Legal
Terms of Service
Last updated: 17 May 2026
1. About these Terms
These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of the Banora mobile application ("Banora," "the app," "we," "us"). Banora is operated by:
By creating an account or using Banora, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the app.
These Terms are a contract between you and us. Your purchase of any paid features is a separate contract with Apple (see section 5).
2. Who can use Banora
You must be at least 18 years old to use Banora. By creating an account, you confirm that you are 18 or older.
Banora is intended for personal use. You may use it for any lawful purpose consistent with these Terms.
3. Your account
You create an account by signing in with your email address. We send a one-time code to that address to verify it; we don't store passwords.
You're responsible for keeping access to your email account secure. If someone gets into your email, they can sign into Banora as you.
You can delete your account at any time from within the app (Settings → Profile → Delete Account). Deletion is immediate and permanent.
4. What Banora does
Banora records your voice notes, transcribes them on your device, and uses AI to organize them into categories you've created. The transcription happens on your device. The transcript is then sent to our servers and to OpenAI's API for embedding and categorization. Our Privacy Policy explains exactly which data goes where.
You retain all rights to the thoughts you record and the categories you create. We don't claim ownership of your content.
5. Free and paid features
Banora has a free tier and a paid tier ("Banora Pro").
Banora Pro is sold by Apple, not by us. When you subscribe, you enter into a purchase contract with Apple under Apple's Media Services Terms and Apple's Standard EULA. Apple processes your payment, handles refunds according to Apple's refund policy, and manages your subscription.
To cancel a Banora Pro subscription, use the Apple subscription management page: https://apps.apple.com/account/subscriptions
Or on your device: Settings → [Your Name] → Subscriptions.
Because the subscription is concluded through Apple's In-App Purchase system, your statutory right of withdrawal (14-day cooling-off period) is handled by Apple at the point of purchase, in accordance with Apple's terms.
We don't currently sell Banora Pro directly through our website. If we add direct sales in the future, we will add a clearly marked cancellation flow and a withdrawal notice on the site.
6. Acceptable use
You agree not to use Banora to:
- Record another person's spoken word without their consent. In Germany, recording the non-public spoken word of another person without their consent is a criminal offense under § 201 of the Strafgesetzbuch. You are responsible for ensuring you have the consent of anyone whose voice you record.
- Upload or transcribe content that is illegal, infringes someone else's rights, or that you don't have the right to share with us.
- Attempt to access other users' data, reverse-engineer the app beyond what's allowed by law, or interfere with the service.
- Use the app to generate or store content that depicts child sexual abuse, that incites violence, or that violates applicable law.
If you violate these rules, we can suspend or terminate your account.
7. Your content and AI processing
The thoughts you record belong to you. We process them only to provide the service: transcription on your device, then storage and AI organization on our servers and OpenAI's API.
You grant us a limited, non-exclusive license to store, process, and display your content for the sole purpose of operating Banora for you. This license ends when you delete the content or your account.
We don't use your content to train AI models. We've configured our OpenAI account to opt out of all data sharing for model training, and OpenAI doesn't retain your API requests beyond a short abuse-monitoring window. Details are in our Privacy Policy.
8. AI output — what to expect
Banora uses AI to suggest categories for your thoughts and to surface patterns over time. AI output is not always accurate. Categories may be wrong, suggestions may be off-base, and patterns the AI surfaces may not be meaningful.
You should treat AI output as a starting point, not a verdict. You can correct any categorization at any time, and the app learns from your corrections.
We make no warranty that AI output will be accurate, useful, or fit for any particular purpose.
9. Data, exports, and backup
Your thoughts are stored locally on your device and synced to our servers (hosted in the UK with our processor Supabase). The Privacy Policy describes our storage, security, and retention practices in detail.
Data loss is a real possibility. While we make commercially reasonable efforts to keep your data safe — including encryption in transit and at rest, access controls, and regular operational checks — no software is immune to bugs, sync failures, or service outages.
