Oak Tree Memories, Inc.

Terms of Service

Last updated: July 2026

Welcome

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of Oak Tree Memories ("Oak Tree" or the "Service"), operated by Oak Tree Memories, Inc. ("we," "us," or "our"). You are required to have agreed to these Terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the Service.

We've tried to write these in plain English wherever the law allows it. Where you need the precise legal wording, we've kept it — but we've explained what it means along the way.

1. What Oak Tree Is

Oak Tree is a private family storytelling platform. Your family creates a private space to store stories, memories, recipes, photographs, and other digital images, and to explore them together — including through an AI feature ("Ask Family") that answers questions using only what your family has actually shared.

Oak Tree is an application your family uses. We don't take part in family decisions about membership, access, or disputes — those are yours to make.

2. Accounts and Eligibility

• Oak Tree is not directed at children. The Service is intended solely for users who are eighteen (18) years of age or older. By creating an account or using the Service, you represent and warrant that you are at least 18 years old. If you are under 18, you are strictly prohibited from registering for an account or submitting any personal information, photos, or stories to the Service. We reserve the right to immediately terminate any account if we discover the user is under 18 years of age. If you believe a minor has created an account, please contact us at hello@oaktreememories.com.
• You're responsible for keeping your login credentials secure and for anything that happens under your account.
• You're responsible for the accuracy of what you enter. We don't verify family relationships, identities, or the truth of any story — that's between your family members.
• The Service is currently offered only to residents of the United States. If you attempt to sign up from outside the United States, we may be unable to offer you the Service, or portions of it may not function as described.

3. Free Trial

• New accounts begin with a 30-day free trial. No credit card is required to start.
• The trial period begins on the date your account is created.
• During the trial, you'll receive reminder emails at 10, 5, 3, and 1 day(s) before the trial ends.
• If you haven't chosen a paid plan by the end of the 30-day trial, your account becomes read-only: your family's existing stories, photos, and information remain visible, but you won't be able to add new content or use Ask Family.
• If no paid plan is chosen within 10 days of becoming read-only (day 40 from sign-up), your account becomes dormant. See Section 6 below for what happens to dormant accounts.

4. Subscriptions and Payment

• Oak Tree offers a single family plan at the price shown at sign-up (currently $20/month or $200/year if paid in advance).
• Subscriptions are billed automatically at the interval you choose until canceled.
• You can cancel anytime. Canceling stops future billing; it does not delete your family's stories. A canceled, paying account follows the lapsed-account process in Section 6.
• We will never surprise you with hidden fees or make it hard to cancel.

5. Your Responsibility to Back Up Your Data

Oak Tree stores your family's stories, photographs, and information with care, and we intend to keep it safe. However, you are responsible for maintaining your own backup copies of anything irreplaceable. We provide tools to export and download your stories at any time, and we encourage you to use them, especially for content that means the most to you. Oak Tree is not liable for loss of data due to technical failure, account dormancy, account removal, errors or omissions, or any other cause, to the fullest extent permitted by law.

6. Account Dormancy and Data Retention

We know families store important things here, so we've tried to build a policy that gives real time and real warning before anything is removed.

If your account was on a free trial and never converted to paid:

Timeline	What happens
Trial ends (day 30), no payment	Account becomes read-only
10 days later (day 40)	Account becomes dormant
90 days after becoming dormant	Uploaded photos, videos, and other media are deleted. We will email a specific advance warning before this happens. Text stories remain intact.
Up to 1 year after becoming dormant	You may reactivate your account and resume full access to your remaining stories at any time.
1 year after becoming dormant, if never reactivated	The account and all remaining data are permanently removed. We will give you advance notice and the opportunity to download your data for free before this happens.

