove features. If we remove something you rely on, we will say so on the site, and where it affects a paid plan we will give reasonable notice.

The Free plan costs $0. It includes as many projects as you like and every editing feature except those marked as Premium; every image you export on it carries a watermark.

Per Export is a one-off payment of $3.50 that removes the watermark from one project, for good, and allows commercial use of that project's exports. It is not a subscription.

Premium is a subscription of $7.00 a month. It removes the watermark from every project, allows commercial use, and adds CloudSync and the other features marked as Premium in the editor. Prices are shown in US dollars and are the prices on the pricing section at the time you buy. Where VAT or sales tax applies it is included in, or added to, the price shown at checkout.

Payments are taken by Stripe. We never see or store your card number. By starting a subscription you authorise us to charge your card each month until you cancel. If a payment fails we may pause the paid features until it succeeds.

We may change our prices. A change to the Premium price applies to you only from your next billing period after we have told you about it by email or on the site.

New Premium subscriptions start with a 30-day free trial. A card is taken at checkout, and the first monthly charge is made when the trial ends unless you cancel before then. You can cancel during the trial without being charged. One trial per person.

You can cancel a Premium subscription at any time from the billing page. Cancelling stops future charges; the plan stays active until the end of the period you have already paid for, and there is no refund for the remainder of that period.

A Per Export purchase takes effect straight away and is not refundable once the watermark has been removed from the project, except where the law says otherwise. If you buy by mistake, or something has gone wrong, email support@wordcloudplus.com and we will sort it out.

Nothing in this section takes away rights you have as a consumer under the law of the country you live in.

The text you paste in, any image you use to make a custom shape, and the word clouds you make from them, are yours. We claim no ownership of them. We need only the permission required to provide the service, which for most people is none at all, because the processing happens in your browser: neither the text nor the image is sent to us. If you use CloudSync, the permission extends to passing your encrypted projects to the Google Drive account you connect.

You are responsible for the text and images you use (for example a logo traced into a custom shape). Make sure you have the right to use them, and take care with other people's personal information: if you are analysing survey responses, interviews or reviews, remove names and anything else that identifies a person before you paste, unless you have a lawful reason to keep them.

Please do not use the service to process text that you are not allowed to hold, that is unlawful, or that would harm someone if it were disclosed.

Images exported on the Free plan carry a watermark and are for personal, educational and other non-commercial use. You may use them freely in lessons, coursework, presentations and social posts that do not sell anything.

Images exported from a project with a Per Export purchase, or from any project while you have a Premium subscription, carry no watermark and may be used commercially: in reports for clients, in products, in advertising and in anything else you charge for. You may not remove or obscure the watermark by other means.

Use the service for what it is for. In particular, do not:

• try to get around security, plan limits, rate limits or the watermark;
• access the service with scripts, bots or scrapers, or place an unreasonable load on it;
• copy, sell or resell the service, or use it to build a competing product;
• upload anything designed to damage or interfere with the service or another person's computer;
• impersonate anyone, or misuse our support channels;
• use the service to break the law, or to harass, threaten or harm anyone.

If you do, we may suspend or close your account (see section 12).

The service itself, including its software, design, text, images, the WordCloud+ name and logo, belongs to us or our licensors. These terms give you the right to use it, not to copy it, and no rights are granted beyond those stated here. The example texts on the site are public-domain works, credited on each example page.

We welcome ideas and bug reports. If you send us feedback, you agree that we can use it to improve the service without owing you anything for it, and without any obligation to keep it confidential.

You can delete your account at any time from Settings › Your data, which also lets you download everything we hold about you first. Deleting the account cancels any subscription, deletes our copy of your settings and your sign-in record, and clears the projects in that browser. Projects in other browsers, and anything you have saved to your own Google Drive, are yours to keep or delete.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms. Where it is reasonable to do so we will tell you first and give you the chance to put things right. We may also close accounts if we stop offering the service, in which case we will give you notice and time to export your data.

We aim to keep WordCloud+ available at all times, but we cannot promise it. Maintenance, faults and events outside our control can interrupt it. Because your projects live in your browser, an outage on our side does not take your work away, but we recommend exporting anything important and, for Premium users, keeping CloudSync on.

We provide the service with reasonable care and skill. Beyond that, it is provided as it is, and we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or suitable for a particular purpose. A word cloud is a visual summary: check anything important against the source text before relying on it.

We are not liable for loss of data held in your browser or your Google Drive, for loss of profit or business, or for indirect losses. Our total liability to you for anything arising from the service is limited to the amount you have paid us in the six months before the claim arose.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited or excluded by law, and nothing in them affects your statutory rights as a consumer.

How we handle personal information is set out in our privacy notice. In short: your text stays in your browser, we hold the minimum needed to run your account and take payment, our analytics are cookieless, and you can export or delete everything from Settings › Your data.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales. If something goes wrong, please contact us first at support@wordcloudplus.com: most problems are quicker to fix than to argue about. If we cannot resolve it between us, the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you live in the European Union or elsewhere and are a consumer, you also keep the protection of the mandatory rules of the country you live in, and you may bring a claim in its courts.

We may update these terms as the service changes. The date at the top shows when they last changed. If a change materially affects your rights or a paid plan we will tell you on the site or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that date means you accept the new terms.

Email support@wordcloudplus.com, or write to Poynter Services Limited, 38 South View Road, Carlton, Nottingham NG4 3QL, United Kingdom.