Terms of Service

1. Agreement to terms

These Terms are an agreement between you and Zalek Labs Ltd ("we", "us", "our"), a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17414810. Alhora is our product.

By creating an account, downloading, or using Alhora ("the Service"), you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service ("Terms"). If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you by email or by posting a notice on the website. Continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.

Two other documents form part of these Terms: our Privacy Policy and our Refund Policy. Where they cover the same ground, the more specific document wins.

2. Description of the Service

Alhora is a desktop application and companion web service that helps authors format books for print and digital distribution. The Service includes:

• The Alhora desktop application (macOS, Windows, Linux, and ChromeOS via its Linux environment).
• The alhora.app website, including account management and billing.
• EPUB and print-ready PDF export functionality.
• Optional paid add-ons: AI checks and Publisher (multi-seat) plans.

Alhora is free to download, and free to use for importing, formatting and previewing a book. Exporting a finished file requires an active paid plan. The desktop application verifies your entitlement before it will write an EPUB or PDF, so export stops working if your plan lapses.

Alhora is a formatting and typesetting tool. It is not a publisher, a distributor, a retailer, or a printer, and it does not sell your book for you.

3. Accounts

To use paid features of Alhora, you must create an account. You agree to:

• Provide accurate and complete registration information.
• Keep your password secure and not share it with others.
• Notify us promptly at [email protected] if you suspect unauthorised use of your account.

You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account. You must be at least 16 years old to hold an account.

4. Your licence to use Alhora

There are two separate things here, and it helps to keep them apart.

The application

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and run the Alhora desktop application on devices you own or control, for the purpose of preparing your own books. The application is licensed, not sold. You may keep using an installed copy for as long as this licence is in force.

The plan

Your paid plan is a separate entitlement that unlocks export and any add-ons you have bought. It is tied to your account, not to a particular installation. Whichever plan you hold — Monthly, Annual or Lifetime — the licence terms in these Terms are the same; only the payment schedule and duration differ.

Both licences are for your own publishing work, including work you publish commercially. What you may not do with them is set out in section 12.

5. Plans and payment

Plans

Alhora offers the following paid plans:

• Monthly — billed monthly, cancel anytime.
• Annual — billed yearly at a discounted rate.
• Lifetime — a one-time payment. See section 6 for exactly what "lifetime" means.

Two add-ons are sold separately, and only inside the desktop application:

• AI checks — a monthly tier that grants editorial credits, plus one-off credit top-ups. See section 10.
• Publisher — a multi-seat plan for a press. See section 13.

Neither add-on can be bought from this website, and neither is required to use Alhora.

Billing

All payments are processed by Stripe. By subscribing, you authorise Stripe to charge the payment method you provide. We never see or hold your full card number. Prices are displayed in GBP and include any applicable taxes.

Renewal

Monthly and annual subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period. You will be charged the then-current price unless you cancel before the renewal date. If we change the price of a plan you already hold, we will tell you by email before the change takes effect, and you may cancel rather than accept it.

Failed payments

If a renewal payment fails, we may place your account into a short grace period so you do not lose access mid-project. If payment still has not succeeded when the grace period ends, export and any paid add-ons stop until the account is brought up to date. Your projects are unaffected — they are on your computer.

Cancellation and refunds

You may cancel your subscription at any time from your account billing page or via the Stripe customer portal. Cancellation, refunds, and your statutory 14-day cancellation right are covered in full by our Refund Policy, which forms part of these Terms.

6. What "Lifetime" means

A Lifetime licence is a single payment for permanent access to Alhora, including all future updates to the application, with no recurring fee. It is the lifetime of the product, not a promise about your own lifetime, and it does not expire on a date.

Being honest about the limit of that promise: export is verified against our servers, so a Lifetime licence depends on Alhora continuing to operate as a service. We are not planning to stop, and if we ever did discontinue Alhora we would give Lifetime holders reasonable notice and take reasonable steps to leave installed copies usable. A Lifetime licence does not include the AI or Publisher add-ons, which are separately priced subscriptions.

7. License keys

License keys purchased or received as gifts grant access to Alhora for the plan type specified on the key. Each key may be activated on one account only and cannot be transferred or resold once activated.