If your account was a paying subscription that lapsed or was canceled:

The existing grace period and reactivation process for lapsed payments applies first (a grace period, followed by read-only access, followed by dormancy, with warnings throughout). Once an account is dormant:

Timeline	What happens
1 year after becoming dormant	Uploaded photos, videos, and other media are deleted, with advance warning first. Text stories remain intact.
Up to 2 years after becoming dormant	You may reactivate your account and resume full access to your remaining stories at any time.
2 years after becoming dormant, if never reactivated	The account and all remaining data are permanently removed, with advance notice and a free opportunity to download your data first.

We chose these different timeframes because a paying customer has already shown a real commitment to preserving their family's library, and we want to reflect that.

7. Ownership of Stories

• Stories belong to the person who wrote them, not to the family space they were shared in.
• If someone leaves a family space, they keep their own stories — they do not lose what they wrote.
• Removing a family member from a family space revokes their login access to that space; it does not delete the stories they authored.

8. Stewardship

• One or more "Stewards" manage a family space. Any current Steward may appoint another.
• A Steward's death does not automatically endanger the family library. Stewardship can be claimed or transferred by remaining family members.
• Oak Tree does not resolve disputes between family members about access, stewardship, or the accuracy of stories. We provide the mechanism; your family makes the decisions.

9. Artificial Intelligence

• Oak Tree uses AI (currently Anthropic's Claude) to help organize, search, and answer questions about the stories your family has shared.
• Ask Family only draws from stories your family has actually entered. Oak Tree does not invent memories, fabricate quotes, or assume facts that were never shared.
• AI responses are a memory aid, not an authoritative historical or factual record. Family members' own accounts may differ from one another, and Oak Tree does not adjudicate whose account is correct.
• We do not use your family's private stories to train AI models for other customers or for general model improvement.

10. Content You Submit; License to Oak Tree

You own the stories, photographs, videos, recipes, and other content you submit to the Service ("Content"). We don't take ownership of it, and we never sell it or use it to train AI models for other customers.

To actually run the Service — storing your Content, showing it back to your family, backing it up, generating thumbnails, and so on — we need your permission to handle it in those specific ways. So, by submitting Content, you grant Oak Tree Memories, Inc. a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, display, format, back up, and transmit your Content, solely for the purpose of operating and providing the Service to you and the family members you share it with. This license includes the right to use trusted third-party service providers (such as cloud storage and infrastructure providers) to perform these same functions on our behalf, under confidentiality obligations at least as protective as this one.

This license does not give us the right to use your Content for advertising, marketing, or public promotion of Oak Tree without your separate, explicit permission. It ends when you delete the Content or close your account, except that we may retain copies for a reasonable period afterward as described in Section 6 (Account Dormancy and Data Retention), in backups, or as required by law.

You represent that you own the Content you submit, or have the right to submit it (for example, a family photograph you're authorized to share), and that it doesn't infringe anyone else's rights.

11. Storage Limits and Fair Use

Oak Tree's family plan includes 50GB of storage per family, which is enough for tens of thousands of photographs and many hours of video — far more than the overwhelming majority of families will ever need for genuine storytelling.

• Photos are automatically optimized for storage when uploaded; you don't need to resize or compress anything yourself.
• Individual video uploads are limited to 10 minutes or 500MB, whichever comes first, per clip. This comfortably covers things like a toast, a recorded story, or a recital — Oak Tree is not intended as a platform for storing or sharing long-form video content.
• You can see how much of your family's 50GB is in use at any time within the Service.
• If your family reaches its 50GB limit, existing content remains fully accessible, but new photo or video uploads will be paused until space is freed up (for example, by removing older media) or additional storage becomes available.
• We may offer additional storage as a paid add-on in the future. If we do, we'll describe it clearly and separately — it won't be added to your bill without your action.

These limits exist so that Oak Tree can remain simple, affordably priced, and unmistakably about family storytelling — not a general-purpose file storage or media-sharing service.

