Terms of service.

Last updated 12 October 2026. Questions go to [email protected], and we read everything.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a binding agreement between you and Ashdown Receipts Inc., the US company that operates Trust Me Bro ("Trust Me Bro," "we," "us"). They govern the Trust Me Bro browser extension, the trustmebro website, our API, and every page we publish, including public receipt pages (together, the "Service"). By installing the extension, creating an account, or using the Service, you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

Section 01: Acceptance and eligibility

You accept these Terms by installing the extension, creating an account, subscribing, or using any part of the Service. You must be at least 13 years old. If you are between 13 and 17, you may only use the Service with a parent or guardian's consent, and they accept these Terms on your behalf. If you use the Service on behalf of an organization, you confirm you have authority to bind it.

Section 02: The Service, defined

Trust Me Bro finds real academic sources for claims. The Service includes:

"Output" means anything the Service generates: verdicts, confidence scores, evidence summaries, quotes, citations, grades, and Receipts.

Section 03: License to use the extension

We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to install and use the extension for your own personal or internal use. The extension is distributed through the Chrome Web Store, and Google's own terms also apply to that distribution. All rights not expressly granted are reserved. This license ends if these Terms terminate or if we withdraw the extension.

Section 04: Accounts

You do not need an account to use the free extension; a pseudonymous device identifier meters your free checks. An account (email and password) is required to hold a Bro or Pro subscription, and to submit disputes, contributions, or re-crawl requests on Receipts. You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for activity under your account. Give us accurate information. We may suspend or terminate an account that violates these Terms. If you delete your account, your personal data is handled as the Privacy Policy describes. Note that Receipts already published are not removed when an account is deleted, because they were never linked to your account in the first place (see Section 09).

Section 05: Plans, billing, and cancellation

Section 06: Receipt dividends and referrals

There are two separate programs, and they can both apply to the same signup. Receipt dividends. If someone subscribes after arriving through a Receipt you shared, we credit you for each month that subscription stays active. Credits are applied to your Stripe customer balance against future bills. They are not cash, are not transferable or redeemable for money, and expire if your account closes. Invites. If five people subscribe to a paid plan through invite links you sent, we give you 30 days of Pro. This is access, not money: it is granted directly on your device, needs no payment method, and **ends automatically after 30 days, returning you to whatever plan you were on before**. It never converts into a paid subscription and never triggers a charge. Every further five invited subscribers earns another 30 days, and there is no limit on how many people you may invite. If you subscribe during a granted period, your subscription simply takes over. Both programs share the same conditions. Self-referral, incentivized or fraudulent referrals, and automation are prohibited. We may claw back credits tied to reversed or fraudulent subscriptions. We may change or end either program at any time; credits already applied to your balance, and a granted period already running, are unaffected.

Section 07: Acceptable use

You agree not to:

We may throttle, suspend, or terminate access for violations.

Section 08: The Trust API

What it is. The Trust API is the same verification engine behind one endpoint. You POST a claim and we return a verdict, sources, and a confidence score. Access requires an account and an API key. Included calls. Paid plans include a monthly allowance of API calls, at the numbers shown on the pricing page. A call counts when it returns a judgment, whether the answer came from an existing Receipt or a fresh check; a failed call does not count. Included calls are used before any wallet balance, reset on the 1st of each calendar month (UTC), do not roll over, and have no cash value. Your plan's included calls follow the best plan held by a device linked to your account. Keys. We show a key once and store only a hash. If you lose it, nobody can recover it, including us. You are responsible for keeping your keys secret and for everything done with them until you revoke them. Revoke a compromised key from your wallet immediately. We may revoke or suspend a key ourselves if we believe it is compromised or is being abused. Five active keys per account. The wallet, and how charging works. Beyond any included calls, API access is prepaid. You load a balance and we debit it per claim at the prices published on the API page: one price for a claim already in our corpus, a higher one for a claim the engine has to check from scratch. We charge only after a call succeeds, so a failed request costs you nothing. Every response reports its cost and your remaining balance. Our ledger is the record of what you were charged. When the balance cannot cover a call we decline it and tell you what it would have cost, rather than degrading the answer. Money terms. Top-ups are non-refundable and the balance has no cash value, is not transferable, and cannot be redeemed for money. It does not expire. If we discontinue the API, or end your access for any reason other than your breach of these Terms, we refund the unused balance. If we terminate you for breach, the balance is forfeited. This does not affect any refund right your local consumer law gives you that cannot be waived. Prices may change on notice; a change applies to calls made after it takes effect and never retroactively to a balance you have already loaded. Treat claims you send as public. A claim the engine has not seen before can be checked and published in the Trust Feed or as a Receipt, as if submitted through the extension. It is published with the claim text and the evidence, without adding your key or account fields. Submitted text may identify your end users. Do not send us personal data, confidential information, or anything you are not free to publish. Treat every call as a public question, because that is what it becomes. You confirm you have the right to send us what you send, and that where the text originates with your own users, you have told them. Limits and availability. Rate limits apply per account, across all of its keys, and differ by plan as shown on the API page. We may apply per-call cost ceilings, and may change limits to protect the Service. The API is offered as-is with no uptime commitment and no service level agreement. We will give at least 30 days' notice before a breaking change to a versioned endpoint or before retiring one, except where a security or legal problem requires faster action. Using the Output. Section 07 applies in full to API access. In particular: do not present Output as human editorial fact-checking, do not strip provenance from Receipts you surface, and do not use the API to build a competing verification corpus or to train a model on our Output. Do not use the API, whether through one account or several, to systematically copy or reconstruct the Trust Wiki or our claim corpus. Bulk or licensed access to corpus records is available only by separate written agreement. You are responsible for what your product does with what we return, including any decision your product takes on the strength of a verdict.

