Terms of Use

These are the terms of the agreement between you and Epistula. They are written to be read, not to be skipped. By making an account, you accept them.

1. Who we are

Epistula is made and operated by Julia Duro, an individual based in Portugal.

Post: EC Avenida — Apartado 19, 4711-909 Braga, Portugal
Email: hello@epistula.app

A real person reads that address.

2. Who may use Epistula

You must be at least 16 years old. We ask for your date of birth when you join and we check it. If you lie about your age, we will close the account when we find out.

Epistula is a Catholic space, but you do not have to be Catholic to be here. You do have to be willing to treat the people here, and what they hold sacred, with respect.

3. Your account

Keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account. If you think someone else has got into it, tell us at once.

Your password matters more here than in most apps, because it is what unlocks your journal. See section 9.

4. What Epistula is, and what it is not

Epistula is a place to write: to the community, to another person, and to yourself before God.

Epistula is not spiritual direction. It is not confession. It is not pastoral counselling, and it is not therapy. Nothing you read here is a substitute for a priest, a doctor, or a counsellor, and nothing you read here should be taken as their advice.

Epistula is not an emergency service. Letters here are delivered slowly, on purpose. Nobody is watching for a cry for help. If you are in danger, or thinking of harming yourself, do not write it into this app and wait. Call your local emergency number, or a crisis line in your country, and speak to a human being tonight.

5. What you write stays yours

You own what you write. Nothing in these terms takes that from you.

To run the service at all, we need your permission to store what you write and to show it to the people you addressed it to: a post to the community, a reply in the forum, a letter to one person. So you grant us a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, back up, and display your content for the sole purpose of operating Epistula, for as long as you keep it here.

That is the whole of it. We do not take the right to use your writing in advertising, to sell it, to sublicense it to anyone, or to train artificial intelligence on it. The licence ends when you delete the content or your account, with the one exception in section 8.

6. How we behave here

Epistula was built on Catholic ground and does not pretend otherwise. But everyone is welcome here, whatever they believe or do not believe, and the price of entry is the same for all of us: respect.

Respect runs in both directions

• Do not mock or demean the Catholic faith, its sacraments, its saints, or the people who hold them dear.
• Do not mock or demean anyone for holding a different faith, or none. A person who is not Catholic is not a target here, and they are not a project.
• Ask, argue, doubt, and disagree freely. Do that without contempt for the person on the other side. Contempt is the line, not disagreement.

Do not ask for money

Epistula is not a place to raise funds. This rule is absolute and there are no exceptions, not even for good causes.

• No fundraisers, donation links, crowdfunding, campaigns, or appeals, whether for yourself, your family, your parish, your ministry, or your mission.
• No selling, advertising, promoting, or recruiting.
• No asking another member for money, in the open or in a letter.

We are strict about this because of what this place is. People write here when they are vulnerable. A space where someone can answer another person's sorrow with a payment link is a space that preys on the very openness it asked for. A prayer request must never become a payment request. We allow no exceptions, because judging which appeals are worthy would mean deciding whose poverty counts.

Do not sow animosity

• Do not harass, threaten, demean, or stalk anyone.
• Do not pile on. Do not organise others against a member.
• Do not use doctrine as a weapon. Declaring another member a heretic, or telling them they are damned, is not correction. It is cruelty wearing correction's clothes, and it is not tolerated here.
• Do not incite hatred against people for who they are, or violence against anyone.
• Do not play priest. You may not hear a confession, grant absolution, or speak in the place of a spiritual director. If someone is carrying something grave, tell them to go to a priest, and go pray for them.

Bear witness. Do not circulate the suffering.

You are free to write about persecution, about war, about martyrdom, and about the evil done to Christians and to anyone else. Those things are real, they matter, and this is a place where they can be named.

You may not post images or video of them. No footage of violence, of bodies, of the dead, of a person being beaten, dragged, or killed. Not as evidence. Not as a plea. Not to wake anyone up.

We are firm about this even when the motive is good, and we know that it usually is. The person in that footage did not agree to become anyone's argument. Their worst moment, or their death, is not ours to pass around with reactions counted underneath it. To share it is to take a second thing from them, in the name of caring about the first. Write what happened. Name it. Grieve it. Pray for them. Do not turn them into a spectacle.

Outrage is the fuel of every feed built to consume people. It will not be the fuel of this one.

The plain prohibitions

• Do not sexualise anyone, and above all not children. Sexual content involving minors is reported to the authorities and the account is removed. There is no second conversation about this.
• Do not post sexual content, violence, or gore, in image or in video, whatever the reason.
• Do not impersonate another person.
• Do not post copyright-protected work: whole books, articles, songs, audio, or video. Quoting a passage and naming its author is welcome, and is what this place is for.
• Do not expose people. No private information about others, and no images of anyone posted to shame, mock, or endanger them.
• Do not spam, and do not use Epistula to run schemes.
• Do not attack, probe, or attempt to break the service, and do not scrape it.

