These terms form a binding agreement between you and TODO: Your legal name (sole trader), the sole trader who operates Animal World Map from TODO: Country of establishment. By visiting the site, creating an account or buying credits, you accept them. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the service.

They work together with our privacy policy, which explains what we do with your personal information.

If you are entering into these terms on behalf of a company — for a sponsorship, for instance — you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

Animal World Map is an interactive way to explore wildlife. It includes:

• A world map showing where species live, with conservation status and habitat information.
• A species catalog you can search and filter by conservation status.
• A blog of articles about wildlife and conservation.
• An AI wildlife guide you can chat with in writing or by voice, and narrated stories about individual species.

The map, the catalog and the blog are free and need no account. The AI guide, voice conversations and narrated stories consume credits, and therefore require an account.

A companion mobile app is also available. Downloads from the App Store are additionally subject to Apple's own terms.

You sign in with an email address and a one-time code — there is no password. You are responsible for keeping access to that mailbox secure: anyone who can read your email can sign in as you. Tell us at [email protected] if you believe someone else is using your account.

• Use an email address you genuinely control.
• One account per person. Creating multiple accounts to collect the free credits repeatedly is not allowed.
• You must be at least 13 years old — or older, where your country sets a higher age for agreeing to online services.
• Accounts are personal. You may not sell, share or transfer yours.

You can close your account at any time by writing to us. Deleting your account forfeits any credits still on it, and those are not refunded unless you are within the withdrawal window described below.

Paid features run on credits. There is no subscription and nothing to cancel: you buy a pack once, and it lasts until you use it.

Credits come in three kinds, and are spent as follows:

Every new account receives a free allowance of 2 min of voice, 5 chat messages and 1 narrated story. It is granted once, at sign-up.

Packs currently range from $2.99 to $9.99. Current contents and prices are always on the pricing page, which prevails over any figure quoted elsewhere.

What credits are — and are not

• Credits do not expire while your account is open. We will give at least ninety days' notice by email if that ever changes.
• Credits have no cash value, cannot be exchanged for money, and cannot be transferred between accounts.
• Credits are a licence to use a feature, not an ownership right, and they are not a payment instrument or stored value.
• If a feature fails after a credit is taken and you receive nothing in return, we put the credit back automatically. If that ever fails to happen, tell us and we will correct it.

Payments are processed by Polar, which acts as our merchant of record. That means Polar is the seller for your purchase, handles payment and collects any sales tax or VAT due in your country. Your card details go to Polar and never pass through our servers.

• Prices are shown in US dollars. Taxes are calculated at checkout, and your bank may apply its own currency conversion or foreign transaction fees.
• Your purchase is a one-time payment. Nothing renews and nothing is charged again.
• Credits are added to your account as soon as the payment is confirmed. If they have not appeared within a few minutes, write to [email protected] with your receipt.
• We may change our prices at any time. A change never affects a purchase already made.

If a payment is reversed or charged back after credits were granted, we may remove the corresponding credits from your account.

Credits are digital content delivered immediately, so please read this before buying.

If you are a consumer in the EU, EEA or UK

You normally have fourteen days to withdraw from a distance purchase. By buying credits and using them straight away, you ask for immediate delivery and acknowledge that you lose that right for the portion you have consumed. In practice, we apply the fair version of that rule: within fourteen days of purchase we refund the credits you have not used, in proportion to what remains.

Everyone else

We are a small independent project and we would rather have a happy user than a disputed payment. If the service did not work as described, if you were charged twice, or if something went wrong, write to [email protected] within thirty days and we will sort it out — usually with a refund.

We do not refund credits already spent on conversations or stories that were delivered, or purchases where the account was used in breach of these terms. Refunds are issued through Polar, to the original payment method.

You can support the project as an individual or as a company. Sponsorship is a voluntary contribution to the running costs of the site, not the purchase of a product, and it is not tax-deductible — we are not a charity.

Where a sponsorship includes a mention or a logo on the site, we decide how and where it appears, and we may decline or withdraw any sponsorship that conflicts with the purpose of the project — anything promoting wildlife trafficking, trophy hunting or the exploitation of animals, in particular. Sponsorship never buys editorial influence over our content.

