youish

Terms of use

Last updated: 30 September 2026

These terms are a binding agreement between you and the operator of youish (“youish”, “we”, “us”). They cover the website at youish.app, including the journal, the letter workshop, practice, stories, and the contact page. By creating an account, signing in, or using the site, you agree to these terms and to the Privacy notice. If you are under 18, your parent or legal guardian agrees to them for you. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

In short

  • Your journal, drawings, glyphs, and letter maps belong to you.
  • The journal password is separate from your account password. If you forget the journal password, we cannot open the entries.
  • The service is free. We do not take payment.
  • The minimum age depends on the country where you live. It is 13, 14, 15, or 16. Under 18, a parent or guardian must agree to these terms for you.
  • Mandatory laws where you live still apply, including rights that cannot be waived.

1. The service

youish is a private journal that uses signs you invent. You can draw or upload a sheet, choose a reference style, generate signs, keep glyphs, map them to letters, practise them, and write journal entries. You can add tags and set the alignment and spacing of an entry. Stories on the site are written by youish. They are part of the site, not part of your journal.

The service is free. We do not sell products, take payments, or run a shop. If we ever charge for a feature, we will say so before you pay, and we will update these terms first.

We may change, limit, or stop features. We cannot promise that every version of the site will stay online.

2. Age

youish is a private journal. It is not directed at children, and it is not a social product for minors. The age to create an account follows the country where you live. We do not open an account for anyone under 13.

These are the minimum ages we apply. They follow the local age for consent to this kind of data use:

  • 13: Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Malta, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
  • 14: Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Italy, Lithuania, and Spain.
  • 15: Czechia, Denmark, France, Greece, and Slovenia.
  • 16: Croatia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.

For a country that is not listed, the minimum is 16, unless that country has set a different age by law. If the law where you live requires an older age than the one listed, that older age applies.

A person under 18 cannot agree to these terms alone. That rule is separate from the ages above, and it applies in every country, including where the privacy age is 13, 14, or 15. The UK Children’s Code, and similar age-appropriate design rules, also treat anyone under 18 as a child. If you are under 18, you may use youish only if a parent or legal guardian has read these terms and the Privacy notice and agreed to them on your behalf. Creating an account while you are under 18 is your confirmation that they have done so.

In the United States, COPPA applies under 13, which is why the United States is in the 13 group. California and some other states add duties for teenagers, including limits on selling or sharing personal information of people aged 13 to 15 and, in some laws, under 16 or under 18. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

If we know that a person is under the age for their country, or is under 18 without a parent or guardian who agreed, we close the account and delete the personal data we hold for it. A sentence in these terms does not allow us to keep the account after we know.

3. Your account

When you register, you agree to give a real name and a real email address, keep them accurate, and keep the account password to yourself. The account password needs at least 6 characters. We store a hash of it. We cannot show it back to you. If you forget the account password, write to us from that email and we can help you set a new one.

You are responsible for activity under your account. Tell us, through the contact page, if you believe someone else is using it. Do not use another person’s account, and do not share yours.

4. The journal password

The first time you open the journal, you create a journal password and enter it twice. It needs at least 6 characters. It is a password for the journal. We do not receive it. The key that opens the journal is created in your browser and stays in memory only for that visit. When you leave or refresh, the journal locks again.

After you create that password, the title and text of each entry are encrypted in the browser before they are saved, using AES-256-GCM. We store the encrypted text and the wrapped key material needed for your browser to open it with that password. We do not have the key. We cannot read the title or the text. If you forget the journal password, the entries cannot be restored. There is no recovery code, and support cannot unlock them.

Until you create the journal password, the title and text are stored so the account can load them.

Tags, creation and update times, alignment, line spacing, and letter spacing are saved with the entry and are not inside the encrypted text. Letter maps, glyphs, fonts, practice progress, and display settings are saved with the account and are not covered by the journal password. Uploaded sheets stay in your browser and are not copied into the account.

You are responsible for remembering the journal password and for keeping any copy of your writing that you need. If we discontinue the service, we cannot decrypt a locked journal for you.

5. Your content

You keep ownership of your drawings, glyphs, letter maps, fonts you generate for yourself, and journal entries (“your content”). We do not claim ownership of your content.

You give us a limited licence to host, store, back up, and transmit your content only so we can operate the service and show it back to you. For a locked journal, that licence is to store and return the encrypted text. It is not a licence to read the title or the writing. The licence ends when the content is deleted, except for a short-lived provider backup described in the Privacy notice, or a copy we must keep to meet a legal duty.

Generated signs are for your use in youish: the journal, practice, and the letter map. We do not promise that a sign is unique, original, or free of resemblance to a known letter or to someone else’s mark. Generation can fail, and a result can differ from the reference you chose.

