Terms and privacy

01What Nekia is

Nekia is a place to write to interpretations of six thinkers of the past — Seneca, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Kierkegaard, Montaigne and Carl Jung — and to keep what they say to you.

The answers are generated by a language model. They are not written by these thinkers, who are dead, and they are not a reconstruction of what those men would have said. They are an interpretation, built from the work published under their names, and they can be wrong about anything, including that work.

Nothing here is advice — not medical, legal, financial, or psychological. If you are making a decision that needs a professional, the professional is the one to ask. If you are in danger, the app says so and points you at a line that can actually help; it is not that line.

02Your account

You sign in with an email address and a password, or through Google. A code sent to the address confirms it once, and stands in for a forgotten password. One account belongs to one person. You are responsible for what is sent from it.

You need to be at least 16, and old enough to enter a contract where you live. Nekia is not built for children.

03What is free, and what costs money

Every account gets three answers and one question to all six voices at once, and one minute of live conversation out loud, at no cost and without a card. The counters are independent and the order you spend them in does not matter. An answer that fails to arrive is not counted. The morning note and the evening review are free and never counted.

After that, the composer closes and a subscription opens it again. There are three plans: Walk, with 20 minutes of live conversation and 100 answers a month, at $6 a month or $60 a year; Companion, with 2 hours of live conversation and 300 answers a month, at $12.99 a month or $120 a year; and Symposium, with 4 hours of live conversation and 600 answers a month, at $25 a month or $240 a year — in US dollars, before tax. Where your country charges VAT or another sales tax, Paddle adds it at checkout, and the plans page and the checkout show the total with it before you pay.

Minutes of live conversation are counted per calendar month while a conversation is connected, and unused minutes do not carry over. If they run out, more hours can be bought from inside a conversation, one to ten at a time, at $7.99 an hour before tax, paid once; they are spent after the month's own minutes and do not lapse at the end of the month. Nothing else inside a plan costs extra.

An answer is one voice answering once: a question to one voice is one answer, a question to all six is six, and a request to say it shorter or simpler is one. An answer that fails to arrive is not counted. The allowance starts again every month from the day the plan began, whether it is paid monthly or yearly, and unused answers do not carry over. When the month's answers are spent, the composer closes until they start again or until you move to the larger plan; everything already read stays readable.

The allowances of a plan — answers and minutes — may change, because what they cost us depends on the providers of the models. A change applies only from your next billing period, and we tell you by email at least thirty days before. A yearly plan keeps the allowances it was bought with until the year ends.

Staying free is a state, not a lock. Everything you have already read stays readable and searchable for as long as the account exists.

Subscriptions are sold by Paddle.com, the merchant of record: Paddle takes the payment, charges any VAT and issues the invoice, and the purchase itself is also governed by Paddle's buyer terms, linked at checkout. What you get for it — the service — is described here.

04Cancelling

You can cancel at any time, from Settings, without giving a reason and without talking to anyone. Access runs to the end of the period you have already paid for; nothing is charged after that, and nothing is refunded for the part of the period you did not use, except under the withdrawal right below.

Cancelling does not delete anything and does not reset the free counters.

05Withdrawal, and the waiver

If you are a consumer in the EU you have fourteen days to withdraw from a contract for digital services and get your money back.

The service starts working the moment you pay, at your request. At checkout there is a box, empty unless you tick it, by which you agree to give up that right. If you leave it empty, you can withdraw within fourteen days of your first payment for a plan, from Settings, without giving a reason, and you get back the payment less a proportionate amount for what you have already used: the larger of the share of the period's answers and the share of its minutes of live conversation that you have spent (for a yearly plan, out of twelve months of them). If you have used nothing, the whole payment comes back. If you tick the box, the right to withdraw ends when the service starts.

06Refunds

Within fourteen days of your first payment for a plan, unless you ticked the box giving up that right, you can have back what you have not yet used of it, as described above: Settings shows the share and has a button for it, or write to [email protected]. The refund goes to the card you paid with, through Paddle; banks usually show it within a few working days. A refund ends the subscription; what you have read stays yours. Hours of live conversation bought on top of a plan are not refunded once used.

After those fourteen days, or for a renewal, payments are not refunded, but you can cancel at any time and nothing more is charged. If something went wrong on our side — you were charged twice, or the service did not work for a long stretch — write and we will put it right.

07What not to do with it

Do not use Nekia to generate material that is illegal where you are, to harass anyone, or to impersonate a real person. Do not try to extract the prompts, resell the answers as a product, or automate the service against its interface.

We can close an account that does these things. If we do, you can still ask for a copy of everything in it first, unless the law says otherwise.

08Availability

The service is offered as it is. It will sometimes be slow, and sometimes a voice will not answer — when that happens nothing is counted against you.

We do not promise a particular uptime. If the service is unavailable for a long stretch of a period you paid for, write and we will sort it out.

09Liability

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, liability is limited to the amount you paid in the twelve months before the thing complained about, and does not extend to decisions you made after reading an answer.

10Changes

If these terms change in a way that matters, the change is announced in the app and by email at least thirty days before it takes effect, and you can cancel before it does.

11Law

These terms are governed by the law of Georgia. If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory law where you live, and it does not stop you bringing a claim in your own courts.

