Terms & Conditions

Who We Are

HoldUsTogether is operated by a South Dakota company. When this document says "we" or "us," that's who we mean. When it says "you," that's the person using the service.

The Agreement

By using HoldUsTogether — visiting the site, creating an account, buying a product, doing an interview, or sharing a story — you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, don't use the service.

Who Can Use HoldUsTogether

You must be 18 or older to buy a product or create your own account.

A subject of an interview can be any age, with appropriate consent — a parent recording a child's story, an adult child interviewing a parent. If you're buying or running an interview on someone else's behalf, you're responsible for having their consent.

We don't knowingly allow anyone under 13 to create an account.

Your Account

You're responsible for what happens under your account. Keep your login private. If someone uses your account without your permission, contact us right away.

Free short stories: completed short stories and their recordings are kept temporarily for 30 days unless saved to your account. Copying or sending a viewing link does not complete account saving. Use the save link in your email to keep the story in your account. You control who receives a viewing link, and anyone with that link can view that story and recording. Temporary copies are deleted after their storage period; save emails include reminders before deletion.

Passwordless email sign-in is available so you don't have to remember a password.

What You Can and Can't Do

You can use HoldUsTogether for personal life-story preservation, gifting, and family sharing.

You can't:

• Resell or commercialize anyone else's story
• Scrape, copy, or extract data from the site by automated means
• Use our service to train any other computer system
• Submit content that's illegal, violates someone else's rights, or breaks the law
• Try to break into the site or interfere with how it works
• Use ordinary private-family video links as a public streaming or commercial distribution service

Your Story Belongs to You

You own your story. Always.

You grant us a limited license to host your story, store it, generate the memoir from it, deliver it to you, and send it to the people you choose to share it with. That's the entire scope. We never resell it. We never share it with advertisers. We only use your story, photos, videos, or recordings in our own advertising or marketing if you give us explicit permission. We never use it to train computer systems.

You can delete your story any time. When you do, it's removed from our active systems within 30 days and from backups within 90 days. Copies family members already downloaded may still exist on their devices — we can't reach into their computers to remove them.

How Your Story Is Written

Automated technology helps choose the Interviewer’s questions and write your story. The company that provides this technology has agreed in its business terms not to train its systems on your story or use or keep it for its own purposes.

The Interviewer’s questions and your finished story are generated from your own answers. The writing may put what you said in different words, combine answers, or restate them—and it can occasionally get a detail wrong.

Please read your story before you share it. If anything is wrong, you can fix it or email stories@holdustogether.com and we’ll help. The story is built from your words, but some of the wording is generated automatically.

Voice and Video Recordings

If you talk to the interviewer out loud, your voice is captured. If your interview is recorded on camera, or your family uploads video, your voice and your face are recorded and stored. These are biometric information.

By using these features, you consent to that capture and storage. Recordings are stored on the service providers listed in our Privacy Policy. They are not sold or used outside delivering your story and the sharing or testimonial choices you explicitly make.

If you live in Illinois, Texas, or Washington, you have specific rights under your state's biometric privacy laws. Email stories@holdustogether.com to exercise them.

Family Members in Your Story

Stories naturally include other people — siblings, spouses, parents, children, friends. By telling your story, you confirm you have the right to share what you're sharing.

If a third party contacts us asking that we remove their name from a story they appear in, we'll review the request in good faith and may edit, redact, or restrict sharing. We're not obligated to remove anything — but in some cases we may.

Sharing Your Story

When a family member is invited by email, they get access to the Family Room — the family tree and the stories kept in it. They never receive the Subscription Owner's password or payment details. A Family Organizer can revoke their access at any time.

If your interview was a gift, the gift buyer gets finished-story viewing by default. The person interviewed may revoke that viewing after reviewing the result. The buyer may still use the 90-day money-back guarantee for any reason, including a change in viewing access.

In plain words: if you buy a Life Story for someone, you can see their finished story unless they choose to keep it private. It is their life and their story, so after reviewing it, they can turn off your access. If that happens, you can still request a full refund within 90 days of your purchase. If you receive a refund, we’ll let the storyteller know that the original purchase has been refunded and give them the opportunity to purchase and keep their Life Story. If they choose not to purchase it, we’ll let them know that they need to download anything they want to keep before the Life Story is removed from our system.

The clip tool may create a revocable link of up to 90 seconds that can be sent to anyone or posted to social media. By creating that link, you understand that anyone who receives it may pass it along. A testimonial submission grants permission only for our private review unless and until we approve it for use. A support-feedback submission is private support material. Neither submission is automatically published.

The optional testimonial interview. After your life story we may invite you to record a short, optional interview about what the experience was like, for possible use on HoldUsTogether.com and in our marketing. It is recorded only after you agree, it is separate from your life story (which stays private), and it may be used only in the ways you choose on a separate screen: which kinds of material, and how you are named. You may withdraw permission for future use from your story page at any time; material already printed or already posted to another company's platform may not be possible to take back. Declining changes nothing about your story or your account.

Family Room access and full-length protected video links are for private family use. Do not publish, embed, scrape, automate, or use a protected full-video link as a public streaming source. If you want to post a moment publicly—including a clip that may be watched many times—use the clip tool. Popular public clips are welcome when the person sharing has the right and permission to share everyone shown.

We may count protected-video and public-clip requests to identify unusual use. A high count creates an internal review alert first; it does not automatically charge, suspend, or accuse a customer. We may contact the account owner or temporarily protect a link if review shows abuse, a security problem, or a violation of these terms.

Family Room Accounts and Profiles

One login can participate in several Family Rooms. A Family Room has one Subscription Owner who controls billing and one additional self-service Family Organizer who can manage people and genealogy. Organizers cannot override a person’s “Only me” privacy choice. A shared email login may contain separate Profiles protected by separate PINs. The organizer can reset a PIN but cannot see it.

Family Room Renewal

A Life Story is a one-time purchase. It includes the first year of the Family Room.

We email you about 30 days before that year ends. Renewing is always your family’s choice. See the Pricing page for the current Family Room renewal price.

If you don’t renew, the family tree, basic profiles, and basic reminders stay free. Download anything from the paid Family Room that you want to keep before its online storage ends, as described under “Video Recording Storage” below.

An active Family Room includes 25 hours of family-uploaded video. Purchased Life Stories and short excerpts made by the clip tool are outside that allowance. At the limit, existing videos keep playing, and new uploads pause until the family frees up space. See Video Recording Storage below for the full storage rules.

Refunds

• Life Story purchases: Our 90-day money-back guarantee: If you change your mind for any reason, request a full refund within 90 days of purchase. No questions asked. This applies whether the Life Story interview is unstarted, in progress, or finished. Email stories@holdustogether.com with your order number; no explanation is required.
• Family Room renewal: renewing is always your choice. A renewal year you choose to buy is not refunded once that year has started.
• Good Old Days: You may request a full refund any time before the conversation begins. Once the Good Old Days conversation has started, the purchase is non-refundable. If a technical problem prevents you from completing the experience and we're unable to resolve it, we'll make it right with a replacement session or refund.

If something goes wrong on our end — the service failed to deliver, the wrong product was delivered, or a charge was a mistake — email stories@holdustogether.com and we'll make it right.

A refund never depends on whether the interview has started or finished. If a Life Story given as a gift is fully refunded after the interview has started or been delivered, the buyer gets their money back and their viewing access is removed. We notify the storyteller and give them the opportunity to purchase and keep the existing Life Story. If they do not purchase it, we give them notice and a chance to download what they want to keep before it is removed from our system.

Video Recording Storage

Your Life Story and its keepsakes can be downloaded while your Family Room is active, so you can keep your own copies. If your Family Room membership ends, we’ll remind you to download anything you want to keep before your online Family Room storage ends.

Videos and other files your family has uploaded are also available while your Family Room is active. Before stored content is removed, we’ll give you notice and an opportunity to download what you want to keep.

Sealed Time Capsules are handled separately and remain available according to the terms that apply to them.

When a Subject Passes Away

The point of HoldUsTogether is preserving a story before it's lost. We take that seriously.

When we're notified that the subject has passed away, account access passes to the legal next of kin.

For 90 days after we're notified of a death, we won't make any irreversible changes to the account — no deletions, no transfers — so the family has time to sort things out.

If a subject's story is unfinished when they pass, the family may ask us to write the finished story from what was already captured. That requires separate consent from the next of kin.

Future Products

We may add new services in the future. New services may have their own terms that we'll show you before you use them.

No Guarantees

We provide the service as-is. The interviewer and the written story may make mistakes. The site may go down occasionally. Technology fails sometimes.

We work hard to deliver a great product, but we don't promise the service is error-free, uninterrupted, or that the interviewer or the written story will catch every detail of your story. Review your story before you share it.

Limit on Our Liability

To the maximum extent the law allows, our total liability to you for anything related to this service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before whatever caused the dispute.

We're not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages — lost time, emotional distress, family conflict that results from sharing a story, or other consequences of what you choose to share. If the story stirs something up in your family, that's outside our control.

You Cover Us

If someone sues us because of something in your story — a family member objecting to how they're portrayed, a defamation claim, an invasion of privacy claim — you agree to cover our reasonable costs of defending the claim.

How We Resolve Disputes

Most disputes can be resolved by emailing legal@holdustogether.com. We'll work with you in good faith for at least 60 days before either of us takes formal legal action.

Arbitration

If informal resolution fails, any unresolved dispute will be resolved by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA) under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, in front of a single arbitrator. Arbitration takes place in your state of residence or remotely. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this clause.

Small Claims Exception

Either of us can take a qualifying dispute to small claims court instead of arbitration. Small claims actions should be brought in South Dakota, except where applicable state consumer protection law requires the action be heard in your state of residence.

No Class Actions

Disputes are resolved one-on-one. You can't join or bring a class action against us. If a court ever decides this class-action waiver isn't enforceable, the rest of the arbitration clause still applies.

Governing Law

South Dakota law governs these terms, except where applicable consumer-protection law in your state overrides it.

Termination

We can suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms. Ending account access does not remove your right to request a Life Story refund within 90 days of purchase under our no-questions-asked guarantee. Deleting your account does not create a separate refund right; any refund eligibility is described in the Refunds section above.

When These Terms Change

If we change these terms in a way that affects your rights, we'll email you before the change takes effect. The effective date at the top always shows when these terms were last updated. If you don't agree with a change, you can delete your account before it takes effect.

Everything Else

These terms are the entire agreement between you and us about HoldUsTogether. If a court decides any part of these terms can't be enforced, the rest still applies. Our not enforcing something once doesn't mean we won't enforce it later.

These Terms & Conditions apply to HoldUsTogether.com and the services connected to it.