Section 09: Your submissions and public Receipt Pages

What you keep. You own the text you submit: claims, essays, disputes, contributions. What you grant us. So the Service can work, and because public Receipts are how Trust Me Bro grows, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, perpetual license to host, store, reproduce, adapt, publicly display, index, and distribute your submissions and the Output generated from them, including on Receipt Pages, in the Trust Feed and Trust Wiki, and in search-engine indexes. This license survives account deletion for content that has been published; for everything else it ends when the content is deleted from our systems. The claim corpus. Claims, verdicts, evidence, and Receipts form a corpus that we own and may license, including through an API and including to AI companies. Account records, device identifiers and requester-history records are not part of that license. We do not license or sell personal information. Public text may still identify people; public availability does not make it anonymous. See the Privacy Policy. Receipts are public. A Receipt carries the claim, recorded verdict, explanation and sources without adding account or device fields. Submitted text and sources can contain names or other identifying details. Claims may appear on the Trust Feed and Trust Wiki even if you never share them, so do not submit text you would not want published. Sharing distributes a permanent public link; recipients may associate you with the claim. Our editorial discretion. We may decline to publish, annotate, correct, or remove any Receipt at any time, for any reason, without notice. What a Receipt is. A Receipt is the output of an automated analysis of one specific claim against our published methodology and the academic sources retrieved at that time. It is not a statement of opinion by us about any publication, author, or person's general credibility, honesty, or character.

Section 10: AI output and accuracy

THE SERVICE USES AUTOMATED RETRIEVAL AND AI MODELS. OUTPUT IS PROVIDED FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY AND MAY CONTAIN ERRORS, OMISSIONS, OR AI-GENERATED INACCURACIES. OUTPUT IS NOT LEGAL, MEDICAL, FINANCIAL, JOURNALISTIC, OR ACADEMIC ADVICE, AND IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR READING THE UNDERLYING SOURCES. YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR INDEPENDENTLY VERIFYING ANY OUTPUT BEFORE RELYING ON IT, INCLUDING BEFORE SUBMITTING IT IN ACADEMIC OR PROFESSIONAL WORK. ANY ACCURACY METRICS WE PUBLISH ARE HISTORICAL MEASUREMENTS OF PAST PERFORMANCE, NOT A GUARANTEE OF ANY RESULT. You remain responsible for complying with your institution's academic-integrity rules when using the Service on coursework.

Section 11: Corrections and disputes

Anyone, including an author, publisher, or person named in a claim, may dispute a Receipt using the dispute link on the page or by emailing us. We aim to review disputes against primary sources within 7 days. If we confirm an error, we will correct the Receipt and add a dated correction note rather than silently editing it; we may also unpublish it. Disputes about copyright specifically follow Section 12 instead.

Section 12: Intellectual property and copyright complaints (DMCA)

We own the Service: the software, design, brand, and site, excluding your submissions and third-party materials. Paper titles, author names, abstracts, and excerpts quoted on Receipts belong to their respective owners and are used for identification, citation, and commentary. If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, email [email protected] with "Copyright complaint" in the subject line, including: (1) identification of the copyrighted work; (2) the URL of the allegedly infringing material; (3) your contact information; (4) a statement of good-faith belief that the use is unauthorized; and (5) a statement that the notice is accurate and that you are the owner or authorized to act for them. We review copyright complaints within 7 days, remove or disable access to material where the complaint is valid, notify the affected user where we can, and consider any reply they send before deciding. We terminate repeat infringers.

Section 13: Third-party content and services

Receipts link to and quote third-party sources retrieved from academic databases. We do not control those sources and do not endorse them beyond the specific automated check performed. Third-party services we rely on, including Google's Gemini API and DeepSeek's API, academic databases, Stripe, and our hosting providers, have their own terms for their layers of the Service.

Section 14: Warranty disclaimer

THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, OR SECURE, THAT ANY OUTPUT WILL BE ACCURATE OR COMPLETE, OR THAT ANY THIRD-PARTY DATABASE OR MODEL WE RELY ON WILL REMAIN AVAILABLE. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW CERTAIN WARRANTY EXCLUSIONS, SO PARTS OF THIS SECTION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

Section 15: Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, DATA, OR GOODWILL, ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE. OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS IN ANY 12-MONTH PERIOD IS CAPPED AT THE GREATER OF (A) THE FEES YOU PAID US IN THE 3 MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM AND (B) US $50. NOTHING IN THESE TERMS EXCLUDES LIABILITY THAT CANNOT BE EXCLUDED BY LAW, INCLUDING FOR GROSS NEGLIGENCE, WILLFUL MISCONDUCT, OR NON-WAIVABLE CONSUMER RIGHTS.

Section 16: Indemnification

You will indemnify and hold us harmless from claims, damages, and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising from your submissions, your use of the Service in violation of these Terms, or your violation of law or third-party rights.

Section 17: Dispute resolution, governing law

For users in the United States: any dispute that cannot be resolved informally will be settled by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, before a single arbitrator. YOU AND WE EACH WAIVE THE RIGHT TO A JURY TRIAL AND TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION OR CLASS ARBITRATION. Either party may instead bring an individual claim in small-claims court, or seek injunctive relief in court for intellectual-property infringement or misuse of the Service. **For consumers in the European Union, United Kingdom, and other jurisdictions where mandatory law overrides the above:** nothing in this section deprives you of the protection of the mandatory consumer-protection rules and courts of your country of residence. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, USA, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules. Before filing any formal dispute, email us first. Most issues can be sorted directly.

Section 18: Termination, changes, and general