Terms of Service

1. Who we are and what this covers

First Verse is a service of Webfront LLC ("First Verse", "we", "us"), which runs the website at firstverse.app and the services on it (together, the "Service"). These Terms of Service (the "Terms") are the agreement between you and us.

By creating an account, posting a poem, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree to them, do not use the Service.

Two other documents form part of these Terms. Our Privacy Policy explains what personal information we hold and what we do with it. Our Code of Conduct is the plain-language version of how to behave here; where it and these Terms cover the same ground, these Terms are the ones that govern.

2. Your account

2.1 Age

You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. If you are under 18, you may only use the Service with the knowledge and permission of a parent or guardian, who agrees to these Terms on your behalf.

2.2 Signing up

You sign in either with Google, or by supplying your email address and following the single-use sign-in link we send to it. There is no password. The address you give us is the means by which you access the account and by which we send you the notices described in these Terms, so it must be one you control and can receive mail at. Accounts created before August 2026 may still hold a password; those continue to work, and may be used with a sign-in link instead.

2.3 One person, one account

Your account is personal to you. Access to it follows access to the email address attached to it: anyone able to read that mailbox can request a sign-in link. You are responsible for keeping that mailbox secure, for not forwarding sign-in links, and for all activity under your account. Tell us promptly if you believe your account has been accessed by someone else.

2.4 Email confirmation

A confirmed email address is required before a poem can publish and before you can use the contact form. Following a sign-in link confirms the address.

2.5 The Code of Conduct

Agreement to the Code of Conduct is required before you post a poem or leave a comment. It is required for those two activities only; reading, starring, following and saving are not conditional on it. Where we materially revise the Code, we will ask you to agree again, and the earlier version continues to apply to you until you do.

3. Your poems and your rights

3.1 You keep your copyright

Posting a poem on First Verse does not transfer ownership of it. You keep every right you had in your work before you posted it, including the right to publish it elsewhere, sell it, enter it in competitions, or collect it in a book.

3.2 What you allow us to do

So that we can operate the Service, you grant First Verse a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, display and distribute the poems, comments, profile text and images you post, and to make the technical copies and format changes needed to do that (for example, generating the share card that appears when a link to your poem is pasted into a message or a social post, or an excerpt in an email telling you your poem went live).

This licence exists only for the purpose of operating and promoting the Service. It is not perpetual and not irrevocable: it ends when you delete the work or your account, except for (a) copies that remain in routine backups for a limited period, and (b) copies other people may have already saved or shared, which we cannot recall.

We will not sell your poems, license them to third parties for their own use, or use them to train machine-learning models. Poems are sent to our moderation and evaluation provider only as described in section 5.

3.3 You must own what you post

You promise that the work you post is yours, that you have the right to post it, and that posting it does not break anyone else's rights or any agreement you have made (including exclusivity terms from another publisher). Posting another person's work as your own is grounds for removal of the work and closure of your account.

3.4 Attribution and editing

Your poems are published under the name on your profile. You can edit or archive a poem at any time while signed in. Editing a published poem sends it back through the same automated checks described below.

3.5 Drafts

A draft is private. Until you publish it, a draft is visible only to you when signed in, is not indexed, is not shown to other members, and is not submitted to the checks in section 5; those run when you post. You may delete a draft at any time, and deleting your account deletes your drafts.

3.6 Feedback about the Service

If you send us ideas or suggestions about First Verse itself (not your poems), we may use them without owing you anything. This does not apply to your creative work.

4. What you may not post

This section covers everything you put on the site — poems, comments and replies, your profile, and anything you send us. Don't post anything that:

• is not yours to post, or infringes someone else's copyright, trademark or other rights;
• sexualises a minor, in any form;
• threatens, harasses or incites violence against a person or a group, or targets them for who they are;
• is a credible plan to harm yourself or someone else, rather than writing about harm;
• publishes private information about a real person without their consent;
• is spam, advertising, SEO filler, or bulk-generated text posted to game the feed;
• impersonates another poet, or passes an account off as someone it isn't;
• is unlawful where you are, or where we operate.

Subject matter is not itself a breach. Writing about grief, violence, addiction, sex between adults, cruelty or despair does not break these rules. The list above concerns conduct that causes harm, not the depiction of harm.

You also agree not to scrape the Service, hammer it with automated requests, break its security, or use it to distribute malware.