8. Device limits

Each account may activate the desktop application on a limited number of devices (currently 3). You can manage your devices from the account dashboard, and deactivating a device frees the slot. We reserve the right to change the device limit, but any reduction will not affect devices already activated.

9. Your content

This is the most important section in these Terms, so it is written as plainly as we can manage.

Your book is yours

You own your manuscript and everything you make with Alhora. You keep every intellectual property right in your text, your images, your covers and your finished files. Running your work through Alhora gives us no ownership of it, no share in it, and no right to publish, sell, display or license it. We claim no rights over your output whatsoever.

We do not use your manuscript to train any AI model, and we do not permit our suppliers to do so either.

Where your work lives

Alhora is local-first. Your projects, manuscripts and exported files are stored on your own computer. We have no copy of them and no way to open them.

There are four narrow exceptions, and you start all four of them yourself:

• AI checks. If you run an AI check, the specific text being checked is sent to our server and on to our AI provider so the check can run. See section 10.
• Hosted ARC links. If you upload an ARC file to share with a reviewer, that file is stored on our servers so it can be downloaded from the link. See section 11.
• Support. If you send us a file to help diagnose a problem, we have that file. We use it only to answer you, and we delete it afterwards.
• The feature requests board. Anything you post there is sent to us and published. This one is different in kind from the other three — see "The feature requests board" below before you post.

Outside these four, nothing about your book reaches us. We do not upload, read, index or back up your projects, and Alhora has no "sync" feature that would do so quietly.

The limited permission we need

For those three cases only, you give us permission to store, transmit and process the content you send, strictly so we can perform the thing you asked for — run the check, serve the download, answer the support request. That permission covers nothing else, lasts no longer than the task, and ends when the content is deleted. It is not a licence to your work in any ordinary sense, and we will not treat it as one.

The feature requests board

The feature requests board is a public page where you can ask for something and vote on what other authors have asked for. Using it is entirely optional, and nothing about your account, your plan or the application depends on it.

What you post there is published. Request titles, request text and vote totals are readable by anyone on the internet, with no account, and can be indexed by search engines. Do not put anything in a request that you would not put on a public web page: no unpublished manuscript text you want to keep private, no plot you are not ready to share, no personal details, and nothing confidential to someone else.

You are shown by a public handle you choose, never your email address. Choose one you are content to see in public and in search results.

You keep ownership of what you write in a request. To publish it we need your permission, so by posting you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, display, reproduce and translate that request, and to quote it in release notes or in describing what we are building. That licence covers the request only. It gives us nothing whatsoever in your manuscript, and nothing in any idea beyond the text you chose to publish.

Ideas you post can be built without payment or credit. That is the point of the board: you are telling us what to make. If a request describes something you consider proprietary, or that you intend to protect, do not post it. We may build the same thing having never seen your request — software companies receive the same suggestion many times, and often already have it planned — and posting gives you no claim over the result and no entitlement to a share of it.

A reply is not a promise. We may label a request as planned, on the roadmap, or shipped, and we may reply to it in public. Those are statements of current intention, not commitments. Priorities change, and something marked as planned may be delayed, altered or dropped. Nothing on the board forms part of any contract between us, and you should not buy or renew a plan in reliance on an unshipped request.

We moderate it. We may hide, edit, merge, re-categorise or remove any request, and may withdraw access to the board from an account that abuses it, with or without notice. Requests can also be hidden automatically when several people report them, pending our review. We are not obliged to publish anything, to keep anything published, or to explain a decision — though we will normally tell you if we remove something you posted.

Getting something taken down. You can ask us to remove a request you wrote by emailing us, and we will. Deleting your account does not by itself remove your requests: they stay on the board detached from you, shown as from a deleted account, because other authors' votes and our public replies are attached to them. Section 7 of our Privacy Policy sets out exactly what is kept and what is deleted.

Everything you post to the board is also subject to the conduct rules in section 12.

Back up your work

Because your files are yours and local, keeping backups is your responsibility. We cannot recover a manuscript you lose, because we never had it.

