Terms of Use - Bretzi

1. Who these terms are with

These Terms of Use are an agreement between you and StroopTaal ("we", "us", "our"), the operator of Bretzi ("the App"). The App means our iOS and Android applications, this website, and everything we provide through them.

By downloading, opening or using the App, or by creating an account, you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the App.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we do with your data and forms part of this agreement.

2. Who may use Bretzi

You may use the App only if you are at least 16 years old and legally able to enter into this agreement. By using the App you confirm that you are. We do not collect dates of birth, so we rely on that confirmation. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will close it.

The App is for your own personal, non-commercial learning. You may not use it to deliver teaching to others, to run a course, or in any other commercial way without our written permission. You may not use it where local law does not allow it.

3. What Bretzi is, and what it is not

Bretzi is a self-study language-learning product. It offers lessons and exercises built around everyday situations, vocabulary and grammar practice, games, AI conversation and pronunciation practice, document reading, and practice material for Einbürgerungstest and DTZ.

To be completely clear about what it is not:

It is not a school, a course, an accredited training programme or a substitute for one.
It is not an official exam, is not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by any examination body, government authority or educational institution, and its exam material is practice only.
Levels, scores, skill maps, readiness indicators and certificates inside the App are motivational estimates produced from your activity. They are not assessments by a qualified examiner, they have no academic or legal standing, and no authority, school or employer is obliged to recognise them.
Nothing in the App is medical, legal, tax, immigration, financial or other professional advice. Scenarios, dialogues, document readings and explanations are language practice, may be simplified, incomplete, outdated or wrong, and must never be used as the basis for a real decision. Always check the official source or ask a qualified professional.

A large part of the content is generated with AI and checked in batches rather than line by line before publication. Section 11 explains what that means for you.

4. Your account

You can sign in with Apple, with Google, or with an email address and password. You can also start without an account, in which case your progress is tied to that device only. Device-based progress is temporary: if you lose or reset the device, reinstall the App, or clear its data, that progress can be permanently lost, and we cannot recover it. Create a real account if your progress matters to you.

You are responsible for keeping your account secure and for everything that happens under it. One person, one account. You may not share, lend, sell, rent or transfer an account, and you may not create accounts in bulk or by automated means. Keep your email address current, because that is how we reach you. Tell us immediately if you believe someone else is using your account.

5. Free use, quotas and fair use

Part of the App is free. Features that cost us money to run — AI conversation, speaking practice, transcription, pronunciation scoring, document scanning and writing feedback — are subject to daily, monthly and per-feature limits. We set those limits, and we may change them, lower them, or apply them differently to different accounts at any time and without notice.

We also apply automated rate limits and abuse controls. We may slow down, limit or suspend an account that places an unreasonable load on the service, that appears automated, or that is used in a way these Terms do not allow. Nothing that is free today is promised to stay free.

6. Premium subscriptions, trials and renewal

Premium subscriptions are sold, billed and managed by the Apple App Store or Google Play, depending on where you installed the App, and not by us. The price, currency and billing period are shown to you before you confirm, and the store charges your store account.

Where a free trial is offered, its length is shown before you start. Unless you cancel at least 24 hours before it ends, it converts automatically into a paid subscription at the price shown.
Subscriptions renew automatically for the same period at the then-current price unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the current period ends.
You manage and cancel your subscription in your store account settings. We cannot cancel, change or refund a store purchase for you, and deleting the App does not cancel a subscription.
Introductory, promotional and win-back offers are limited to one per store account unless stated otherwise, are subject to the store's eligibility rules, and may be withdrawn at any time before purchase.
Prices may change. A price change takes effect from your next renewal, and the store will notify you and, where required, ask you to consent before it applies.

What Premium includes may change over time. We may add, alter or withdraw individual features, provided the subscription as a whole remains materially the kind of service you subscribed to.

7. Cancellation, refunds and your right of withdrawal

Cancelling stops the next renewal. Your access continues until the end of the period you have already paid for, and there is no refund of the unused part of that period except where the law requires one.

All refunds are handled by Apple or Google under their own terms. Requests must go to them. We have no ability to issue a refund on their behalf, and any goodwill we offer is at our discretion and is not an admission of any obligation.

If you are a consumer in the European Union, you normally have 14 days to withdraw from a contract for digital content. By starting to use the App or a paid feature straight away, you expressly ask us to begin performance during that period and acknowledge that you lose the right of withdrawal once the content has been fully supplied. Your other mandatory statutory rights are not affected by anything in these Terms.

If a purchase is refunded, charged back or reversed, we may immediately withdraw the premium access, the bretzels and any content or rewards obtained with it.

8. Bretzel and other virtual items

Bretzels, credits, streak freezes, XP and similar items are a limited, personal, non-transferable and revocable licence to use a function inside the App. They are not money, not electronic money, not a payment instrument and not your property.