The thesis of this app is that we write to build one another up. Everything above is only that sentence, said slowly.

7. Moderation

Three things keep watch here, and you should know which is which.

Images uploaded to public parts of the app are checked automatically before anyone else sees them. An image that fails the check is not published.

Public writing — posts, comments, forum threads and replies, and letters cast into the sea — is screened automatically against a narrow set of categories: threats, and instructions to harm. Disagreement, doubt, anger, and difficult subject matter are not moderated. This app exists for those. Private letters and your journal are never screened.

People can report content, including a letter they received. Reported content is read by a human being before anything is done about it.

We may hide content, and we may suspend or remove an account, when these terms are broken. If your account is suspended and you believe it was wrong, write to hello@epistula.app. A person will read it and answer.

8. Letters

Letters are delivered slowly on purpose. When you send one, you choose how it travels: by pigeon, two days; by boat, four; on foot, seven. Once a letter is sent, it cannot be recalled. That is the nature of a letter, and it is the point.

You control who may begin a letter to you, in Settings. If you end a correspondence with someone, they can no longer write to you, though a letter already on its way may still arrive.

A letter you sent stays with the person who received it, even after you delete your account. Your name is removed and it is signed only a fellow. We do this because a letter, once given, belongs to the person it was written for.

The sea

You can also cast a letter into the sea: a bottle, addressed to no one, for a stranger to find. A bottle is a public act. It is screened automatically like any other public writing, and whoever finds it can report it.

Casting a bottle is an invitation. The reply to your bottle can come from any member, whatever you have chosen in Settings about who may begin a letter to you — that setting governs letters addressed to you, not answers to a bottle you chose to cast. If you do not want to hear from strangers, do not cast bottles.

9. The journal and its encryption

Your journal is encrypted on your own device, with a key derived from your password, before it is sent to us. We cannot read it. This is not a policy we could quietly change; it is how the software is built.

The price of that guarantee is this, and you should read it twice:

If you forget your password and no longer have access to a device where you have signed in, your journal entries may be permanently unrecoverable. We cannot restore them. There is no back door, for you or for anyone else. That is what "we cannot read it" actually means.

10. Voice

The journal lets you speak instead of typing. If you use it, your recording travels to our own server, which passes it to OpenAI to be turned into text; the text returns along the same path and is encrypted on your device.

This is the point at which your journal words leave the protection of Epistula's on-device encryption. They travel encrypted in transit, but both our server and OpenAI necessarily handle them in readable form, because that is what transcription is. Neither the recording nor the text is stored along the way. If that does not sit right with you, type. The privacy policy explains this moment in full.

11. Subscription

The community surfaces of Epistula, the feed and the forum, are free, and are meant to stay that way. What is paid for is depth of personal practice, never access to the company of others.

Epistula Plus is a single subscription that unlocks the personal surfaces: letters and the journal. It renews automatically, for the period you chose, at the price the App Store shows you at the moment you subscribe.

All payment runs through Apple. We never see your card. You can manage or cancel the subscription at any time in your App Store account settings; cancel at least 24 hours before the current period ends and you will not be charged again. What the subscription unlocked stays unlocked until the period you paid for runs out. Deleting the app does not cancel a subscription.

A free trial may be offered; the App Store shows its length before you subscribe. If you do not cancel before the trial ends, the paid subscription begins.

Refunds for purchases made through the App Store are handled by Apple, under Apple's rules, at reportaproblem.apple.com. If you are a consumer in the European Union, you have a right of withdrawal for digital purchases; because payment runs through Apple, that right is exercised with Apple.

12. Ending the agreement

You may delete your account at any time, from inside the app, in Settings. You do not have to email anyone or ask permission. Before you go, you can download everything you have written, from the same screen.

We may end your access if you break these terms in a serious way, or repeatedly. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why.

13. Availability

Epistula is offered as it is. We work to keep it running and to keep your writing safe, but we do not promise that it will never be interrupted, never lose a byte, or never contain a mistake. It is made by one person.

Keep a copy of what matters most to you. The app will make you one whenever you ask.

14. Liability

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit, or for the content that other members write. Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

If you are a consumer in the European Union, none of this takes away the rights the law gives you. Those rights come first, always.

15. Changes

If these terms change in a way that matters, we will tell you inside the app before the change takes effect. If you do not accept the new terms, you may delete your account and take your writing with you.

16. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by Portuguese law. If you are a consumer resident in another EU country, you also keep the protection of the mandatory rules of your own country, and you may bring proceedings in your own courts.

Before anything else, write to hello@epistula.app. Most things can be settled by two people talking.