Your responsibility for what you format

You confirm that you have the rights to the material you put into Alhora — your own writing, or work you are licensed to use — and that formatting and publishing it does not infringe anyone else's rights or break the law.

10. AI features

AI in Alhora is an optional paid add-on. Every core feature works with it switched off, and nothing here applies if you never turn it on. Our AI principles explain the design in full; these are the contractual terms.

The AI does not write your book

Alhora's AI never composes prose. It checks, flags and drafts suggestions about words you have already written. There is no compose feature — not behind a setting, not on a higher tier. Every suggestion is a separate accept-or-reject decision that you make, and nothing enters your manuscript without your approval. We commit to this as a term of the contract, not only as a design choice.

How your text is handled

When you run a check, the relevant passage is sent to our servers and on to our AI provider, and the result comes back to you. We keep counts — how many checks you ran, how long they took, whether they succeeded — never the text. The one exception is a longer "deep read", which runs in the background: your text is held on our servers only while that job is running, and is erased the moment it finishes. Neither we nor our provider use your text to train models.

Credits

AI tiers grant a monthly allowance of credits. Unused monthly credits roll over, but the balance accrued from monthly grants is capped at twice your tier's monthly amount. Credits bought as one-off top-ups never expire and are not subject to that cap. If a check fails, the credit is returned automatically. Credits have no cash value, cannot be transferred between accounts, and are not exchangeable for money.

Limits and availability

We apply fair-use rate limits and daily caps to AI features, and we may adjust them to keep the service stable. We may also suspend AI features entirely — for maintenance, for cost, or if a provider becomes unavailable. If we withdraw AI features permanently while you hold an unused paid balance, we will refund it.

What AI output is worth

AI suggestions are suggestions. They can be wrong, and they are not editorial, legal or publishing advice. You are responsible for what you accept. Alhora does not check facts, and it cannot tell you whether your book is any good.

Disclosure when you publish

Some stores require publishers to declare AI-generated content, and treat AI-assisted editing of an author's own work differently. Alhora's features are built to keep your book your work, but store policies are the stores' to set and they change. Checking the current policy of each store you publish on, and deciding how it applies to your book, is your responsibility.

11. Hosted ARC links

If you hold a paid plan, you can upload a stamped advance-reader copy and get an expiring link to share with a reviewer. Files are up to 25 MB, links expire after a period you choose (up to 30 days), and you can revoke a link at any time.

Two things to be aware of. First, anyone holding the link can download the file until it expires or you revoke it, so treat the link as the key. Second, hosted files are stored on infrastructure that may not survive a server redeploy — a lost file simply makes the link stop working. Never treat an ARC link as a backup; keep your own copy of anything you upload.

You are responsible for the file you upload and for who you send the link to, including the confidentiality expectations you set with your reviewers. We may remove a hosted file that breaches section 12.

12. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Reverse-engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Alhora application, except to the limited extent that law expressly permits and we cannot lawfully prevent.
• Circumvent, disable or tamper with the export entitlement check, licence verification, device limits, or any credit or usage limit.
• Share, redistribute, resell, rent or sublicence your account, your licence key, or the application.
• Use the Service to infringe the intellectual property rights of others, or to format or distribute material that is unlawful.
• Use the Service to produce material that sexualises children, incites violence, or is otherwise illegal to publish in the UK.
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to our systems or other users' accounts.
• Use automated tools to scrape, abuse, or overload the Service, or use AI features in a way designed to defeat their limits.
• Use hosted ARC links to distribute files unrelated to your own book, or as general file hosting.

And on the feature requests board specifically, not to post:

• Anything abusive, harassing, hateful, threatening, obscene, or directed at a particular person.
• Advertising, spam, referral links, or requests written to promote something rather than to ask for a feature.
• Someone else's personal information, or your own beyond the handle you chose — no email addresses, no phone numbers, no home addresses.
• Anything confidential to another person or business, or anything you are not free to publish.
• Content that infringes copyright, or another author's unpublished work.
• Votes cast from accounts created to inflate a total, or reports filed to suppress a request you disagree with.

Reports are for content that breaks these rules. Disagreeing with a request is what the vote is for.

