The Wash Guide app: terms of use

1. What the app is, and what it is not

The Wash Guide gives you laundry guidance: a detergent, a dose, a temperature and the reasoning behind them, drawn from what you tell it about the load and what you keep in your cupboard.

It is guidance, not a guarantee. Fabrics vary, machines vary, water varies, and the label sewn into a garment knows things we do not. Follow the care label where it disagrees with us. We are not liable for damage to your clothes, your machine or anything else that follows from acting on the app’s advice, and nothing in the app is a promise about a particular result.

Where the app quotes money, a running cost, a saving or a tariff, it is an estimate and the app says so wherever it says it. It is not a meter and it is not a bill.

2. Your account

You can use most of the app without an account. The calculator, the cupboard, the catalogue and the whole of Care and craft work on the phone alone.

An account is needed for three things: joining or creating a household, holding a PRO subscription, and minting smart-home keys that work away from your own network.

You must be 13 or over to hold an account. The app is not built for anyone younger, and under-13s are not permitted. A junior is a member aged 13 or over whose place in a household an adult admin there oversees. A junior joins with the invite code like any other member and holds their own account; the adult grants the role afterwards, can change or take it away, and can remove them from the household entirely. If you are the adult, the juniors in your household are yours to look after.

Keep your sign-in address to yourself. Tell us at support@thewashguide.app if you think somebody else is in your account.

You can delete your account at any time, from inside the app or at thewashguide.app/delete-account. It is a real deletion: not hidden, not deactivated. Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription, because a subscription lives with your Apple ID or Google account and only the store can end it. Cancel it there first.

3. Households, and the people in them

A household is a private group you join with a code somebody hands you. There is no directory, no search, and no way for a stranger to find you or contact you through the app.

Inside a household, other members can see the name you chose, your photograph if you set one, your role, your wash personality and how much washing you have been doing. Do not put anything in those fields you would not want your housemates to read.

There is no tolerance for objectionable content, and none for abusive behaviour. That means, plainly: no names, household names, reward words or photographs that are obscene, hateful, harassing, threatening, sexual, or targeted at anybody. It means not using a household to bully, frighten or wear somebody down, and it means not using the assignment or reminder features to badger a person. It applies to adults and it applies twice over where a junior can read it.

If somebody in your household is doing any of that, tell us at support@thewashguide.app, or use Report a concernin the app’s settings. We read those. We can remove content, suspend an account or close one, and we will do it without waiting for permission from the person who caused it. An admin can also remove a member from their household at any time, and is offered the chance to change the invite code so the person cannot walk back in.

We do not read household content routinely, and we would rather not have to.

4. PRO subscriptions

PRO is an auto-renewing subscription. It comes in two lengths:

• Monthly, at £3.99, billed every month.
• Yearly, at £29.99, billed every twelve months.

Prices are shown in the app in your own currency and are always taken from the store, never from us. The store’s price is the price.

PRO belongs to a person, not to a household. It follows your account to any phone you sign in on, and one subscription never covers everybody you live with. Some of the things PRO unlocks are shared, and a household feels the benefit of whoever is paying, but the subscription itself is one person’s.

How the billing works. Payment is charged to your Apple ID or your Google account when you confirm the purchase. It renews automatically at the same price for the same length, and it keeps renewing until you cancel. Cancel at least 24 hours before the end of a period, or that renewal has already happened. Managing and cancelling both happen in the store, not in the app: on iPhone that is Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions, and the app has a shortcut to it; on Android it is Google Play, then Payments and subscriptions.

Refundsare the store’s to give, not ours. Apple and Google each set their own policy and their own window. We can help you work out what happened, but we cannot reverse a charge we never took.

If we ever change what PRO costs or what it includes, you will hear about it before it applies to you, and a price rise never takes effect on an existing subscription without your agreement.

5. What you may not do

Do not take the app apart, copy it, resell it, or try to reach parts of the service you have not paid for. Do not automate it in ways that put weight on the service, and do not use it to break the law.

The smart-home features publish to an address you choose. Choose your own.

6. What is ours

The app, its writing, its design, its detergent catalogue, its guidance and its wash-personality system are ours and stay ours. Using the app does not transfer any of it to you.

What you put in is yours. Your wash history, your cupboard, your photograph and your names belong to you. You give us permission to store and show them for the purpose of running the app, including showing them to the other members of a household you joined, and that permission ends when you delete them or delete your account.

7. Ending it

You can stop at any time by deleting the app, your household, or your account.

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, particularly section 3. Where it is fair to do so we will say why and give you a chance to put it right first; where somebody is being harmed we will act first.

8. The legal part

The app is provided as it is. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted or free of faults, and we do not promise the guidance suits every garment.

Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not let us limit. If you are a consumer, you keep every right the law gives you, and nothing here takes any of them away. Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and where we are liable our total liability is limited to what you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts there have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer living elsewhere in the UK or in the EU, you may bring proceedings in your own country and keep the protections of its law.

If you live in the United States, section 9 sets out how disputes between us are resolved, and it is worth your time.

We may update these terms. When we do, the date at the top changes, and if the change matters we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

9. If you live in the United States: arbitration, and no class actions

This section applies only if you live in the United States. It changes where legal disputes between us go, and it is the most formal thing on this page because courts read it as well as people. There is a way to opt out at the end, and it costs nothing.

Talk to us first. Before either of us starts arbitration or court proceedings, we each agree to try to sort the dispute out informally. You write to support@thewashguide.app with your name, the email on your account and what has gone wrong; if the dispute is ours, we write to the email on your account. Neither of us may begin formal proceedings until sixty days after that notice, and both of us will make a genuine attempt in the meantime. Any limitation period is paused during those sixty days.

We each agree to arbitrate. Any dispute or claim arising out of or relating to these terms or the app will be resolved by binding arbitration between you and us individually, not in court and not before a jury, except the two carve-outs below. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section. The arbitrator can award you individually everything a court could, including damages and injunctive or declaratory relief for your own claim.

The two carve-outs. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small claims court. And either of us may go to court to protect intellectual property: to stop infringement or misuse of copyright, trade marks or trade secrets.

No class actions. You and we each waive the right to bring or join a class, collective, consolidated, representative or private-attorney-general proceeding of any kind, in arbitration or in court, and the arbitrator may not preside over one. If a court decides this paragraph cannot be enforced for a particular claim, that claim, and only that claim, goes to court, and the rest of this section stands for everything else.

No jury. For anything under this section that does end up in court, you and we each waive the right to a trial by jury.

How the arbitration works. One arbitrator, administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, which are at adr.org. The arbitration happens in the county where you live, by video, by telephone or on the papers where the rules allow you to choose. Fees follow those rules, and where the rules make a fee ours, we pay it. The arbitrator decides every question about this section, including whether a dispute belongs in arbitration, with one exception: only a court may decide whether the “No class actions” paragraph is enforceable.

Many similar claims. If twenty-five or more demands raising similar claims are filed against us by the same or coordinated counsel, the arbitrations proceed in batches: ten at a time, chosen jointly, with limitation periods paused for the rest, so that early results can settle the pattern. This exists to keep consumer arbitration workable, not to slow anyone down.

Opting out. You can reject this section entirely by emailing support@thewashguide.app within thirty days of first accepting these terms, saying you opt out of arbitration, with your name and the email on your account. Opting out changes nothing else: the app, the price and the rest of these terms stay exactly as they are.

If we ever change this section, the change does not apply to a dispute that began before it. This section survives the end of your account and of these terms.

10. If you got the app from Apple's App Store

These terms are between you and Obasien Group Ltd only. Apple is not a party to them. Apple is not responsible for the app or its contents.

Your licence is a non-transferable licence to use the app on any Apple-branded device you own or control, as permitted by the Usage Rules in Apple’s Media Services Terms and Conditions.

Support and maintenance are ours, not Apple’s. Apple has no obligation to provide either. Ask us at support@thewashguide.app.

Warranty. We are responsible for any warranty on the app, express or implied, to the extent it is not disclaimed above. If the app fails to conform to any warranty that applies, you may tell Apple, and Apple will refund what you paid for the app, if anything. To the maximum extent the law allows, Apple has no other warranty obligation at all, and any other claim arising from a failure to conform to a warranty is ours to answer.

Claims.We, not Apple, are responsible for dealing with any claim you or a third party makes about the app or your use of it, including product liability claims, claims that the app fails to meet a legal or regulatory requirement, consumer protection claims, and claims that the app infringes somebody’s intellectual property.

Legal compliance. You confirm that you are not in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated by the US Government as a terrorist-supporting country, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

Questions and complaints about the app go to Obasien Group Ltd, 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, or support@thewashguide.app.

Third-party terms. You must comply with any applicable third-party terms when using the app.

Apple is a third-party beneficiary of these terms. Apple and its subsidiaries may enforce them against you, and you accept that they have the right to do so.

11. If you got the app from Google Play

These terms are between you and Obasien Group Ltdonly. Google is not a party to them and is not responsible for the app. Your use of the app is also subject to the Google Play Terms of Service, and support is ours to provide, not Google’s.

12. Getting hold of us

Obasien Group Ltd, 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX, registered in England and Wales, company number 17314957.

• Anything at all: hello@thewashguide.app
• Help, or reporting somebody: support@thewashguide.app
• Data and privacy: privacy@thewashguide.app