Terms
Terms of service.
Written to be read. Where a term is unusual for this kind of service, it is because Joan involves two different people — the one who pays and the one who talks.
Last updated 17 August 2026
Founding phase. Joan is pre-launch and these terms are being finalized with counsel before paid memberships open. The commitments below about ownership, approval, recording, and voice are settled and will not be weakened. Sections marked as pending will be completed, not reversed.
01Who the agreement is between
Joan is usually bought by one person for another — a daughter for her father, most often. That creates two roles, and they have different rights.
- The member is whoever sets up and pays for the membership. They control scheduling and billing.
- The storyteller is whoever talks to Joan. They control the material: what is discussed, what is recorded, what is written, what is kept, and who may see it.
Paying for a membership does not give the member authority over the storyteller’s material. A member cannot approve stories on the storyteller’s behalf, cannot read stories the storyteller has kept private, and cannot consent to recording for them.
02What Joan provides
Guided telephone conversations, each shaped into a written story, kept with its original recording in a private archive for the family. Joan is software: it makes the calls, asks the questions, and writes the stories. There is no ghostwriter or human editor involved in producing them.
Joan is not a therapist, a lawyer, a doctor, a financial adviser, or a genealogical research service, and nothing Joan produces is professional advice or a verified historical record. Joan records what a person says they remember.
03Recording, and the separate question of voice
Conversations are recorded, because the recording is what keeps a written story checkable. The storyteller gives that permission themselves before anything is kept, and can withdraw it at any time, after which Joan stops recording.
Recording consent is not voice consent. Agreeing to be recorded does not permit us to create a synthetic model of a storyteller’s voice or generate speech they did not say. Joan does not do this today. If we ever offer it, it will require separate, explicit, revocable permission from the storyteller, asked for on its own and refusable on its own.
An audio edition of the archive, where offered, uses the storyteller’s actual recordings — their real voice saying words they really said.
04Ownership and what we may do with the material
The family owns its stories and recordings. We do not claim authorship of a storyteller’s life, and we do not acquire ownership of it by writing it down.
You grant us only the permission we need to run the service: to store, process, transcribe, and shape the material into stories and the archive, and to produce a keepsake when you order one. That permission does not extend to publishing it, selling it, licensing it, using it in marketing, or training public or third-party models on it.
If we ever want to show a family’s story publicly, we will ask that family specifically and separately, and a refusal costs them nothing.
05Approval is a gate
No story enters the archive until the storyteller approves it. They may correct it, keep part of it private, remove it, or decline it entirely, and they do not have to give a reason. Unapproved material is not visible to other family members, cannot be printed, and cannot be shared.
06Keepsakes
Printed books and other keepsakes are ordered separately from membership and are never bundled or required. They are produced from stories that have already been approved, printed by a third-party print-on-demand partner, and priced at the time you order.
Because each item is made for you, orders can be changed or cancelled before printing begins but not after. Anything that arrives damaged or misprinted is replaced at our cost.
07Ending a membership
A member may stop at any time and Joan stops calling. Ending a membership does not delete anything: approved stories and their original recordings remain the family’s, and can be exported.
A storyteller may stop at any time regardless of who is paying, including mid-conversation, and does not need the member’s agreement to do so.
08If the storyteller dies
We deliver everything already completed, stop billing immediately, and charge nothing further. The family keeps the archive and the original recordings. Stories the storyteller sealed stay sealed on the terms they set, and stories they had not approved are not released — their decision not to approve something survives them.
09Acceptable use
Joan is for recording a real person’s life with their knowledge. Do not use Joan to record someone who has not consented, to impersonate anyone, to gather information about a third party covertly, or to produce material intended to harass or defraud. We will end a membership over this.
10Availability and limits
Joan is early software. Calls may occasionally fail, be rescheduled, or produce a poor story. When that happens we redo the work; we do not charge you again for it.
We keep multiple copies of stories and recordings, but no service can promise permanence absolutely. If your archive matters to you — and it should — export a copy periodically. We will always make that possible.
Specific limitation-of-liability, dispute-resolution, and governing-law terms are pending completion with counsel before paid memberships open. They will be published here before anyone is charged, and we will notify existing members when they are.
11Changes to these terms
If we change these terms in a way that reduces your rights over your family’s material, we will tell you directly rather than quietly updating this page, and you will be able to export everything and leave.
Questions about any of this are welcome through the contact form. How we handle personal information is in the privacy policy, and the plain-language version of our commitments is on our promise.