Terms of Service

The agreement

This is an agreement between you and Ocean Creative LLC, a Pennsylvania limited liability company. It covers the Deft iPhone app, the Deft Plus subscription, our sync service, and oceancreative.app. If you do not agree with it, please do not use the app.

You need to be at least 13 years old to use Deft, and if you are under 18 you should have a parent or guardian's permission. Handling money is also subject to your bank's rules, which are between you and them.

What Deft is

Deft is a personal bookkeeping app. It records what you spend and earn, sorts it into categories and budgets, and — if you subscribe — pulls transactions from your bank so you do not have to type them in. That is the whole product.

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use Deft on Apple devices you own or control, in the way the App Store terms allow. You may not resell it, rent it out, reverse engineer it beyond what the law permits regardless of contract, or strip out its notices.

Not financial advice

Ocean Creative is not a bank, broker, lender, investment adviser, tax preparer, or accountant, and Deft is not any of those things either. Everything it shows you — balances, budgets, categories, projections, summaries — is informational and organizational. It is not a recommendation, and it is not advice about what to buy, sell, borrow, or file.

Bank data reaches the app through third parties, and it can arrive late, arrive incomplete, be categorized wrongly, or not arrive at all. Pending transactions change. Institutions go down. Before you make a decision that matters — a payment, a tax filing, a large purchase — check your actual bank or a qualified professional. Your financial institution's records, not Deft's, are the source of truth.

Your data and your device

Your ledger is stored on your iPhone. That is a deliberate design choice, and it has a consequence worth stating plainly: if you delete the app, reset the phone, or lose the device without a backup, that data is gone, and we cannot recover it because we never had it. Keeping a backup is your responsibility, and iPhone or iCloud backups are the usual way to do it.

You keep ownership of everything you enter. We do not claim any rights in it. What we do with the small amount of information that reaches our server is described in the Privacy Policy, which is part of this agreement.

Deft Plus and billing

Deft is usable as a manual ledger without paying. Deft Plus is the optional subscription that adds automatic bank sync.

• Price. $6.99 per month, or $59.99 per year, in US dollars, plus any tax Apple collects.
• Free trial. New subscribers get one month free. If you cancel before the trial ends, you are not charged. Following Apple's standard rule, any unused part of a free trial is forfeited if you purchase a subscription during the trial period.
• Auto-renewal. The subscription renews automatically for the same period until you cancel. Apple charges your App Store account at confirmation of purchase, and again within 24 hours before the end of each period.
• Who bills you. Apple does, through your App Store account. We never see or handle your payment details.
• Price changes. We may change prices. Apple will notify you of an increase and, where required, ask for your consent; a new price never applies to a period you have already paid for.

Cancelling and refunds

Cancel any time in your App Store subscription settings on your iPhone, under your Apple Account. To avoid the next charge, cancel at least 24 hours before the current period ends. Cancelling stops the renewal; the subscription keeps working until the period you paid for runs out.

Refunds are handled entirely by Apple under the App Store terms, and they are at Apple's discretion. We cannot issue refunds, cannot prorate a partial period, and have no ability to reverse an App Store charge. If you want a refund, request it from Apple through reportaproblem.apple.com or your purchase receipt. We are still glad to help with anything on the app's side — write to us and we will do what we can.

Bank connections

Bank sync runs through Plaid Inc. When you link an institution, you confirm that the accounts are yours or that you are authorized to access them, and you authorize us and Plaid to retrieve account and transaction data on your behalf for as long as the connection is active.

Your credentials go to Plaid directly and we never see them. Plaid's own terms and its End User Privacy Policy apply to what Plaid does, alongside your agreement with your bank.

We do not control whether an institution stays connected. Banks change their systems, revoke access, or require you to re-authenticate, and connections break for reasons no one on our side can fix. You can disconnect an institution in the app at any time, which removes the connection on our side.

Acceptable use

The short version: use the app for your own bookkeeping and do not attack it. Concretely, do not use Deft for anything unlawful, do not link accounts you have no right to access, do not probe, scrape, overload, or attempt to break into our servers or API, do not try to circumvent subscription checks, and do not use the service to build a competing product from our data.

Availability and changes

We are a small studio. We will keep the service running as best we reasonably can, but there is no uptime guarantee, and maintenance, outages, and third-party failures happen. Features may be added, changed, or removed as the app develops.

If we ever have to discontinue Deft Plus, we will give reasonable advance notice, stop new charges, and make sure the app still opens so you can reach the ledger on your device.

Disclaimer of warranties

Deft is provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, or statutory. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the app will be uninterrupted, error free, or secure, or that the financial data it displays will be accurate, complete, or current.

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Ocean Creative LLC is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or financial losses arising out of your use of Deft — including decisions you make based on what the app displays.

Our total liability for any claim relating to Deft is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the claim, or fifty US dollars. Some states do not allow these limits, so they may not apply to you in full.

Ending the agreement

You can end it at any time by cancelling your subscription and deleting the app. We may suspend or end your access to the sync service if you materially breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue the service; where we reasonably can, we will tell you first. Sections that by their nature should survive — disclaimers, liability limits, governing law — survive the end of this agreement.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, without regard to its conflict of laws rules. Any dispute that is not resolved informally will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Pennsylvania, and we each consent to their jurisdiction. Nothing stops either of us from bringing a qualifying claim in small claims court.

We have deliberately not included a mandatory arbitration clause or a class action waiver. If we ever have a disagreement, the first thing to do is email us — most things end there.

Apple's role

Apple required us to say some of this, and it is accurate, so here it is. This agreement is between you and Ocean Creative LLC only, not with Apple, and we alone are responsible for Deft and its content. Apple has no obligation to provide any maintenance or support for the app.

If the app fails to conform to any applicable warranty, you may notify Apple, and Apple will refund the purchase price if any; to the maximum extent permitted by law, Apple has no other warranty obligation with respect to the app. We are responsible for handling any claim that the app or your use of it infringes someone's intellectual property, or fails to meet legal or regulatory requirements, or any product liability or consumer protection claim, subject to the limits above. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms and may enforce them against you. You also confirm that you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated as a terrorist-supporting country, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the app changes. The current version always lives on this page with its effective date at the top. If a change is material, we will give notice in the app or here before it takes effect. Continuing to use Deft after that means you accept the updated terms; if you do not, you can cancel and stop using the service.

Odds and ends

These terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us about Deft. If a provision turns out to be unenforceable, the rest stays in force. If we do not enforce something right away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later. You may not transfer this agreement; we may transfer it in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of the business.

Contact

Questions about these terms, or about the app in general:

hello@oceancreative.app
Ocean Creative LLC, Pennsylvania, United States