What applies, between you and us.

1. What this is about

Heartwood is a private life archive operated by clicksgefühle GmbH & Co KG. You answer questions about your life – written or spoken – and decide yourself whether and when any of it is passed on to people you name.

These terms apply between you and us. The contract language is German. They are aimed at consumers; mandatory consumer protection provisions remain unaffected.

2. Account and sign-in

You need an email address you will keep access to. There is no password: to sign in we send you a link valid for 15 minutes that works only once.

If you lose access to that address, you lose access to your archive. We cannot transfer an account to a different address without verifying identity – and an archive that could be reassigned on request would not be a safe archive. So export your data regularly.

You must be at least 16 years old. Your account is personal; do not pass on the sign-in link.

3. What it costs

Up to your 30th answer, Heartwood is entirely free, with all features. Beyond that, a paid tier is planned for further answers.

That paid tier is currently not available for purchase. No price has been set and no payment is triggered. Once it is introduced, price, term and payment method will be clearly shown before ordering, including VAT, and the order will be expressly marked as payable. Whatever you have saved by then remains available and readable in any case.

4. Right of withdrawal

If you conclude a paid contract as a consumer, you may withdraw within 14 days without giving reasons. The period starts when the contract is concluded. An informal message to office@clicksgefuehle.at is sufficient.

If you expressly request that we begin performance immediately and confirm that you thereby lose your right of withdrawal once the contract has been fully performed, that right lapses early under those conditions (§ 18(1)(11) FAGG). Without such an express statement, the right of withdrawal remains in full.

5. Your content is yours

We acquire no rights in anything you write or speak beyond what running the service requires: storing it, showing it to you, transcribing it at your request, and passing it to the people you named once the conditions for that are met.

We do not analyse your content, do not pass it on, and do not use it for advertising or for training AI models. Which providers are technically involved, and what is still open there, is set out in the privacy policy.

You undertake not to submit content that infringes third-party rights or is unlawful. When you write about other people – and in a life archive you inevitably do – bear in mind that a later release affects those people too.

6. Availability and liability

We aim for continuous operation but do not owe any particular level of availability. Maintenance and faults may cause interruptions.

We are liable without limitation for intent and gross negligence and for injury to life, body or health. For slight negligence we are liable only for breach of essential contractual obligations, limited in amount to the foreseeable damage typical of this type of contract. Mandatory provisions, in particular of consumer protection and product liability law, remain unaffected.

An archive is no substitute for your own backup. We back up daily and keep backups for 30 days. Still, download your data regularly via the export – it is the only route that holds even if one day we no longer exist.

7. Termination and deletion

You may terminate at any time without notice by deleting your account in the menu. This permanently removes your answers, recordings, earlier versions, contacts and releases; they disappear from backups within 30 days. We may terminate with three months' notice; in that case we will tell you in good time how to export your content beforehand.

8. If you die

This section belongs in a life archive, however strange it reads.

We do not require proof of death – without a certificate and an authority we could not establish it anyway. What counts instead is your sign of life: as long as you sign in, nothing happens. After 90 days without a sign-in, we ask after you for 30 days. Then a further 30-day period begins, during which your trusted contacts are also notified. Only after that do the people you named gain access to what you designated for them. If two of your trusted contacts confirm your death, that shortens only the first 90 days; the enquiry period and the notice period run unchanged, and a single person cannot set anything in motion. Any single sign-in stops the entire process immediately – at any stage.

The contract does not end automatically on your death. Your heirs succeed to it and may have the account deleted. What you released during your lifetime remains accessible to the people you named – that is the purpose of the release, and we do not override it.

9. Changes to these terms

We may amend these terms if the law, case law or the features of the service change. We will notify you of any change by email at least six weeks in advance. If you do not object before it takes effect, it is deemed accepted – we will point this out separately in the notice. If you object, the contract ends when the change takes effect, and you keep access to your export until then.

10. Applicable law

Austrian law applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. As a consumer you do not thereby lose the protection of mandatory provisions of your country of residence. The place of jurisdiction for actions against consumers is their domicile, habitual residence or place of employment (§ 14 KSchG).