Terms of Service

Effective date: 12 October 2026

These terms are the agreement between you and the operator of Novagora named in the Impressum ("we", "us", "the Novagora team"). They cover the Novagora apps for iOS and Android, the web app at novagora.app and everything they give you access to (the "Service"). You accept them when you create an account, and we record the edition you accepted.

The Community Guidelines, the Privacy Policy and, for the apps, the End User License Agreement are part of this agreement; the Cookie Notice explains storage in your browser. If these terms and the Community Guidelines conflict, these terms prevail.

1. Who can use the Service

You must be at least 16 and able to enter into this agreement. If you use the Service for an organisation, you confirm that you may act for it. If we terminated an account of yours for a violation, you may not sign up again unless we agree.

2. Your account

• An account needs a valid, verified email address, a unique username and a password of at least ten characters; we refuse passwords found in known data breaches and addresses at disposable email services. An account that is never verified is removed after 7 days. While sign-up is paused, only invited addresses can sign up.
• Keep your password private, use two-factor authentication if you can, and tell us at [email protected] if you think someone else has access.
• Your username is public and forms your profile address. One change every 30 days is free; another change within those 30 days costs credits, at the price shown before you confirm. Your old name stays reserved for 30 days.
• You may hold more than one account, but not to get around a restriction, block, limit or other enforcement measure. Accounts are personal and may not be sold, rented or transferred.

3. The Service

Novagora is a community platform. People run Spaces with a feed, posts, articles, chat, events, tasks, notes, polls and files, and follow people and Spaces. Your public profile card is visible to everyone; everything else is visible to the audience you choose.

The core is free and stays free: signing up, creating and joining Spaces, posting, commenting, reacting, following, chatting, events, tasks, notes, polls and a reasonable amount of photo upload. Paid plans and credits (section 7) add allowances, higher limits and paid amplification; they never gate the core.

We develop the Service and may add, change or retire features. We tell you in advance where we reasonably can, and section 7.6 applies to paid features.

4. Your content

4.1 It stays yours

You keep all rights in what you post, write, upload or send ("your content").

4.2 The licence you give us

You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, resize, re-encode, cache, transmit and display your content and to make it available to the audience you chose, for as long as it is on the Service. It covers only what running the Service needs: thumbnails and previews, video transcoding, search indexing, public web pages and backups. We do not use your content for advertising, sell it or train models with it.

The licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for copies others already received in the normal course of the Service, content a safety case holds as evidence for that case, and backups until they rotate. What you posted in other people's Spaces and chats stays after your account is anonymised, attributed to a deleted user.

4.3 Your responsibility

You are responsible for your content and confirm that you have the rights to post it and that it complies with the Community Guidelines and the law. We do not review content before it is published and are not its author. If someone makes a claim against us because content you posted or your use of the Service culpably violated their rights or the law, you indemnify us against that claim, including reasonable costs of legal defence. This does not apply if you are not at fault. We tell you about such a claim promptly and let you take part in the defence.

4.4 Public content

Public profiles, public Spaces, public articles and events, and notes shared by link are visible to anyone, also without signing in, and search engines may index them. A note share link works for the time and number of reveals shown when you create it.

5. Spaces

A Space is owned by a person, who decides who may join, its own rules and who moderates. Owners and moderators may remove content, restrict or remove members and handle reports routed to them; a Space's rules add to the Community Guidelines and never loosen them. Owners run their Space in line with these terms; where an owner does not act on a serious problem, we do. Owners see moderation information about their Space but never who reported. Before deleting your account you must transfer or delete each Space you own. A deleted Space is removed after 7 days.

6. Rules of conduct

You follow the Community Guidelines, and you do not:

• use the Service other than through the official apps and web app, or interfere with its operation, security or limits;
• collect data about other users at scale or scrape the Service;
• get around a block, restriction, limit, paywall or other measure;
• reverse engineer, decompile or copy the apps except where the law allows it (see the End User License Agreement);
• use the Service to break the law or help others do so.

To keep the Service working for everyone, we limit what one account can do per minute and per day, how much of each kind of content it can publish per day, the minutes of video it can send per day and how much it can upload per day (currently 2 GiB). The limits are well above normal use; an action beyond one is refused. We also limit sign-up and sign-in attempts per network and verification and password-reset emails per address, and we may adjust limits to protect the Service.

