TERMS & THE TRUTH
The Honest Part
The marketing says your novel dies. This page says exactly what happens. The gap between those two is the whole product — so we keep this page honest. The theater is a dark pattern on purpose; the fine print is not.
1. What actually happens to your manuscript
Nothing you write is ever destructively deleted while a punishment is active. The render-layer punishments (tiers 1–8) only change how your text looks — the underlying manuscript in our database is never altered by a punishment.
When a manuscript “dies” at PERMADEATH, it is moved to a private escrow table, not erased. It sits there for 45 days — your resurrection window. We send two warning emails before anything is permanently removed. A true purge happens only: (a) 45 days after an un-resurrected permadeath, after those warnings, or (b) immediately when you delete your account (GDPR/CCPA).
We also keep daily version snapshots with 90-day retention. The funeral screen is theater. The drawer it goes into is real.
2. Pricing is shown in full, every time
Forgiveness Credits get more expensive the more you buy in a rolling 30-day window — $0.99, then $1.99, $3.99, $7.99, capped at $14.99— and the window resets monthly. The 5-credit bundle is a flat $9.99. The full price you’ll pay is shown before every purchase. No hidden charges, no fake countdowns, no un-cancellable anything.
3. Refunds
Unspent credits are refundable. Once a credit has been spent — on a buyout, a streak restore, an export unlock — it’s gone. Resurrections are non-refundable once the manuscript has been restored (we already brought it back; that’s the thing you paid for).
4. The line we never cross
DEADLINE mocks your discipline — the showing up — and nothing else. It never mocks your prose, your identity, or you as a person. It never touches your computer, your files, or any other account. Every punishment lives entirely inside this app and is fully reversible until the very end.
AI-assisted writing is allowed, as long as it goes through the editor. We punish absence, not quality, and certainly not your tools.
5. Your data and your opt-outs
You can write to the Wall of Shame under a pseudonym — choose it at signup. Witness emails (a friend who gets notified when you fail) require that friend to double-opt-in; we never email someone who hasn’t agreed to watch. You can delete your account at any time, which purges your manuscripts and escrow immediately.
This page is a plain-language summary written to be read. It sits alongside the full Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Where they differ, the full documents govern — but we wrote them to say the same thing this page does.