Terms of Service

1. Who you are dealing with

horch is developed and licensed by Marco Müllner ("we", "us"), a sole trader established in Austria. The full operator details are in the Impressum below.

Payments are not made to us directly. Paddle.com Market Ltd acts as merchant of record: it is the seller of the product to you, takes the payment, handles VAT and sales tax, and issues your invoice. Paddle's own buyer terms apply to that transaction. These Terms of Service govern the license to use the software, which we grant you.

2. The license

When you buy horch, we grant you a perpetual, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the software for personal or business purposes, on up to 2 Macs at the same time. A Mac can be deactivated in the app to free the seat for another one.

The license is not a subscription. It does not expire and it is never revoked for non-payment, because there is nothing further to pay. The app runs entirely on your Mac and does not need our servers to keep functioning.

Update window

The price includes 1 year of updates from the date of purchase (the "update window"). You may install and keep using every version released inside that window, indefinitely. When the window lapses, the app keeps working at the version you have; it simply no longer installs versions released afterwards.

A renewal (€25 per year) extends the update window by a further year. It is optional. It grants no other rights and its absence takes none away.

Trial

A fresh installation runs as a full-featured 30-day trial with no account and no payment details. When the trial ends and no valid license key has been entered, the app stops operating. Your data (recordings, transcripts, summaries, notes) remains on your Mac in plain files and is not deleted, held back, or made unreadable.

3. Price and payment

The license costs €49 as a one-time payment; the optional renewal costs €25 per year. Prices are in euro. Applicable VAT or sales tax is determined and added at checkout by Paddle.com Market Ltd, which also issues the invoice.

4. Refunds and right of withdrawal

We offer a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee from the date of purchase, on top of the free trial. See the refund policy for how to request one.

This is a voluntary commitment. It is in addition to, not instead of, any statutory right of withdrawal you may have as a consumer under EU and Austrian law. Statutory withdrawal is handled by Paddle.com Market Ltd as the seller of record; you may raise it with us and we will pass it on.

5. How you may and may not use horch

You may use horch for any lawful purpose. You may not:

• share, resell, sublicense, rent, or publish your license key, or use it on more Macs than the license allows;
• circumvent or tamper with the license check, or use a key you did not obtain legitimately;
• reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the software, except to the extent that mandatory law expressly permits it despite this restriction;
• use horch to record people where doing so is unlawful. You are responsible for complying with the recording, consent, and privacy laws that apply to you: horch records what you tell it to record.

6. Ownership

We retain all intellectual property rights in horch. You own everything horch produces on your Mac: your recordings, transcripts, summaries, notes, and todos are your data, stored in open formats on your own disk. We claim no rights in them and, as described in the privacy policy, we never receive them.

7. Support

Support is provided by email at [email protected]. We answer as promptly as a one-person business reasonably can. horch is not sold with a service level agreement, an uptime guarantee, or a guaranteed response time.

8. Warranty and liability

The statutory warranty (Gewährleistung) under Austrian law applies to the software as sold. Beyond that, horch is provided as it is: we do not warrant that it will be free of errors, that transcription or AI-derived output will be accurate or complete, or that it will meet a particular purpose. Automatic transcription and summarisation make mistakes; do not rely on them for decisions with legal or financial consequences without checking them.

We are liable without limitation for damage caused intentionally or through gross negligence, for personal injury, and wherever mandatory Austrian law (including the Product Liability Act and consumer protection law) imposes liability. Liability for slight negligence is excluded to the extent the law permits. We are not liable for lost data, lost recordings, or lost profits arising from slight negligence. Keep backups of anything you cannot afford to lose.

9. Revocation of a license

We may revoke a license if the purchase is refunded or charged back, or if the license is used in serious breach of section 5 (for example, a key published for others to use). Revocation returns the app to its locked state; it never deletes your files.

10. Data protection

horch is local-first: your recordings and transcripts stay on your Mac, and we operate no service that could receive them. Two optional features send data to a provider you have an account with, never to us: a cloud AI provider you connect with your own API key, and the iPhone Companion, which syncs through your own iCloud. What our license service stores, and why, is set out in full in the privacy policy.

11. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms for future purchases, for example when the product or the law changes. The version in force for your purchase is the one published at the time you bought your license. Material changes are reflected in the "last updated" date at the top of this page.

12. Governing law

These terms are governed by Austrian law, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. If you are a consumer, this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of the country in which you have your habitual residence, and you can always bring proceedings in the courts of that country.

Impressum (§ 5 ECG, § 63 GewO)

• VAT identification number (UID): ATU72737906
• Applicable trade regulations: Gewerbeordnung 1994 (GewO), www.ris.bka.gv.at
• Business purpose: development and licensing of software.
• Merchant of record: Paddle.com Market Ltd sells horch licenses to customers and issues invoices on our behalf.

Complaints: write to [email protected] and we will try to settle the matter directly. Your statutory rights as a consumer, including the right to take a dispute to the competent authorities or courts, are unaffected.