5. Review, moderation and AI checks

Every human submission passes through automated checks before the public can see it. Those checks look for the categories in section 4, and for work that appears to be somebody else's.

Those checks are performed in part by an AI service (currently Anthropic's Claude API). This means the text of your poem, its title, and the author name attached to it are transmitted to that provider for the purpose of running the check. The provider processes it to return a result; it is not used to train their models. The same applies to the optional craft evaluations described in section 7.

A flagged submission is reviewed by a member of our staff before any decision takes effect. We may hold, decline to publish, unpublish, or remove work, and we may limit or close an account, where we believe these Terms have been broken. We notify you by email when a poem publishes and when it does not. Automated checks are not infallible; you may ask us to review any decision, and we will reconsider it.

We are not obliged to review everything, and not reviewing something is not an endorsement of it.

5.1 Posting pace

To keep the feed readable, there are limits on how many poems one poet can publish in a given period, and how many poems the site publishes in a day. If a day is full, your poem is scheduled for the next available one. You can see and change the schedule while a poem is pending.

5.2 Comments

Comments are screened and rate-limited. A comment reported by more than one member is withheld from public view pending review; it is withheld, not deleted, and its author can still see it. You may edit a comment for a limited period after posting and delete it at any time. The owner of the poem or page a comment appears on may hide it there. You may ask us to review a comment that has been withheld or hidden.

6. Poems that First Verse publishes

Alongside work by poets who post here, the Service publishes two other kinds of poem, both labelled where they appear:

• Public-domain poems. Curated reprints of work whose copyright has expired, shown with an attribution line.
• AI poems. Poems generated by First Verse and published under a byline that says so. They do not carry stars, and they are never presented as a person's work.

Neither kind is offered as, or mixed in with, anybody's own writing.

7. Paid features

Reading and posting are free. There is no submission fee and no paywall on poems. Four optional features are paid. None of them affects whether a poem is accepted for publication:

7.1 Craft evaluations

You can buy credits and spend them on a detailed, private AI evaluation of one of your poems. An evaluation is an opinion generated by a language model against a fixed rubric. It is not a guarantee of publication, quality, or anything else, and it is never shown to anyone but you. The first evaluation credit is granted free when your first poem publishes.

7.2 Expedited publishing

When a day's publishing slots are already full, you can pay to have a poem published the same day instead of waiting. Your card is authorised at the time you ask and is only charged if we approve the expedite. If we do not, the authorisation is released and you are not charged.

7.3 Featuring a poem

You may pay to feature one of your own published poems for a fixed number of days. A featured poem receives additional placement — a slot in the feed rotation and in the daily email — and is labelled as promoted wherever it appears. What you buy is placement only: we do not generate stars, comments or other engagement for it. The poem must be published, original, and cleared by the checks in section 5. A limited number of poems run at any one time; where those are full, the purchase secures the next available run and we confirm its start date.

If the poem ceases to be publicly visible during a run, whether because you archive it or because we remove it, the run ends and we refund the unused portion. We send a summary of the run by email when it ends.

7.4 Poet handles

You may be able to claim a handle: a short address for your poet page. A handle is a one-off purchase and is held for as long as your account remains open. It confers no trademark right and no exclusivity outside the Service. We may reclaim a handle that impersonates another person or organisation, that was acquired for resale, or that is attached to an account closed under section 10. Handles are sometimes granted at no charge; the terms of this section apply equally in that case.

7.5 Payments and refunds

Payments are handled by Stripe. We do not see or store your full card number. Prices are shown before you pay and include no hidden charges.

Unused evaluation credits are refundable on request within 30 days of purchase. A credit that has been spent — an evaluation has been generated and delivered — is not refundable, because the work has been done. If an evaluation fails to generate, the credit is returned automatically. An expedite you paid for that we did not approve is never charged. A feature run refunds pro rata as described above. If you believe a charge is incorrect, contact us and we will investigate it.

7.6 Changes to pricing

We may change prices. Changes never apply to credits you have already bought, or to a feature run already under way.

8. Tips to poets

A poet may publish their own Venmo, Cash App or PayPal handle so that readers can send them a tip. Payment does not pass through First Verse. The tip control takes you off the Service and into that provider's app or website, where you pay the poet directly. We do not hold, route, process or take any share of the funds, and we receive no information about the payment beyond the fact that the control was used.