01What is stored

Your email address, and your password — only as a one-way hash, held by Supabase, which nobody can read back, us included. Your conversations: every question you wrote, every answer a voice gave, which voices were in the room and when they joined or left, which lines you kept, and any draft you have not sent.

Two counters for the free tier; which plan you are on and when it renews; Paddle's identifiers for your subscription and last payment; and a label for the payment method such as "Visa ·6411". Card numbers are never stored here and never reach this service.

When you were last here, which is what decides whether the app greets you as someone returning.

If memory is on (it can be turned off, and its contents read and erased, in Settings): a short note the voices keep about what you have brought them, so that they remember you between conversations. The day's notes written for you; a week of practice, if you start one; whether you asked for the weekly note by email; and, if you allow notifications, the address your browser gives for them.

How the voices speak to you, if you have tuned them.

The answers you have listened to, as audio, for up to 30 days, so that hearing one again does not mean making it again.

Product analytics of our own: that something happened — a question asked, a line kept, a note answered, a payment made — with the time, your account and the interface version, so that we can see what helps. Never what you wrote. We look at it per account too: to see who has stopped coming, who ran into the limit, and where the service fails people. It stays in our database and is read only by the person who runs Nekia; there is no third-party analytics, no advertising, no tracker, nothing sold or shared, and nothing decided about you automatically.

Visits, whether or not you have an account: which pages of the site were opened, the site or link you came from (its name only, and any tag in the link such as ?ref=), whether it was a phone, a tablet or a computer, the country the connection comes from (as Cloudflare reports it), the language your browser asks for, and how long a page was open and how far down it was read. No cookie is set for this and nothing is stored in your browser. A visit is counted under a code made from your address and browser with a random key that changes every day and is never written down, so visits on different days cannot be joined up, and the code cannot be turned back into an address.

Cookies: the one that keeps you signed in; two that remember your language and the interface version; and, before you have an account, one that counts the free answers already used. Your browser also keeps a few small settings for this site.

Your IP address, briefly and only in the server's memory: to limit how many questions can be asked from one address without an account, and to make the day's visit code above. The address itself is not stored.

02Why, and on what basis

To run the service you asked for: that is the contract between us, and it covers your account, your conversations and your subscription.

To keep invoices, which tax law requires for a fixed number of years whatever either of us would prefer.

To keep the service working and not abused — a legitimate interest, and the reason there are rate limits on sending sign-in codes.

To understand how Nekia is used and make it better — the product analytics and the visits above. This is a legitimate interest too: it is kept to what happened, never what was written, and you can object to it by writing to [email protected], after which your account is left out of it.

03Who else touches it

Cloudflare — the network in front of the site: every request to Nekia passes through it on the way, and it tells Nekia which country a visit comes from.

Supabase — the database and the sign-in system. Your account and every conversation live there.

Railway — the hosting. The application runs there and its logs pass through it.

xAI — the language model the voices answer with, and the voices you hear. Your question and the conversation it belongs to are sent so that an answer can be generated. If you listen to an answer, its text is sent to be read aloud; if you talk with a thinker aloud, what you say is sent as sound so that it can be heard and answered.

Anthropic — a second language model, for the work around an answer. Your question is sent so that it can judge how long the answer should be, whether the subject is a heavy one, and which passages of the thinkers' own books to look up; your latest questions and, if memory is on, its note are sent when the day's note or the memory itself is written.

Google — only if you sign in with Google: it confirms who you are and gives Nekia your email address.

Resend — the mail. Your address is used to deliver sign-in codes and receipts, and the weekly note if you asked for it.

Your browser's push service (Apple, Google or Mozilla, depending on the browser) — only if you turn notifications on: it receives a wake-up signal with no content, and the note itself is fetched from Nekia.

Paddle.com — the payment provider, and the merchant of record for every subscription: it sells the subscription, takes the payment, works out and pays VAT, and issues the invoice. Your card details go to Paddle and never reach Nekia; what Nekia keeps is a label such as "Visa ·6411".

04How long

Conversations are kept until you delete them or delete the account. Nothing is archived, nothing expires and nothing is deleted for being old — threads are meant to run for years.

Deleting the account removes it and everything hanging off it: conversations, messages, the roster, kept lines, the memory note, notification addresses and the audio of answers you listened to. Deleting a conversation takes its audio with it. The product analytics described above lose their link to you — what remains says only that something happened, not to whom. Invoices are kept for as long as tax law requires, because they have to be.

Visits are kept for thirteen months and then deleted.

The host's logs, which carry no conversations, are kept for the host's short retention period and then discarded.

05What you can do about it

Ask for a copy of everything you have written and every answer you were given: write to [email protected] from the account's email address, and the copy is sent there as a text file within thirty days. That is the right of access.

Delete a conversation, or the whole account, from Settings. Deletion is immediate and there is no copy kept.

Correct your email address, restrict or object to processing, withdraw any consent you gave (memory, the weekly note, notifications — each is a switch in Settings), or complain to the supervisory authority where you live. Anything that is not a button, write to [email protected]: it is answered within thirty days.

06Your words and the model

Your conversations are sent to the model so that it can answer them. They are not used to train it.