Terms of Service

You give dropHear links, notes, questions or documents. We extract their text, write a script with a large language model, voice it with a text-to-speech provider, and deliver the result as an episode you can play in the dropHear iPhone app, and in a private RSS feed at a URL unique to your account.

You can listen in the dropHear app, or add your private feed to a podcast app such as Apple Podcasts, Overcast or Pocket Casts, which play it under their own terms. Spotify does not accept personal RSS feeds and is not supported.

You keep all ownership of the documents you upload, the scripts you edit, and the audio generated from them. We claim no licence to your content beyond what is technically necessary to run the service: storing your files, processing them through the providers listed in section 8, hosting the resulting audio, and serving it to your feed.

We do not use your documents, scripts, or audio to train models, and we do not sell them or share them with anyone outside the subprocessors in section 8.

dropHear is a personal listening tool. You are responsible for having the right to upload and convert everything you put into it. Do not upload material you have no licence to use.

There are no public sharing or redistribution features in the product today. Every feed is private to one account, or to the members of one team. Your feed URL is a credential; if you publish it, republish episodes elsewhere, or otherwise distribute generated audio beyond your own listening, you take on responsibility for that distribution and any rights it requires.

If public channels are added later, they will come with their own content rules, mandatory source attribution, and a DMCA process.

Every episode is synthetic. The voices are text-to-speech, not recordings of the people they may resemble, and the scripts are written by a language model working from your source document. Episodes are labelled as AI-generated in the feed metadata.

Generated scripts can be wrong, can miss the point of a source, and can state things the source never said. Do not treat an episode as an accurate rendering of its source without checking, and do not rely on one for medical, legal, or financial decisions.

You may not use dropHear to clone a voice you do not have permission to use, to impersonate a real person, or to generate audio that is unlawful, harassing, or deceptive.

You need an account and must keep its credentials secure. Do not attempt to reach other users’ feeds or content, probe or overload the service, or resell access. We may suspend an account that does, and we will tell you why.

In the iPhone app, dropHear is an auto-renewing monthly subscription bought through the App Store. New subscribers get a 7-day free trial. Unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the trial or the current month ends, the subscription renews automatically and your Apple ID is charged the price shown in the app. Manage or cancel it at any time in your Apple ID settings (Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions). Apple handles the payment, and its terms and refund rules apply; we never see your payment details.

On the web, new accounts get a 7-day trial of the Pro plan. A card is required to start it; cancel before the trial ends and you pay nothing. Paid plans renew monthly until cancelled. Payments are processed by Stripe; we never see or store your card details.

Cancel at any time; your plan runs to the end of the paid period and then stops.

You can delete your account at any time in the dropHear iPhone app: open Account and choose Delete account. You can also write to support@drophear.com from your account’s email address to delete your account or an episode, or to get a copy of your data. The privacy policy explains what deletion removes and the statutory deadlines we work to. Deleting your account does not cancel an App Store subscription; cancel that in your Apple ID settings.

Encrypted backups roll off on their own schedule (currently 30 days), after which deleted content is gone from those too. Records we must keep for tax and accounting — invoices, payment records — are retained as the law requires.

Running dropHear means sending your content to a small number of providers. The current list, and what each one receives:

• Language model providers (Google Gemini; OpenAI as a fallback) — receive extracted source text to write the script.
• Text-to-speech providers (Google Gemini; OpenAI as a fallback) — receive the script to voice it. ElevenLabs was retired on 24 September 2026 and receives nothing.
• Hosting, storage and CDN (Fly.io, Cloudflare R2, Neon) — store your uploads, transcripts and audio files and serve the feed.
• Stripe — payments, billing and tax. Stripe receives your billing details, not your content.
• Transactional email (Resend) — sign-in links and codes, and failure notices.
• Page fetching and research (Firecrawl, Perplexity) — fetch the pages you save and research the desks and the questions you ask.
• Apple — App Store subscriptions and push notifications in the iPhone app.

The privacy policy covers what each holds and for how long. This list will change as the service does, and material changes will be announced before they take effect.

dropHear is provided as-is. We do not promise uninterrupted service, successful extraction of every document, or that a generated script will satisfy you. Extraction of paywalled or heavily scripted pages fails regularly; when it does you will see an error rather than a half-empty episode.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the three months before the claim.

We may update these terms. Material changes will be sent to your account email before they take effect, and continued use after that date means you accept them. If you do not, cancel and delete your account.