A tip is therefore a voluntary gift between you and the poet: not a payment for goods or services, and not a transaction with First Verse. We cannot refund or reverse a tip, and we are not a party to any dispute about one — that is a matter between you, the poet, and the payment provider. Poets are responsible for the accuracy of the handle they publish and for any tax owed on money they receive.

9. Copyright complaints

If you believe material on the Service infringes your copyright, notify us through the contact form or at support@firstverse.app, including:

• a link to the page on First Verse;
• a description of your work and where it was published;
• your contact details;
• a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised, and that the information in your notice is accurate;
• your signature (typed is fine) as the rights holder or someone authorised to act for them.

We act on credible notices promptly. If your work has been removed and you believe that was an error, you may submit a counter-notice and we will reconsider. We close the accounts of repeat infringers.

9.1 Designated agent

Formal notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act should go to our designated agent:

DMCA Agent, Webfront LLC
Webfront LLC
6727 Martin Luther King Jr Way S
Ste M #1212
Seattle, WA 98118
Phone: 509-426-5842
Email: legal@webfront.co

The agent address above is for formal copyright notices. For anything else, including a question about a poem of yours, use the contact form or support@firstverse.app.

10. Ending your account

You can delete your account at any time from your account page. Deleting it clears your personal details and takes your poems, drafts and comments down with it. It cannot be undone, so save anything you want to keep first.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these Terms or the Code of Conduct. Where we can, we will tell you why and give you a chance to respond first — unless doing so would put someone at risk or is not possible.

Sections 3.2 (the licence, as limited there), 9, 12, 13 and any accrued payment obligations survive the end of this agreement.

11. Changes to the site and to these terms

The Service is under active development. We may add to, change or discontinue parts of it.

We may also update these Terms. When we make a material change we will update the date at the top and, for changes that affect your rights, tell registered users by email before it takes effect. If you keep using the Service after a change takes effect, you accept the updated Terms.

12. Disclaimers and limits on liability

The Service is provided "as is". We do not promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that anything posted here will be read, starred, followed or paid for. We do not endorse the opinions in poems or comments posted by users.

To the fullest extent the law allows, First Verse is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data or lost opportunity, arising from your use of the Service.

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or (b) US$100.

We are not responsible for the content other members post, for what other members do with work you have made public, or for the acts, omissions, terms or privacy practices of the third-party services described in these Terms — including any payment provider used to send a tip under section 8.

12.1 Your indemnity

You agree to indemnify First Verse against any claim, demand, loss or expense (including reasonable legal fees) brought by a third party and arising out of work you post, your breach of these Terms or the Code of Conduct, or your infringement of anyone else's rights. We will notify you of any such claim and you may take over its defence, provided you do not settle it in a way that imposes any obligation on us without our agreement.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Some jurisdictions do not allow some of these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law allows.

13. Disputes and governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute that cannot be resolved between us will be brought in the state or federal courts located in the State of Washington, and you and we consent to their jurisdiction — except that either of us may bring a claim in small-claims court where it qualifies.

This section does not take away rights the law of your own home gives you. If you live somewhere whose law grants you consumer rights that cannot be waived by agreement — which includes residents of California and of the UK and EU — those rights continue to apply to you in full, as does any right that law gives you to bring proceedings locally, whatever this section says.

Nor does this section affect our obligations under privacy and data-protection law. Those apply according to where you live, not according to the law chosen above: if you are covered by the California Consumer Privacy Act, the UK or EU GDPR, or any equivalent, you keep everything they give you. See the Privacy Policy.

13.1 Time limit

Any claim relating to the Service must be brought within one year of the event giving rise to it, except where the law of your jurisdiction does not permit that limit.

13.2 General

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the Code of Conduct, are the entire agreement between you and First Verse about the Service, and replace any earlier version of them.

You may not transfer your account or your rights under these Terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours to a successor in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of the business, on notice to you.

We give you notice under these Terms by email to the address on your account, or by a notice posted on the Service. You give us notice through the contact details in section 14.

Nothing in these Terms creates a partnership, employment or agency relationship between us, and nobody other than you and First Verse has any right to enforce them.

If any part of these Terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing a term on one occasion is not a waiver of it.

14. Contact

Contact us through the contact form, or at support@firstverse.app. That address also receives copyright notices under section 9 and any formal notice under these Terms.

Questions about these terms: use the contact form or write to support@firstverse.app.