13. Publisher organisations

A Publisher plan gives a press a set number of seats. The owner of the organisation is responsible for paying for it, for who is invited to it, and for the conduct of its members under these Terms. Each seat carries full access to the application; AI credits remain personal to each member and are bought separately.

Members' manuscripts remain their own under section 9 — joining an organisation gives its owner no rights over a member's work and no access to their files. Removing a member, or the plan lapsing, ends that member's access through the organisation but changes nothing about their ownership of what they have written.

14. Affiliate programme

Any account holder may share a referral link and earn commission on the plans it sells. The programme's rates, attribution window, approval period, payout threshold and rules are published in full on our affiliate programme page, and taking part means accepting them. Where that page and this section differ on a detail of the programme, that page governs.

Commission is paid gross, with nothing deducted. It is not salary, wages or employment income, we are not your employer, and it is yours to declare to your own tax authority. Rates may change, but a change applies only to sales made after it; commission already earned is paid at the rate it was earned at.

We may withhold or cancel commission on a referral we believe to be manufactured rather than earned — self-referral through a second account, or signups that show no sign of being real people — and may close a referral link on that basis. Commission already approved at the time is still paid.

15. Intellectual property

The Alhora application, website, brand, name, logo, templates and all associated materials are owned by Alhora and protected by copyright and trademark law. Nothing in these Terms transfers any intellectual property rights to you beyond the limited licence in section 4.

Books you export are yours, unrestricted. There is no royalty, no attribution requirement, and no colophon on a paid export.

If you send us feedback or a feature request, we may act on it without owing you anything. That does not give us any rights in your book.

16. Availability and updates

We aim to keep the Service available at all times but do not guarantee uninterrupted access. We may:

• Perform maintenance that temporarily limits availability.
• Release updates to the desktop application (you may choose when to install them, though very old versions may stop working with our servers).
• Add, modify, or remove features. If we remove something significant that you are paying for, we will tell you, and you may cancel and ask for a refund of the unused part.
• Offer beta or early-access features, which are provided as-is and may change or be withdrawn without notice.

17. Third-party services and stores

Alhora produces files intended for stores and printers such as Amazon KDP, Apple Books, Kobo and IngramSpark. We are not affiliated with any of them. Their requirements, review processes and content policies are theirs to set and can change without notice to us.

We validate exports against each store's published specification as we understand it, and we work hard to get this right — but we cannot guarantee that any given store will accept a file, or that your book will be approved for sale.

18. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

• The Service is provided "as is" without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied.
• We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of the Service — including lost sales, lost royalties, lost publishing opportunities, missed launch dates, or a store rejecting a file.
• We are not liable for loss of or damage to your manuscripts or project files, which live on your computer and are yours to back up.
• Our total liability for any claim arising from these Terms shall not exceed the amount you paid us in the 12 months preceding the claim.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

If you are a consumer, none of this affects your statutory rights. Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, digital content must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described. Where it is not, you have remedies that these Terms cannot take away, and the exclusions above apply only so far as the law allows.

19. Termination

We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms. Except where a breach is serious enough to require immediate action, we will tell you what the problem is and give you a fair chance to put it right first. Upon termination:

• Your access to the Service, including export and any add-ons, will cease.
• Your projects remain on your own computer. They are not deleted, and they are still yours — but you will need an active entitlement to export them again.
• Hosted ARC links you created will stop working.
• We will handle your personal data in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

If we terminate your account for a reason that is not your fault, we will refund the unused portion of anything you have paid for. If we terminate it for a serious breach, we will not.

You may delete your account at any time from the account settings page. Deletion is immediate and permanent, and it does not by itself cancel a Stripe subscription — cancel that first, from the billing page.

20. Governing law

These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales. Any disputes arising from these Terms shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the United Kingdom, or in a country whose law gives you protections that cannot be contracted away, you keep those protections and may bring proceedings in your local courts.

21. General

If any part of these Terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. If we do not enforce a term straight away, we have not given it up. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms to someone else without our agreement; we may transfer ours if Alhora is sold or reorganised, and your rights are unaffected if we do. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and Refund Policy, are the whole agreement between us.

22. Contact

For questions about these Terms, please contact:

• Email: [email protected]