They have no cash value and cannot be exchanged for money, sold, gifted, traded or transferred to anyone, inside or outside the App.
They are consumed when you use a feature, and consumed items are not refundable.
We may change what they cost, how they are earned, and what they unlock, at any time.
We may remove, reduce or reset a balance that was obtained through an error, a bug, a chargeback or any breach of these Terms.
Any remaining balance expires without compensation when your account closes or is terminated, and does not survive your account.

9. Referrals, invite codes and promotions

Referral rewards are for genuine new learners only, and limits apply per day and in total. We may withhold, reduce or reverse a reward, and close the accounts involved, where we reasonably believe there has been self-referral, use of multiple or automated accounts, device or identity manipulation, or any other attempt to obtain rewards that were not earned.

Invite codes, promo codes and campaign offers are personal, may not be sold, published for resale or used commercially, and may be cancelled or changed at any time before they are redeemed. Where we run a partner or influencer campaign, the partner's own statements are theirs and not ours, and only what is written here and in the offer itself binds us.

10. Leaderboards and what other learners see

Taking part in the leaderboard under your own name is optional and off until you choose it. Your nickname must not be offensive, must not impersonate another person or organisation, must not advertise anything, and must not contain personal data.

We may rename, hide or remove an entry, exclude a score we believe was obtained by cheating or automation, or remove an account from the leaderboard entirely, at our discretion. Leaderboards, leagues and streaks are game mechanics. They mean nothing outside the App, and they are not a measure of anyone's ability.

11. AI features and their limits

The chat partner, the speaking coach, pronunciation feedback, personal plans, weekly reports, document scanning and writing feedback are produced by artificial intelligence, in part by external providers. What you see is generated at the moment you ask for it. No person reviews it before it reaches you.

AI output can be wrong, incomplete, outdated, biased or inappropriate, and can be wrong while sounding confident.
The characters you talk to are software. They are not people, not teachers, and not qualified professionals, and they will never claim to be.
Do not rely on AI output for anything with legal, financial, medical, educational or immigration consequences. Check the official source or ask a qualified person.
You are responsible for what you send to these features and for what you do with what comes back. Do not send sensitive personal data, other people's personal data, or confidential material.
These features depend on third-party providers and on quotas we buy from them. They may be slow, limited, temporarily unavailable, or discontinued.

Our AI transparency page explains in plain language where we use AI and what our AI labels mean. To the fullest extent the law allows, we accept no liability for any decision you take on the basis of AI output.

12. No guaranteed result

We do not promise that you will reach any particular level, that you will pass Einbürgerungstest, DTZ or any other examination, or that using the App will lead to a residence permit, a qualification, a job or any other outcome. Learning depends on your own effort, your circumstances and factors outside our control.

Nothing in the App, on this website, in our marketing or in any AI-generated message is a guarantee of a result, and no statement by a partner, influencer or reviewer creates one.

13. Your content and the licence you give us

"Your content" means anything you put into the App: messages, recordings, photographs of documents, written answers, nicknames, question reports and feedback. You keep ownership of it.

You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit, adapt and process your content, and to have our providers do the same, so that we can operate the service, produce your results, answer your support requests, and keep the service safe and working. This licence lasts as long as we hold the content under our Privacy Policy and ends when the content is deleted.

You confirm that you are allowed to send us everything you send, that it does not break the law and does not infringe anyone's rights, and that you have any consent needed where it concerns another person. We are not obliged to store, monitor, moderate or return your content, and we may remove content that breaches these Terms. Ideas, suggestions and feedback you send us may be used by us freely, without payment, obligation or attribution.

14. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

Use the App for any unlawful purpose, or in breach of anyone's rights
Access, or try to access, accounts, data or systems that are not yours
Interfere with, overload, probe or disrupt the App, our servers or our providers
Reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble the App, except to the limited extent mandatory law allows and only after asking us first
Circumvent quotas, paywalls, rate limits, region restrictions or purchase verification, or tamper with the App or its receipts
Use bots, scripts, emulators, automated clients or scrapers, or extract content in bulk
Use the App, its content or its AI output to build, train, evaluate or improve any competing product, dataset or machine-learning model
Submit or generate content that is illegal, hateful, harassing, deceptive, sexual involving minors, or infringing
Sell, share or transfer your account, or resell access to the App

We may investigate suspected breaches, and we may take any step we consider proportionate, including removing content, limiting features, suspending or closing accounts and reporting to the authorities.

15. Our content and intellectual property

Everything in the App other than your content — text, exercises, curriculum, translations, audio, images, characters, software, design, names and logos — belongs to us or to our licensors and is protected by copyright, trade mark and other laws. Content generated with AI and published by us is our content on the same terms.

We grant you a personal, limited, revocable, non-exclusive and non-transferable licence to use the App for your own learning, for as long as you comply with these Terms. You may not copy, publish, redistribute, resell, sublicense, adapt or create derivative works from our content, and you may not extract it in bulk, without our prior written permission. All rights we do not expressly grant are reserved.

