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Terms of Service

Effective date: July 22, 2026
Last updated: July 22, 2026

Hot Cocoa is a writing app for anyone working on a manuscript. These Terms are the agreement between you and us.

Short version: we'll treat your work with the highest level of care and respect. It is yours, it stays private, and we will never mine it, sell it, or feed it to a machine. In return, we ask you to help us keep Hot Cocoa a safe and supportive place for authors, new and experienced alike. We provide the surface, you provide the magic.

We've written the rest of this document in plain language, because you should not need a lawyer to understand what you are agreeing to.

If you do not agree to these Terms, please do not use Hot Cocoa.

1. Who we are

Hot Cocoa ("Hot Cocoa," "we," "us," "our") is operated by Scott Capener, an individual, and is available at hotcocoa.app.

You can reach us at support@hotcocoa.app.

2. Who can use Hot Cocoa

You must be at least 13 years old to create an account.

If you are between 13 and 18, or under the age of legal majority where you live, you may use Hot Cocoa with the permission and supervision of a parent or legal guardian, and that parent or guardian agrees to these Terms on your behalf.

You may not use Hot Cocoa if you have previously been banned from it.

3. Your account

Your account is yours to look after. Keep your password private, make sure the email address you give us is one you actually read (we need it to reach you about your account and your work), and know that what happens under your login is your responsibility.

If you think someone else has gotten into your account, write to support@hotcocoa.app and we will help you secure it.

Accounts are for individual people. Please do not share your login or create an account on someone else's behalf without their permission.

4. Your work is yours

Everything you create in Hot Cocoa, including your manuscripts, scenes, chapters, notes, outlines, characters, and images, belongs to you. Writing it here gives us no ownership of it, no claim to it, and no right to publish it, sell it, or profit from it.

What we will never do

We will never:

  • Use your work to train, fine-tune, evaluate, or otherwise develop any artificial intelligence or machine learning model, ours or anyone else's.
  • Sell, rent, license, or trade your work to anyone.
  • Mine your work for marketing data, advertising profiles, or behavioral targeting.
  • Publish, display, or share any part of your work publicly.
  • Send your work to any third-party service for analysis, enrichment, or scraping.

We cannot quietly walk this back. Changing it would mean changing these Terms, and Section 15 requires 30 days of advance notice before any material change takes effect, which gives you time to leave with everything you have written. Any change to this section counts as material.

What we need your permission to do

Running a writing app means doing some mechanical things with your words. So you give us a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, back up, encrypt, transmit, reformat, and display your work, solely so that we can operate Hot Cocoa for you.

That permission covers exactly this:

  • Saving your work and showing it back to you.
  • Syncing it across your devices and sessions.
  • Backing it up so it survives a failure on our end.
  • Converting it into the formats you ask for when you export.

It ends when you delete the work or your account, on the timeline in Section 12.

5. Privacy

We do not read, review, index, or analyze your work, and no automated system scans your prose to profile you or to build anything.

A person on our side may open specific content in your account in four situations:

  • You ask us to. For example, when you report a bug or need help recovering something.
  • Someone reports a credible violation of Section 7, and we need to look in order to evaluate it.
  • The law requires it, through a valid subpoena, court order, or other binding legal process.
  • Someone is in danger, and there is a credible and urgent risk of serious harm.

When that happens, we look at what the situation requires and nothing more, and we use what we see only to resolve that specific issue.

Our Privacy Policy covers what data we collect, who processes it, and how long we keep it. It is part of these Terms.

6. AI-generated writing is not allowed

Writing it yourself is supposed to be the fun part, and the purpose of Hot Cocoa is to help it feel that way.

You may not use Hot Cocoa to store, organize, or develop manuscript text that was generated by a large language model or similar system and kept as your own work. That includes generating scenes, chapters, dialogue, or description with such a model, and expanding your outline into prose with one.

Ordinary writing tools are entirely fine: spelling and grammar checkers, dictionaries, thesauruses, translation tools, and research you did with help from anything at all and then wrote up in your own words.

How we enforce this. We do not run AI-detection software on your manuscripts. In addition to our commitment to never letting AI ingest your work as training data, AI detection tools are often unreliable, frequently producing false accusations against real writers. This happens most often against people writing in a second language or in an unusual voice, and we are not willing to act on a machine's guess about your prose. We act on human judgment, and only when something is actually brought to our attention.

If we believe this rule has been broken, we will tell you what we think happened and give you a chance to respond before we act, except where Section 8 allows us to move immediately.

7. What you may not store on Hot Cocoa

Hot Cocoa should feel safe to everyone who writes here, so a few things are off limits. You may not use Hot Cocoa to store, upload, or distribute content that:

  • Sexually exploits or endangers a minor. This is absolute, with no exception of any kind, in text or images, fictional or otherwise. We report apparent child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, as the law requires.
  • Is a genuine threat of violence against a real person or group, or that incites, solicits, or gives instruction for real-world violence or terrorism.
  • Targets, harasses, or endangers a real person, including doxxing, stalking, non-consensual intimate imagery, and impersonation.
  • Is illegal to possess or distribute where you or we are located.
  • Infringes someone else's copyright, trademark, or other rights. Fan fiction is great. Pirated books or unlicensed images are not.
  • Contains malware, or is used to attack, overload, probe, or gain unauthorized access to Hot Cocoa or anyone else's systems.