7. Plans, credits and purchases

7.1 Who sells to you

Pro and Ultra plans and credit packs are in-app purchases sold by Apple (Apple Distribution International Ltd. in the EU) through the App Store or by Google (Google Commerce Ltd. in the EU) through Google Play. They take the payment, issue the receipt, charge VAT and handle refunds under their terms. Nothing is sold on the web, and we never see your payment details.

7.2 Subscriptions

A plan renews automatically at the end of each period until you cancel it in your Apple ID or Google Play settings; cancelling stops the next renewal and does not refund the current period. Price, period and allowance are shown in the store before you buy and in the app. A plan belongs to the account and store account that bought it.

7.3 Credits

Credits are the Service's internal unit for things that cost us real money or amplify your content. Credits:

• have no cash value, cannot be exchanged for money and are not refunded by us, subject to the store's refund policy and your statutory rights;
• come in four kinds: purchased and gifted credits, which never expire and which you may gift within the limits shown in the app; a plan's monthly allowance, which expires in full at the end of its period without carry-over and cannot be gifted; referral credits, which expire 90 days after they are granted and cannot be gifted; and a one-time welcome gift on verifying your email, which expires 30 days after it is granted and cannot be gifted. We do not grant the welcome gift to, and may withdraw unspent welcome credits from, accounts our abuse protection limits or links to several accounts sharing one email inbox;
• are spent at prices shown before you confirm;
• are forfeited when your account is deleted or terminated for a violation;
• may be adjusted by us to correct a fulfilment error, a duplicate grant, a refunded purchase or fraud, and we tell you when we do.

We may change credit prices, allowances and what credits buy. A change never removes purchased or gifted credits you hold; allowances and the welcome gift still expire as described. A subscription price change applies from the next renewal at the earliest, with the notice the store requires.

7.4 Promotions

Spending credits to promote a post, article or event lifts it in ranking for a period. Promotion is the only advertising on the Service, is always labelled, buys ranking points rather than a guaranteed position and does not exempt content from the Community Guidelines.

If you stop a promotion or remove the promoted content yourself, the credits are not returned. If moderation removes the content or we end the promotion early, we return the credits for the unused time, in proportion and rounded down, to the balance they came from: purchased credits always; allowance credits only while that allowance period runs; welcome credits only while the gift has not expired or been withdrawn. Otherwise that share is forfeited.

7.5 Refunds and withdrawal

Apple or Google decide refunds for in-app purchases under their rules. As an EU consumer you may withdraw from a distance purchase within 14 days. For digital content delivered at once, such as a credit pack, the store asks you to agree to immediate delivery and to acknowledge that you lose the right of withdrawal once delivery begins (§ 356(5) of the German Civil Code and its equivalents).

7.6 If we withdraw a paid feature

If we discontinue a paid plan or a materially important paid feature during a period you have paid for, you may end the plan, and we make sure you are refunded for the unused part through the store or, if you prefer, receive credits of equal value.

8. Moderation and enforcement

8.1 How moderation works

Everyday reports about content in a Space go to that Space's moderators. Reports about people or whole Spaces, and every serious category (sexual content involving minors, violence and threats, self-harm, illegal content), come to us, and a Space cannot overrule them. People decide on reports, content removal and account termination; protection against spam and automated misuse works automatically (section 8.2).

8.2 Automated abuse protection

The Service automatically detects spam, fake accounts and automated misuse, such as the same text or link sent to many audiences, messages and follow requests nobody answers, machine-like pace and unused uploads, supported by refused requests, reports and other members' reactions, and computes a trust level from these signals and the account's age, verification and history. Without a person reviewing first it can slow an account down, ask for a bot check before posting, commenting or messaging, hold its posts and articles from the last 72 hours and new ones until an administrator reviews them, or suspend it for 24 hours. An account refused over limits an extreme number of times is also suspended for 24 hours. Limits ease as signals age; held content is released by an administrator. Section 5.2 of the Privacy Policy explains the logic. You are told about each decision and can have a person review it (section 8.5).

