Legal

Terms of Service

Short, in plain English, and honest about the one obligation that actually matters: you are the one recording, so you are the one who needs permission.

Last updated 31 August 2026

These Terms are an agreement between you and OpenSoftLabs LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company ("OpenSoftLabs", "we", "us"). They govern your use of the Oats desktop app for macOS and Windows, the Oats mobile app for iOS and Android, the website at oatsnote.com, and the hosted services behind them (together, the "Service").

By downloading, installing or using Oats you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use it.

1. Who may use Oats

You must be at least 13 years old, or 16 in the European Economic Area. If you use Oats for an employer or client, you confirm you are authorised to accept these Terms for that organisation, and "you" means both you and it.

2. Your licence to use the software

We grant you a personal, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to install and use the Oats apps for any purpose, personal or commercial, subject to these Terms. Oats is free to download and use; there is no seat count and no licence key.

The desktop app's source code is published under the MIT licence, and that licence — not this section — governs what you may do with the source. These Terms govern the binaries we distribute and the hosted services we run.

You may not: remove or obscure any notice in the software; use the Service to break the law; attempt to breach our infrastructure, evade quotas, or extract credentials from the app; resell access to our hosted transcription or rewrite endpoints as a service of your own; or use the Service to build a competing transcription service on top of our metered endpoints. Reading the source, forking it and running your own build are all expressly fine — that is what the MIT licence is for.

3. Accounts

The desktop app needs no account. The mobile app starts anonymous and asks you to sign in with Google or Apple when you use the metered cloud features. You are responsible for the security of the account you sign in with. Tell us at opensoftlabs2026@gmail.com if you believe it has been compromised. You may delete your account from the app's settings at any time.

4. Recording, consent and the law — read this one

You are the recorder. Oats is a tool. Whether you may lawfully record a given conversation depends on where every participant physically is, what kind of conversation it is, and what your profession separately requires of you. Some US states and many countries require the consent of every party. Oats does not obtain consent for you, does not detect where anyone is, and does not know what you are recording.

You are solely responsible for complying with all wiretapping, eavesdropping, privacy, data-protection, employment and professional-conduct rules that apply to your recordings, and for obtaining every consent and giving every notice they require. This includes GDPR and equivalent obligations where you are the controller of what you record, and any duty of confidentiality you owe as a lawyer, clinician, therapist, accountant or similar.

Our recording-law guides are general information written to be useful, not legal advice, and no lawyer-client relationship arises from reading them. If the answer matters, ask a lawyer licensed where you are.

Because Oats records through your own machine and puts nothing in the meeting's attendee list, other participants will not be told a recording is happening unless you tell them. That is a feature of how it works, and it makes telling them your job.

5. Your content

Your recordings, transcripts and notes are yours. We claim no ownership of them and take no licence to them. We do not use them to train models, and on the desktop app we could not if we wanted to — they never reach us.

Because your content lives on your device, keeping it safe is on you. We hold no backup and cannot recover anything you delete or lose. Export what matters; the app writes ordinary files any program can open.

You are responsible for what you record and for having the right to record it.

6. Third-party services

Oats can send your content to services we do not control:

We choose these providers carefully but we are not responsible for their acts, their availability, or changes to their terms. What each one receives is set out in the Privacy Policy.

7. Plans, quotas and payment

The desktop app is free, in full, with no metered feature. The mobile app has a free tier with limits on the number of notes, the length of a recording and the transcription minutes available in a period; when you reach a limit, cloud transcription stops until the period resets. Notes you have already made stay readable and editable.

If and when paid plans launch, subscriptions are sold through the Apple App Store or Google Play. Those stores take the payment, set the local price, and handle renewals, cancellations and refunds under their own terms — we never see your card. A subscription renews automatically until you cancel it in the store, and cancelling stops the next renewal rather than refunding the current period. We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice, effective at your next renewal. Nothing on this page or in the app charges you anything today.

8. AI output is a draft, not an answer

Transcription and summarisation are statistical. Transcripts mis-hear words, attribute lines to the wrong speaker, and drop audio they could not resolve. Summaries omit things, compress nuance out of existence, and occasionally state something that was never said. Accuracy varies with your microphone, the room, accents, overlapping speech and the model you chose.

Check anything that matters against the recording. Do not rely on Oats output as a verbatim record, a legal transcript, a medical or clinical record, or professional advice of any kind. If your profession requires an accurate record, you are the one who has to make it accurate.

9. Availability and changes

We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of the Service, including hosted endpoints and free-tier limits, at any time. We will give reasonable notice of changes that materially reduce what a paid plan provides. Because the desktop app runs entirely on your machine, an outage on our side does not stop you recording, transcribing or reading your notes.

10. No warranty

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that transcripts or summaries will be accurate or complete. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, in which case this section applies to the fullest extent permitted.

11. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OPENSOFTLABS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, DATA, RECORDINGS, GOODWILL OR BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY, ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY.

OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICE IS LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS (US$100). For most users that first figure is zero, because Oats is free; that is the trade you are making by using free software, and it is stated here plainly rather than buried.

Nothing here excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law, including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. If you are a consumer, you keep every mandatory right your local law gives you.

12. Indemnity

You will indemnify and hold harmless OpenSoftLabs and its members and contractors from any claim, damage, loss or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising from your use of the Service, your content, or your breach of these Terms — in particular any claim that a recording you made was made without a consent the law required.

13. Termination

You may stop using Oats at any time by uninstalling it and, on mobile, deleting your account. We may suspend or terminate access if you materially breach these Terms, attack our infrastructure, or use the Service unlawfully. Sections 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 12 and 14 survive termination. Your local content is unaffected by termination — it is on your device, and it stays there.

14. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The courts located in Wyoming have exclusive jurisdiction, and you and we consent to venue there. If you are a consumer resident in the EEA or the UK, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of your country of residence, or of the right to bring proceedings there.

Before filing anything, email opensoftlabs2026@gmail.com. Most disputes with a one-person company are a misunderstanding, and thirty days of talking is cheaper for both of us than a filing fee.

15. Apple App Store

If you obtained the mobile app from the App Store: these Terms are between you and OpenSoftLabs only, not Apple. Apple has no obligation to provide support or maintenance for the app. Apple is not responsible for any product warranty, product-liability claim, or third-party claim that the app infringes intellectual-property rights; those are ours to handle. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and may enforce them against you. You confirm you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated as terrorist-supporting, and are not on any US Government prohibited-parties list.

16. General

These Terms, with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us about the Service. If a provision is unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them to a successor in a merger or sale of the business. We may update these Terms; material changes will be announced in release notes and the date at the top of this page will change, and continuing to use Oats after that means you accept them.

Contact

OpenSoftLabs LLC, Wyoming, United States — opensoftlabs2026@gmail.com.