12. Acceptable Use and Prohibited Content

Oak Tree is built to hold a family's real, private history — including photographs and video of real people, some of them children. That trust depends on everyone using the Service responsibly. You agree not to use the Service to:

• Upload, store, or share any content that is illegal, or that infringes someone else's copyright, trademark, privacy, or other legal rights
• Upload or share any content depicting, describing, or facilitating the sexual exploitation or abuse of a minor, in any form — see the zero-tolerance policy below
• Upload, store, or share any sexually explicit or pornographic content of any kind, involving any person, regardless of the age of the people depicted or whether all parties consented to its creation. Oak Tree is not a platform for adult content, and none is permitted under any circumstances.
• Upload intimate or private images of any person without that person's knowledge and consent
• Harass, threaten, defame, or impersonate any person
• Upload malicious code, viruses, or anything designed to damage or disrupt the Service or another user's device
• Attempt to access another family's private space without authorization
• Scrape, data-mine, or use automated means to access the Service outside of normal, individual use
• Attempt to interfere with, disrupt, reverse-engineer, or circumvent the security of the Service
• Use the Service for any commercial purpose, bulk messaging, or purpose unrelated to your family's private storytelling

Zero tolerance for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Oak Tree has absolute zero tolerance for content that sexually exploits or endangers children. We do not permit any user, for any reason, to upload, store, transmit, or otherwise use the Service in connection with child sexual abuse material, or any content that sexualizes minors. If we become aware of any such content or activity, we will immediately remove the content, terminate the associated account without prior notice, preserve the evidence as required by law, and report the content and all available information about the user to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children ("NCMEC") via its CyberTipline and to law enforcement, as required by federal law (18 U.S.C. § 2258A). We will cooperate fully with any law enforcement investigation.

We may remove content, and suspend or terminate accounts, that violate this section. For severe violations — including CSAM, other illegal content, pornographic content, or activity that threatens the safety of any person — we may do so immediately and without prior notice.

13. Copyright Complaints and DMCA Notice

We respect the intellectual property rights of others and expect users of the Service to do the same. If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, you may submit a notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 17 U.S.C. § 512, to our designated agent below.

Your notice must include, in writing:

• A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or a person authorized to act on their behalf
• Identification of the copyrighted work you claim has been infringed
• Identification of the specific material you claim is infringing, and information reasonably sufficient to let us locate it on the Service
• Your contact information, including your address, telephone number, and email address
• A statement that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law
• A statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on their behalf

Designated Agent for Notice:
Oak Tree Memories, Inc.
Attn: Copyright Agent
legal@oaktreememories.com

Upon receipt of a valid notice, we will remove or disable access to the identified material and notify the user who submitted it. That user may submit a counter-notice if they believe the material was removed in error, containing their signature, identification of the removed material and its former location, a statement under penalty of perjury that they have a good faith belief the material was removed by mistake or misidentification, and their consent to the jurisdiction of the federal court in their district (or, if outside the United States, in Travis County, Texas). Unless the original complaining party informs us that they have filed a lawsuit seeking a court order against the user, we may restore the material within 10 to 14 business days of receiving a valid counter-notice.

We will terminate, in appropriate circumstances, the accounts of users who are determined to be repeat infringers.

14. Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability

The Service is provided "as is." To the fullest extent permitted by law, Oak Tree disclaims all warranties, express or implied, and is not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from your use of the Service, including loss of data. Our total liability for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability where the law does not allow it to be limited.

15. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we'll notify you by email or through the Service before they take effect.

16. Governing Law and Forum Selection

These Terms, your use of the Service, and any dispute or claim arising out of or relating to them shall be governed by, and construed in accordance with, the laws of the State of Texas, without giving effect to any choice or conflict of law provision or rule. You and we explicitly agree that any legal suit, action, or proceeding arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service — which cannot be resolved via the mandatory mediation protocol outlined herein — must be instituted exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Austin, Travis County, Texas. You and we irrevocably submit to the exclusive personal jurisdiction and venue of such courts for any such lawsuit, and waive any objection based on an inconvenient forum (forum non conveniens).

20. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Reach us at legal@oaktreememories.com.