Legal

Terms

Last updated August 12, 2026

This agreement is between you and PlainSpan LLC, a limited liability company in Texas. Making an account means agreeing to it. It was written by PlainSpan LLC without a lawyer, counsel review is pending, and this page changes if that review changes it.

Porchkeep is not open. There is no public build and no account exists yet. These terms are published now so they can be read before anybody is asked to agree to them.

Who can hold an account

• You are 18 or over.
• You are in the United States.
• You are making the account for yourself, in your own name.
• No previous account of yours was removed for harming somebody. A removal for that reason is permanent.

Every account goes through the same live capture before a word it writes is visible to anybody. Free and paying alike. What that check establishes is that a living person is present. It says nothing about who that person is or what they have done, and it should not be read as though it did.

The standards

These are not graduated. Doing any of them ends the account, and there is no warning step that has to run first.

• No sexually explicit content. Not in a photograph and not in a message. This is refused at the upload boundary rather than caught afterwards, and no setting turns it back on.
• Nobody under 18. Not as a member, and not as the subject of any image. An intimate image of a minor is reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is a legal duty rather than a choice.
• No intimate image of anybody who did not agree to it being here. Reporting one takes no account and is handled at the takedown page.
• No threats, and nothing arranged here that is meant to hurt somebody there.
• No asking members for money. Not a loan and not a gift card, whatever the story around it. This is the most common way people are hurt on services like this one.
• No pretending to be somebody else. That includes photographs of a person who is not you.
• No contact after a block. A block is an answer. Getting round it with another account ends both.
• Nothing commercial. No advertising and no recruiting. Collecting members or their words for use somewhere else gets the same answer.
• No automated collection. Scraping the service, or any part of what members wrote, is not allowed by any method.

What happens to an account

An account ends in one of three ways.

• You delete it. One confirmation, in the app. What goes and what survives is set out in the privacy policy.
• It is removed for breaking a standard above, or on a credible signal that the holder is under 18. Using the service in a way the law does not permit ends it too.
• The service closes. If Porchkeep shuts down, accounts are deleted and export stays open first.

A removal can be wrong. If you think yours was, write to hello@plainspan.com and say why. That address reaches a person rather than a form.

What you write stays yours

You own what you post. PlainSpan LLC needs your permission to store it and show it to the people it was meant for, and that is the whole of the permission being asked for. It ends when you delete the content or the account, except where something has to be preserved for a reason named in the privacy policy.

Nothing you write is used to train a model, and nothing you write is sold.

Money

Any purchase goes through Apple. Cancelling is done in your Apple account settings, where Apple controls the flow, and a refund is Apple's to give.

Paying changes nothing about how far your words travel. Three Knocks a day is the budget for everybody, and no purchase moves anybody up anybody else's wall. There is no way to send money to another member, and there will not be one.

Meeting people

Porchkeep is a place to read what people said and to write back. A Table is six seats at a public place at a stated time, arranged by the people going to it. PlainSpan LLC does not host or supervise any of that. There is no relationship with any venue named in the app, and no commission from one.

Use the same judgement you would use meeting any stranger. Tell somebody where you are going. Arrange your own way there and back.

What is not promised

The service is provided as it is. There is no warranty that it will be available or free of faults, and none at all that a person you meet through it is who you hoped. To the extent the law allows it, PlainSpan LLC is not liable for what one member does to another, and any liability that survives is capped at what you paid in the twelve months before the claim.

Some states do not permit those limits. Where that is so, they do not apply to you.

Disputes

Texas law governs this agreement. There is no arbitration clause here and no waiver of your right to bring a claim as part of a group. If something goes wrong, the first step is an email, and that is not a legal requirement so much as the thing most likely to fix it.

Changes

A change here changes the date at the top. A change that affects what you may do, or what is done with what you wrote, is announced in the app before it takes effect.

Written by PlainSpan LLC. Not reviewed by counsel, and that review is pending. Questions go to hello@plainspan.com.