You are responsible for your content. You confirm that you have the rights you need to upload it, that it does not infringe anyone else’s rights, and that it complies with these terms and with the law that applies to you.

6. Acceptable use

You agree not to use youish to:

  • Break a law that applies to you, including sanctions and export rules
  • Infringe someone else’s rights, including intellectual property and privacy
  • Upload content that is illegal, or that threatens, harasses, or defames another person
  • Upload viruses, malware, or other harmful code
  • Try to access our systems, another person’s account, or another person’s journal without permission
  • Interfere with the service, or probe it beyond what a normal account can do
  • Collect other people’s information without their consent
  • Use bots or scripts to overload the service or to pull other people’s data
  • Impersonate another person

We may remove content and suspend or close an account that breaks these rules.

7. Our property

The site, its design, the youish name, the stories we publish, and the software that runs the service belong to us or to our licensors, and are protected by intellectual-property laws. Your content is excluded.

We give you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the site for your own private journaling. You may not copy the service, resell it, or present it as your own product. You may not reverse engineer it except where the law expressly allows that. You may not use the youish name or marks as the name of another product without written permission.

8. Other people’s services

Sign generation sends your drawing to Replicate (Flux). Replicate’s terms apply to that step. We do not send your journal, your email, or your passwords to Replicate.

The site loads a Google tag so we can understand visits. Google’s terms and privacy rules apply to that tag. We do not send your journal text or your passwords to Google.

We are not responsible for a third-party site or tool that you open from youish, or for the availability of Replicate or Google. Links, if we show them, are there for convenience.

9. Privacy

How we handle personal data is described in the Privacy notice. That notice is part of the agreement between you and us. Where these terms and the notice describe the same fact, they are meant to be read together. The journal-password rules in these terms control if a sentence elsewhere is older.

10. No warranty

The service, including generated signs and the journal lock, is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent allowed by law, we disclaim warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, satisfactory quality, quiet enjoyment, and non-infringement, and any warranty that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure, or that a defect will be corrected.

We do not warrant that generation will succeed, that a sign will match a style, or that a locked journal can be opened without the journal password. We take reasonable care with the service. That care is not a promise that encryption, storage, or transmission is perfect.

Some countries do not allow an exclusion of this kind. In those places, the exclusion applies only as far as the law allows, and statutory rights stay in force.

11. Liability

To the maximum extent allowed by law, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive loss, or for loss of data, profits, or goodwill, arising from your use of the service or from your inability to use it. This includes a journal that cannot be opened because the journal password is lost, and a drawing or sign that is lost because a provider fails.

Where a cap is allowed, our total liability for a claim arising from these terms is limited to the amount you paid us for the service in the 12 months before the claim. The service is free, so that amount may be zero.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for any other liability that the law does not allow us to exclude or limit. If you are a consumer, mandatory consumer rights in your country of residence remain in force.

12. Responsibility for your content

To the extent the law allows, you agree to cover claims, losses, and reasonable legal costs brought against us because of your content, your use of the service, or your breach of these terms or of someone else’s rights. This does not apply to the extent the claim is caused by our own breach, and it does not take away rights a consumer cannot waive.

13. Closing an account

You may delete your account at any time from the Privacy page while you are signed in. Deletion removes the account and the saved journal, letter maps, glyphs, and fonts from the account store, and clears sheets stored in that browser. A locked journal is deleted as ciphertext. Deleting the account does not decrypt it, and it does not create a copy for you.

We may suspend or close an account if you break these terms, if the law requires it, or if we discontinue the service. When we reasonably can, we will tell you. If the law requires us to act immediately, we may not be able to tell you first. If we close an account because you broke these terms, and a paid feature exists at that time, fees already paid are not refunded except where the law requires a refund.

14. Changes

We may update these terms. The date at the top will change. If a change is significant, we will also show a notice in the service when we reasonably can. Continuing to use youish after the update means you accept the new terms. If you do not agree, stop using the service and delete your account.

15. If a term cannot be enforced

If a court or authority finds that a sentence in these terms is invalid or cannot be enforced where you live, that sentence is limited or removed there. The rest of the terms stay in place. We will treat the invalid sentence as replaced by the closest valid rule that still matches what the sentence was trying to do.

16. The whole agreement

These terms and the Privacy notice are the whole agreement between you and us about the service. They replace earlier understandings about the same subject. If we do not enforce a term once, that is not a waiver of the right to enforce it later. You may not transfer your account or these terms to someone else. We may assign them to a successor that continues the service, and we will tell you if that happens.

17. Laws that apply

These terms apply wherever you use youish. They do not replace mandatory laws in the country where you live, including consumer, privacy, and data-protection rules that cannot be waived. Those rules stay in force. Please contact us and give us a reasonable chance to resolve a dispute directly before you start a formal claim.

18. Contact

Questions about these terms: info@youish.app, or the Contact page.