Use the service for what it is meant for: learning about wildlife. Specifically, you agree not to:

• Break the law, infringe anyone's rights, or use the service to harass, threaten or harm others.
• Scrape, crawl or bulk-download our species data, map data or articles, or use them to train a machine learning model.
• Resell, sublicense or commercially redistribute access to the AI guide, the stories or our content.
• Attempt to bypass credit limits, rate limits or payment — including by automating requests, creating multiple accounts or forging requests to our API.
• Probe, scan or interfere with the security or availability of the service, or attempt to access accounts or data that are not yours.
• Reverse engineer the service, or use it to develop a competing product.
• Use the AI guide to generate illegal, hateful, sexual or otherwise abusive content, or to extract information about how the underlying models work.
• Impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your affiliation with a person or organisation.

We apply rate limits to protect the service. They are generous enough that ordinary use will never reach them.

This section matters more than the rest. Please read it.

The AI guide and the narrated stories are generated by language models. Species descriptions in our catalog are also partly AI-written. Such content can be wrong, incomplete or out of date, and can state an inaccuracy with complete confidence. We review what we can, but we cannot verify every sentence about every species.

• Not professional advice. Nothing on the site is veterinary, medical, legal, scientific or travel advice. Do not use it for academic citation, for identifying a species in a consequential situation, or for any decision that needs a verified source.
• Not a safety guide. Never rely on this service to judge whether an animal is dangerous, whether it is safe to approach, handle or feed one, or what to do if you are bitten, stung or injured. Wild animals are unpredictable. In an emergency, contact local emergency services or a qualified professional.
• Conservation data changes. Conservation statuses, distribution ranges and population figures come from sources that are periodically revised. Consult the IUCN Red List directly for authoritative status.
• Locations are approximate. Map positions indicate general habitat ranges, not the actual whereabouts of any animal.

Where you rely on any of this content, you do so at your own risk. If you spot an error, the report button on a species card sends it straight to us — those reports are genuinely useful.

When you send feedback, report a problem on a species card, request a new species or write a sponsorship message, you keep ownership of what you wrote. You grant us a free, worldwide, non-exclusive licence to use it to run and improve the service — to fix the bug you reported, to add the species you asked for, or to correct a fact.

Only send content you have the right to send. We may remove or ignore any submission, and we have no obligation to act on one.

Replies produced by the AI guide, and stories generated for a species, are yours to use personally. They are not exclusive — the same question may produce a similar answer for someone else — and stories in particular are written once and shared by every listener.

The site itself — its name, logo, design, code, blog articles and editorial content — belongs to us and is protected by copyright. You may read, share links and quote reasonably with attribution. You may not copy the site, redistribute its content at scale, or use our name or logo to suggest we endorse you.

Data and images from other sources

Species information draws on public sources including the IUCN Red List, iNaturalist and Wikimedia Commons. Photographs remain the property of their authors and are used under the licences those authors chose; attribution is shown where we have it. If you are the author of an image and want it credited differently or removed, write to [email protected] and we will act promptly. Map data is provided by Mapbox and OpenStreetMap contributors, under their respective terms.

We aim to keep the service running, but we do not promise it will always be available or error-free. We may add, change or remove features, and we may suspend the service for maintenance or for reasons beyond our control — an outage at a provider, for example.

If we discontinue a paid feature entirely, we will give reasonable notice by email and refund the credits you bought for it and have not used.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy or non-infringement.

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, nor for lost profits, lost data or lost opportunity, arising from your use of the service — including any reliance on AI-generated content or species information.

Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you for all claims is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or twenty US dollars.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not permit us to exclude. If you are a consumer, you keep every mandatory right your local law gives you, and nothing here limits them.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms — typically after a warning, immediately where the breach is serious or where fraud or abuse is involved. If we close your account for a breach, unused credits are forfeited. If we close it for any other reason, we refund the credits you have not used.

You may stop using the service at any time and ask us to delete your account. The sections on intellectual property, liability and governing law survive the end of this agreement.

We may update these terms as the service evolves. The date at the top of this page shows the latest revision. For material changes — to pricing, refunds or your rights — we will notify account holders by email at least thirty days before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new terms; if you do not, you may close your account and ask for a refund of unused credits.

These terms are governed by the laws of TODO: Country of establishment, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and the courts of TODO: Country of establishment have jurisdiction over any dispute.

If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live, and you may also bring proceedings before the courts there. Consumers in the European Union can use the European Commission's online dispute resolution platform.

Before any of that, please write to us. Nearly everything is settled by a single email.

Questions about these terms, a purchase or your account: [email protected].

TODO: Your legal name (sole trader)
TODO: Street address, postal code, city
TODO: Country of establishment