8.3 Reporting

Every profile, Space and piece of visible content has a report action. Anyone, signed in or not, can also report illegal content to [email protected]: say what and where it is (a link), why you believe it is illegal or against the Guidelines, and how we can reach you. We act on notices without undue delay and aim to handle reports within 24 hours. Reporters are never named to the person reported. Knowingly false reports are a violation.

8.4 Our right to moderate and suspend

If content or behaviour violates these terms, the Community Guidelines or the law, or puts people or the Service at risk, we may, in proportion to the violation and its history: warn you; remove or hide content; hold it from feeds; limit a feature, slow your account or ask you to confirm you are a person; remove you from a Space; suspend your account; or terminate it. Severe violations skip steps. We may preserve content as evidence and, where the law requires or someone's life or safety is at risk, inform law enforcement. When deciding, we consider the legitimate interests of everyone involved, including your freedom of expression.

8.5 Reasons and disputes

When we remove your content or restrict your account we tell you what we did, which rule it rests on and how to dispute it, unless that would endanger someone or is prohibited. Write to [email protected] within six months to dispute a decision; a person not involved in it reviews it and answers with reasons. Automatic restrictions and our administrators' decisions are explained on the Account standing page in Settings, where you can also request a review of an automatic restriction; a suspension is also emailed. Email always works, also while suspended. Your right to go to court or to a dispute-resolution body is not affected.

8.6 Point of contact

Our single point of contact for authorities and users, including under the Digital Services Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2065), is [email protected], in German or English.

9. Ending the agreement

You can delete your account at any time in Settings; the Privacy Policy describes the 30-day grace period. We may terminate your account with reasonable notice, and without notice where a violation is serious, the law requires it or continuing would put people or the Service at risk. We may discontinue the Service with at least three months' notice by email, during which you can export your data. On termination your licence to use the apps ends, unused credits are forfeited, and sections 4.2, 4.3, 10, 11 and 13 continue to apply.

10. Our intellectual property

The apps, the web app, their design and code and the Novagora name and marks belong to us or our licensors. You may use them only to use the Service, and not the name or marks without our written permission. Open-source components are used under their own licences.

11. Availability and liability

11.1 Availability

We provide the Service with reasonable care, as it stands at any given time. We do not promise that it is always available or free of errors: it may be interrupted for maintenance, updates, incidents or reasons outside our control, and moderation does not catch every violation. We are not responsible for what other users publish or for sites that links lead to. Your statutory rights for paid features are not affected.

11.2 Liability

We are liable without limit for intent and gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the Product Liability Act and under any guarantee we expressly gave.

For slight negligence we are liable only for breach of an obligation whose fulfilment makes the proper performance of this agreement possible at all and on which you may regularly rely (a cardinal obligation), and then only for damage that is foreseeable and typical for this kind of agreement. Otherwise liability for slight negligence is excluded. For the free parts of the Service we are liable for defects only if we fraudulently concealed them.

These limits also apply to the personal liability of people who work for us. Liability that cannot be limited by law is not limited.

12. Third-party services

The Service relies on the providers named by role in the Privacy Policy and on Apple's and Google's stores and push services, whose terms govern your relationship with them.

13. Governing law and disputes

German law applies, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. As a consumer you keep the protection of the mandatory law of the country where you live and may sue and be sued in its courts. We are neither willing nor obliged to take part in dispute resolution before a consumer arbitration board (§ 36 of the German Consumer Dispute Resolution Act).

14. Changes to these terms

We change these terms when the Service, our obligations or the law change. Each edition has a version number and an effective date. A change that affects your rights or obligations applies to you only once you accept it: the app asks you to read and accept the new edition before you continue, and you may decline and delete your account instead. Editorial changes and changes that only benefit you may apply without acceptance.

15. General

If a provision is invalid, the rest remains in force and the statutory rules apply in its place. We may transfer this agreement to a company that takes over the Service; we tell you in advance, and you may then end the agreement by deleting your account. You may not transfer your account. The English and German editions say the same thing; the edition you accepted applies to you, and where a difference cannot be resolved, the English edition prevails, without limiting mandatory consumer law.

16. Contact

[email protected], for questions about these terms, notices about illegal content and disputes.