You also may not resell or commercially redistribute access to Hot Cocoa, scrape it, or use automated systems in ways that degrade it for other people.

Fiction often goes to dark places – we're not here to police the content of your novel. These rules exist to prohibit material that causes real harm in the actual world.

8. Moderation and enforcement

We may review, moderate, restrict, remove, disable, suspend, or terminate content and accounts that we reasonably believe violate these Terms.

Where we can, we will tell you what happened and why, and give you a chance to respond first. We may act immediately and without notice when content is illegal, when someone is in danger, when the law requires it, or when waiting would cause serious harm.

Reporting. If you believe something on Hot Cocoa violates these Terms, email support@hotcocoa.app with enough detail for us to find it and evaluate it.

Appeals. If we have acted against your account and you think we got it wrong, reply to the notice we sent or write to support@hotcocoa.app. A person will look at it again.

Copyright complaints. If you believe content on Hot Cocoa infringes your copyright, send a notice to support@hotcocoa.app that identifies the work and the infringing material, gives your contact information, states your good-faith belief that the use is unauthorized, states under penalty of perjury that your notice is accurate and that you are authorized to act, and includes your signature. We terminate repeat infringers.

9. Hot Cocoa is free

Hot Cocoa is currently free to use. There is nothing to pay, and these Terms create no payment, subscription, or refund obligations.

If we ever introduce paid features, we will update these Terms under Section 15 first, and the change will not apply to you retroactively. Either way, what you have written stays yours and stays available to you.

10. Keep your own copies

Your work is yours. We'll never do anything to lock your work inside this app.

We take your backups seriously – however, no service is immune to data loss, and we would rather tell you that than let you find out.

Export your manuscripts regularly and keep a copy somewhere we do not control. The export feature exists for exactly this, and it is not going anywhere.

11. Availability and changes to the service

We will add features, change features, and occasionally remove them. Sometimes we need to take Hot Cocoa offline for maintenance.

If we ever decide to shut Hot Cocoa down, we will give you at least 60 days' notice by email and keep the export feature running for that entire period, so that you leave with every word you wrote.

12. Ending your account

You can leave whenever you want. Delete your account from your Account page.

When you do, the account is deactivated right away and you lose access to it. Your work is held in a recoverable state for 30 days, so that a deletion you regret is not permanent. During that window, write to support@hotcocoa.app and we will restore it.

After 30 days, your account and your content are permanently deleted from our live systems. Copies may remain in encrypted backups for a short period until those backups age out on their normal rotation, and then they are gone.

We can end your account too, for a violation of these Terms as described in Section 8. If we close your account for anything other than illegal content, we will give you a fair chance to export your work first.

13. Our stuff

Hot Cocoa itself, meaning the software, the name, the logo, the design, and the interface, belongs to us. These Terms give you no right to copy it, reverse engineer it, or use our branding.

None of that touches your manuscripts, which are covered by Section 4 and remain entirely yours.

14. Disclaimers and liability

Hot Cocoa is provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We cannot promise that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that it will never lose data. Section 10 is the reason we ask you to keep your own copies.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost manuscripts. If we are held liable despite that, our total liability for all claims is limited to one hundred U.S. dollars, which reflects the fact that Hot Cocoa is free to use.

Some places do not allow certain warranty disclaimers or liability limits. Where that is true, the above applies only as far as the law allows, and nothing here limits our liability for fraud, gross negligence, willful misconduct, or anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

If content you store here breaks Section 7, or you otherwise break these Terms or someone else's rights, and that leads to a claim against us, you agree to cover the resulting damages and reasonable legal costs.

15. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. When we do, we will change the "Last updated" date at the top.

If a change is material, meaning it meaningfully reduces your rights or increases your obligations, we will tell you by email and in the app at least 30 days before it takes effect. That gives you time to read it and, if you do not like it, to export your work and close your account. Any change to Section 4 is material.

Using Hot Cocoa after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute not resolved informally will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Washington, and you and we consent to the jurisdiction of those courts.

If you live somewhere whose consumer-protection laws let you bring a claim locally, this section does not take that right away from you.

If something has gone wrong, please email support@hotcocoa.app first. We're authors too, we get it. Most things can be sorted out without lawyers, and we would much rather do it that way.

17. Housekeeping

  • Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about Hot Cocoa.
  • Severability. If any part of these Terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.
  • No waiver. If we do not enforce something right away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
  • Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms. We may transfer ours only to a successor who agrees in writing to be bound by all of them, including every promise in Section 4.

18. Contact

Questions, reports, appeals, or anything else at all:

support@hotcocoa.app

Now – settle in your favorite spot, grab a mug of hot cocoa, and get writing!