Terms of Service
Effective 24 September 2026. This document is versioned in the repository that serves it; the date above changes when the text does.
These terms are the agreement between you and Noah Finn ("iou", "we") about your use of the iou app and its pages on this website. By creating an account you accept them. If you do not, do not create one.
1. What iou is
iou is a points tracker for a group of people. You create a Network, give its currency a name, invite people, and send points back and forth inside it.
What the points mean is entirely up to the Network. Stars for chores, a tally for a shared trip, rewards for a team — iou has no opinion about it and no knowledge of it.
2. What iou is not — the important one
The points have no monetary value.
- They are invented by each Network and exist only inside it.
- They cannot be bought, sold, transferred for money, or redeemed for money, and there is no mechanism in the app by which any of those could happen.
- No payment of any kind passes through iou. There is no in-app purchase, no payment processing, no wallet, and no connection to any bank, card or payment service.
- iou is not a bank, not a payment service, not a money transmitter, and not an issuer of electronic money, and nothing in the app should be read as suggesting otherwise.
iou is not a party to what your Network decides its points mean. If a Network agrees that 100 points is worth an hour of babysitting, a week of dishes, or anything else at all, that is an arrangement between the people in that Network. iou records the number. It does not enforce, guarantee, arbitrate or take any responsibility for whatever the number stands for, and a dispute about it is between the people who made the arrangement.
3. Your account
- You need an email address you control. Sign-in is a code sent to that address; there is no password.
- One account per person. Your username must not impersonate someone else.
- You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping access to the email address it is attached to. Anyone who can read that inbox can sign in.
- You may change your username, display name, picture and preferences at any time.
4. Age
You must be 13 or older to create an account on your own behalf.
A child under 13 may use iou with the consent of a parent or guardian. That parent or guardian accepts these terms on the child's behalf, is responsible for the child's use of the app, and may exercise every right in the Privacy Policy on the child's behalf.
iou does not ask for a date of birth and has no technical means of verifying either an age or a parent's consent. Consent given under this section is therefore a representation you make to us, and supervising the account remains the parent or guardian's responsibility. If you are a parent or guardian who believes a child is using iou without your consent, write to [email protected] and we will close the account.
5. Networks, and who decides what
A Network's owner and its admins set its rules — who may invite, whether members may send to each other, whether balances may go negative, whether points may be burned, who may see the ledger, and more. Those rules are theirs, not ours. An owner may also lock a Network's settings permanently, including against themselves; once locked, they cannot be changed by anyone, and we will not change them on request.
Owners and admins can remove or ban members. We do not adjudicate those decisions.
Networks are invite-only. There is no directory, no search for Networks, and no way for a stranger to find one. You get in through a link or a direct invite, and you can refuse both in your privacy settings.
6. Acceptable use
Do not use iou to:
- harass, threaten, bully or abuse anyone;
- post or upload content that is illegal, hateful, sexually explicit, or that depicts or exploits children;
- impersonate another person;
- infringe anyone's intellectual property;
- upload a picture you do not have the right to use;
- break into, overload, scrape or otherwise interfere with the service or anyone else's account;
- use iou for anything illegal, or to represent that its points are money.
What enforcement actually looks like
We would rather describe this accurately than impressively.
- You can block anyone. A blocked person cannot find you by username, cannot send you a friend request, and cannot invite you. The block is yours: only you can undo it, and the other person is not told.
- Network owners and admins can remove or ban members from their own Network.
- There is no in-app report button in this version. Reports go to [email protected], which is monitored. Tell us what you saw and where, and we will look at it.
- We may remove content or suspend or terminate an account that breaks these terms. With one person running the service, we cannot promise a response time, and we do not review content proactively.
7. Your content
What you write and upload stays yours. You give us only the permission we need in order to run the service: to store your content and show it to the people in the Networks you are in.
You are responsible for having the right to upload what you upload.
Note that the ledger is append-only by design: transactions and requests cannot be edited or deleted by anyone, including you and including us. A mistake is corrected with a new offsetting entry. Consider that before writing something into a transaction note.
8. Deleting your account, and termination
You can delete your account in the app: Profile ▸ Danger zone ▸ Delete account. It is described at bessta.com/work/iou/delete-account.
- A deletion request starts a 30-day grace period during which the account works normally and one tap cancels the request.
- After 30 days your profile is anonymised and your sign-in identity is removed.
- If you are the sole owner of a Network, the request is refused until you transfer ownership of that Network or delete it. A Network with no owner has no way back to being administered. The refusal names the Networks concerned.
- Transactions survive. They belong to two people. Your name comes off and the rows stay. The Privacy Policy explains this in full, and it is the one part of deletion worth reading before you request it.
We may suspend or terminate an account that breaks these terms, or stop offering the service altogether. If we shut the service down, we will give reasonable notice so you can export your data first.
9. The service is provided as it is
iou is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, to the fullest extent the law allows. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that data will never be lost.
iou is a record of what a group of people agreed among themselves. It is not a system of record for anything that matters legally or financially, and it should not be relied on as one.
10. Liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost data, or for anything arising out of what a Network's points are taken to mean or what its members do about them.
Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, and any statutory rights you have as a consumer, which these terms do not affect.
11. Changes to these terms
We may change these terms. The effective date at the top changes when we do, and earlier versions are available on request from [email protected]. A material change will be announced in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use iou after a change means you accept it; if you do not, delete your account.
12. Governing law
These terms are governed by Swedish law, and the Swedish courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the EU, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, or of your right to bring proceedings there.
Consumers in the EU may also use the European Commission's online dispute resolution platform, though we would much rather you wrote to us first.