If you believe something in the App infringes your rights, tell us through our support page with enough detail to identify it, and we will look at it and remove it where the complaint is justified.

16. Third-party services and stores

The App depends on services we do not run, including the Apple App Store and Google Play, AI providers, hosting, content delivery and push notification services. Their availability, performance, terms and prices are outside our control, and a failure or change on their side may interrupt or change the App.

Where you obtain the App or make a purchase through a store, that store's terms also apply to you. Apple and Google are not parties to these Terms and are not responsible for the App or for supporting it. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and may enforce them against you.

Links to third-party websites and materials are provided for convenience only. They are not an endorsement, and we are not responsible for their content, their products or their handling of your data.

17. Availability and changes to the service

We do not promise that the App will be available without interruption or free of errors. Maintenance, updates, outages, quota exhaustion at a provider and events outside our reasonable control all happen.

We may change, limit, suspend or discontinue the App or any part of it, including whole features, at any time. Where we permanently discontinue a paid feature that you have already paid for, and this materially reduces what you bought, you may cancel and, where the law requires it, receive a proportionate refund for the unused part of the period. We may require you to install updates, and older versions of the App may stop working.

We are not liable for any delay or failure caused by an event beyond our reasonable control, including provider outages, network failures, cyber-attacks, changes in the law, and store policy decisions.

18. Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the App and everything in it are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory. In particular we do not warrant that:

The App will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free
Defects will be corrected, or corrected within any period
The App, its content, its translations, its exam material or its AI output are accurate, complete, current or fit for any particular purpose
The App will meet your requirements or produce any particular learning result
Content, progress or purchases will never be lost

If you are a consumer, your mandatory statutory rights, including the conformity guarantee for digital content, are not affected and nothing in this section removes them.

19. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damage, nor for loss of profit, revenue, savings, opportunity, data, goodwill or reputation.
We are not liable for exam fees, course fees, missed deadlines, refused applications, immigration or residence consequences, employment consequences, or any other loss arising from a decision you took on the basis of the App or its AI output.
We are not liable for loss caused by a third-party provider, by your device, by your network, or by your failure to keep your account secure.
Our total liability for all claims arising in any period of twelve months is limited to the greater of the amount you actually paid for Bretzi in that period, or fifty euro.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for intent or conscious recklessness, or for anything else that may not be limited under the applicable law. If you are a consumer, the limits above apply only so far as mandatory consumer law allows, and your statutory rights are unaffected.

20. Your responsibility to us

You will compensate us for, and hold us harmless against, any claim, damage, loss, fine or reasonable legal cost that arises from your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the App, your content, or your infringement of the rights of a third party.

This does not apply to loss caused by us, and where you are acting as a consumer it applies only to the extent mandatory law allows.

21. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the App at any time and delete your account from within the App. Deleting your account does not cancel a store subscription, which you must cancel separately.

We may suspend or terminate your access, immediately and with or without notice where the circumstances justify it, if you breach these Terms, if we reasonably suspect fraud, abuse or a security risk, if a store or the law requires it, or if we discontinue the service.

When your access ends, your licence to use the App ends with it, and any remaining bretzels, credits, streaks, rewards and unlocked content are lost without compensation. If we terminate without cause and you have paid for a period you have not used, we will refund that unused part. The sections on intellectual property, your content, disclaimers, liability, your responsibility to us, and governing law survive termination.

22. Changes to these terms

We may change these Terms as the product and the law develop. The date at the top always shows the current version.

Where a change materially affects your rights or obligations, we will give you at least 14 days' notice in the App or by email before it takes effect. If you do not accept the change, your remedy is to stop using the App and cancel any subscription before the change takes effect. Continuing to use the App after that means you accept the new version.

23. Governing law and disputes

These Terms and any dispute arising out of them or out of your use of the App are governed by the law of the Netherlands, excluding its conflict-of-law rules and excluding the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

Disputes will be brought before the competent court in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. If you are a consumer resident in the European Union, you keep the protection of the mandatory provisions of the law of your country of residence, and you may also bring proceedings in the courts of that country.

Please contact us through our support page before starting any formal procedure. Almost everything is resolved there.

24. General, and how to reach us

If any provision of these Terms is held to be invalid or unenforceable, the rest remains in force and the invalid provision is replaced by a valid one that comes closest to its intended effect. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it.

You may not assign or transfer your rights under these Terms. We may assign ours to a successor as part of a merger, acquisition or sale of the business, on notice to you. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us about the App and replace any earlier understanding.

These Terms are published in several languages. The English version is the authoritative one, and translations are provided for convenience. Where mandatory law in your country gives a translated version precedence, that version applies for that purpose only.

Support: Bretzi support page
Email: [email protected]