For this reason, we provide an "Export all my data" function in the app (Settings → Profile → Export Data). It produces a JSON file containing your thoughts and the categories you've organized them into. We recommend you use it periodically to keep your own backup.
Using the export function regularly is the most reliable protection against data loss, and we strongly encourage it for any thoughts that matter to you.
10. Service availability
We try to keep Banora available and working well, but we don't guarantee uninterrupted service. The app depends on Apple's App Store, our hosting providers, OpenAI's API, and your own device and network. Outages happen.
We may release updates, change features, or temporarily take parts of the service offline for maintenance.
11. Termination
You can stop using Banora and delete your account at any time. We can suspend or terminate your account if you materially breach these Terms, after giving you notice and a reasonable chance to fix the issue where reasonable in the circumstances.
If we terminate the service entirely, we'll give you reasonable advance notice and the chance to export your data before shutdown.
12. Liability
This section limits our liability. It does not exclude or limit liability where the law forbids us from doing so.
We are fully liable, without limitation, for:
- Damages to life, body, or health caused by our negligence or intent
- Damages caused by our gross negligence (grobe Fahrlässigkeit) or intent (Vorsatz)
- Damages caused by gross negligence or intent of our legal representatives or vicarious agents (Erfüllungsgehilfen)
- Claims under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz)
- Liability arising from any guarantee (Garantie) we have explicitly given
- Any other liability that cannot be excluded or limited under mandatory law
For damages caused by our slight negligence (leichte Fahrlässigkeit):
- For breach of an essential contractual obligation (Kardinalpflicht — meaning an obligation whose fulfillment is necessary for the proper performance of these Terms and on whose fulfillment you may regularly rely), our liability is limited to the foreseeable, contract-typical damage.
- For breach of any non-essential obligation, our liability is excluded.
We do not provide a flat monetary cap on liability, because German consumer law requires that the limitation must still cover the foreseeable, contract-typical damage, and we want this limit to be measured by what's actually foreseeable rather than by an arbitrary number.
Foreseeable, contract-typical damage in the context of Banora primarily means the value to you of thoughts that were lost or made temporarily unavailable. The export function described in section 9 exists so you can keep your own copy of this data and so the foreseeable damage from any loss event is materially reduced.
These limitations apply to all claims, however they are framed (contract, tort, statutory), to the extent permitted by law.
13. Your statutory rights
Nothing in these Terms limits your statutory rights as a consumer under German or applicable European Union law. If any clause in these Terms is in conflict with a mandatory consumer protection rule, that mandatory rule applies and the clause is replaced by the rule to the extent of the conflict.
14. Intellectual property
The Banora app, brand, design, and code are ours. We grant you a personal, non-transferable, revocable license to use the app for its intended purpose on your devices.
Your thoughts and the content you create remain yours, as described in section 7.
15. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.
For consumers resident in the European Union: this choice of law does not deprive you of the protection of mandatory consumer protection rules of the country in which you have your habitual residence (Article 6(2) of Regulation (EC) No 593/2008, Rome I).
The place of jurisdiction for any disputes is Berlin, to the extent legally permissible. As a consumer in the EU, you also have the right to bring proceedings in the courts of the country where you live, and we may bring proceedings against you only in the courts of the country where you live (Article 18 of Regulation (EU) No 1215/2012, Brussels I-bis).
EU online dispute resolution: The European Commission provides a platform for online dispute resolution at https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr/. Our email is hi@banora.dev.
We are not obligated and not willing to participate in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board.
16. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms — for example, when we add features or when the law changes. If the change is material, we'll notify you in the app or by email before the change takes effect, and you'll have the chance to object or stop using the app.
Continued use of Banora after a change means you accept the updated Terms.
17. Severability
If any part of these Terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the rest stays in force. The invalid part will be replaced by the statutory rule that applies, or by a valid clause that comes closest to what was intended.
18. Contact
Questions or notices about these Terms: