Terms of Service

01Who we are

Ceres ("Ceres", "we", "us", "our") is operated by Wei-chih Hsu, a sole trader based in Australia ("the operator").

You can contact us at wilson.hsu.1115@gmail.com.

These Terms of Service ("Terms") form a legally binding agreement between you and the operator governing your use of the Ceres application and website (together, the "Service"). By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

02Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old to use the Service. By using it, you confirm that you are 18 or older. The Service is not directed at anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly allow under-18s to create accounts.

03The Service

Ceres is a recipe, meal-planning and shopping-list application. It lets you create, import, and store recipes; generate meal plans; build shopping lists; view estimated nutrition information; and optionally publish recipes to a public library for other users to see.

We may change, suspend, or discontinue any part of the Service at any time. We will try to give reasonable notice of material changes where practical.

04Your account

To use most features you must create an account with an email address and password. You are responsible for keeping your password secure and for all activity under your account. Provide accurate information and keep it current. Tell us promptly at the contact email above if you believe your account has been compromised.

05Subscriptions, billing, and cancellation

Some features require a paid subscription. Subscriptions are sold as auto-renewing subscriptions through the app store you downloaded the Service from (Apple App Store or Google Play).

Payment is charged to your app store account at confirmation of purchase.

Auto-renewal: your subscription renews automatically for the same period at the then-current price unless you turn off auto-renewal at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Your account is charged for renewal within 24 hours before the end of the current period.

Managing or cancelling: you manage and cancel your subscription through your app store account settings, not through us. Deleting the app does not cancel your subscription.

Refunds: refunds are handled by the app store under its own policies. We do not process payments and generally cannot issue refunds directly. Nothing in this clause limits any rights you have that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law (see section 12).

Price changes: we may change subscription prices. Changes apply to future billing periods and, where required, we will seek your consent or give notice through the app store.

06Your content and the licence you grant us

"Your Content" means anything you submit to the Service — recipes, ingredients, steps, descriptions, images, meal plans, notes, and similar material, including recipes you import or adapt from other sources.

You keep ownership of Your Content. However:

By submitting Your Content, you grant the operator a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable licence to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, distribute, and otherwise exploit Your Content for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to do so in any media now known or later developed.

You represent that you have the rights necessary to submit Your Content and to grant this licence, and that Your Content does not infringe anyone else's rights (including copyright in recipes or images you import from third-party sources).

07Public recipes

You can choose to publish a recipe to the public library. When you do:

• The recipe becomes visible to anyone, including people without an account.
• Your name is displayed as the author alongside the recipe.
• Basic engagement information (such as a popularity count) may be shown.

You can change a recipe back to private at any time using the visibility control. Making a recipe private stops new public access, but we cannot guarantee removal of copies, caches, or screenshots already made by others while it was public.

08Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the Service for any unlawful purpose, or submit content that is unlawful, infringing, defamatory, or harmful;
• upload malware or attempt to disrupt, probe, or gain unauthorised access to the Service or its infrastructure;
• scrape, harvest, or bulk-extract data from the Service except as expressly permitted;
• misuse import features to reproduce third-party content you have no right to use; or
• impersonate others or misrepresent your affiliation with any person.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that breach these Terms.

09Third-party services

The Service relies on third parties to function, including Google Firebase (authentication, database, hosting, and file storage) and the Google Gemini API (to process recipe content for parsing, classification, and nutrition estimation). Your use of the Service involves your data being processed by these providers. See our Privacy Policy for detail.

Nutrition figures are derived in part from the Australian Food Composition Database (AFCD) and from automated estimation. See section 10.

10Nutrition, allergy, and health disclaimer

11Our intellectual property

The Service itself — its software, design, branding, and content we provide (excluding Your Content and third-party content) — belongs to the operator. We grant you a limited, personal, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Service in accordance with these Terms. You may not copy, reverse-engineer, or create derivative works from the Service except as permitted by law.

12Australian Consumer Law and disclaimers

Our goods and services come with guarantees that cannot be excluded under the Australian Consumer Law (ACL). Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts, or modifies any consumer guarantee, right, or remedy you have under the ACL that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Subject to those non-excludable rights, and to the maximum extent permitted by law:

• the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind (including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or uninterrupted availability); and
• we do not warrant that nutrition data, allergy information, imported content, or generated meal plans are accurate, complete, or reliable.

13Limitation of liability

Subject to your non-excludable rights under the Australian Consumer Law, and to the maximum extent permitted by law:

• we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential loss, or for loss of data, profits, or goodwill, arising from your use of the Service; and
• where our liability cannot be excluded but can be limited, our total liability is limited, at our option, to re-supplying the relevant service or paying the cost of having it re-supplied; and
• our total aggregate liability to you for any claim relating to the Service will not exceed the amount you paid us (if any) for the Service in the 12 months before the claim arose.

Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

14Termination

You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time (contact us at the email above, or use any in-app deletion feature). We may suspend or terminate your access if you breach these Terms or if we discontinue the Service. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (including sections 6, 10, 12, and 13) survive.

15Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we will take reasonable steps to notify you (for example, in-app or by email). Continued use of the Service after changes take effect means you accept the updated Terms.

16Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia, and you submit to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of that place and of the Commonwealth of Australia. This does not deprive you of any protection under the law of the place where you live.

17Contact

Questions about these Terms: wilson.hsu.1115@gmail.com.