Terms of Use

You must be at least 13 years old to create a WholeFamily account. By creating an account you confirm that you meet this requirement.

You are responsible for the accuracy of your account information and for keeping access to your email and device secure. Activity that happens through your account is your responsibility.

Access to a family is by invitation only. The family creator decides who is invited and may remove members at any time.

What it costs: WholeFamily offers auto-renewing subscription plans. The Family plan is $12.99 per month or $99 per year. The Family Plus plan is $19.99 per month or $149 per year and raises the limits on contributors, viewers, and spaces. A new family starts with a free two-week trial before any purchase, one trial per email address; this is separate from any introductory offer the App Store may attach to a subscription (see Free trial below). Prices are shown in United States dollars; the exact price, billing period, and any applicable taxes are shown at the time of purchase, in the App Store or on the web checkout page. One subscription covers the entire family: the family creator subscribes, and everyone they invite gets access at no additional charge.

How you are charged: You can subscribe in two places, and the place you choose handles your payment. A subscription bought in the WholeFamily app for iPhone is purchased through Apple In-App Purchase and charged to your Apple ID account at confirmation of purchase. A subscription bought on the web is processed by Stripe, our payment provider, and charged to the card you enter at confirmation of purchase. We never see or store your full card number.

Auto-renewal: Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each billing period unless you cancel it first, at the price then in effect. For an Apple purchase, your Apple ID account is charged for renewal within 24 hours before the end of the current period, and you must cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends to avoid the renewal. For a web purchase, your card is charged on the renewal date, and canceling at any time before that date stops the renewal. If we change a price, we will tell you before it applies to you; for Apple purchases, Apple's price-change rules also apply.

Managing and canceling: Manage your subscription where you bought it. For an Apple purchase, turn off auto-renewal in your App Store account settings. For a web purchase, open Billing in your WholeFamily settings, which takes you to a secure Stripe page where you can update your card, switch plans, or cancel. Canceling stops future renewals; it does not retroactively refund the current period.

Free trial: When you create your first family, it receives a free two-week trial. No purchase or payment details are needed, and nothing is charged when the trial ends; to keep using WholeFamily after it, the family creator chooses a plan. The free family trial is limited to one per email address: if a trial has already been used with an email address, deleting the account or the family does not make that address eligible again. Separately, a subscription in the App Store may include an introductory free trial; if it does, any unused portion of that trial is forfeited when you purchase a subscription.

You keep ownership of the photos, videos, and writing you share on WholeFamily. We do not claim any ownership of your content.

You grant us a limited license to store, process, and display your content for the purpose of operating the service for you and the family members you have shared it with, and to carry out the safety review described below. That license covers the technical work of running the app, such as storing files, generating thumbnails, and delivering content to your family. It does not permit us to sell your content, use it for advertising, or show it to anyone outside your family, except as set out in Content Safety and Review.

You are responsible for having the right to share what you upload, including photos of other people.

WholeFamily is for private family use. Your family space is not visible to the public, but private does not mean unregulated. The rules below apply to everything uploaded to WholeFamily, including photos, videos, captions, comments, display names, and profile images.

You agree not to upload, store, or share:

• Child sexual abuse material, or any sexual or sexualized depiction of a minor, whether photographed, drawn, edited, or generated.
• Content that sexually exploits, endangers, or grooms a child, including otherwise ordinary images of children presented or captioned in a sexualized way.
• Pornography or sexually explicit media of any kind, including material involving consenting adults, and including material shared only with your own family.
• Intimate images of any person shared without that person's consent.
• Content that depicts, promotes, or incites violence, terrorism, human trafficking, or serious harm to a person or an animal.
• Content that harasses, threatens, defames, or abuses another person.
• Content that infringes copyright, trademark, privacy, or publicity rights.
• Anything else that is unlawful under applicable law.

You also agree not to attempt to access families or accounts that are not yours, interfere with the operation of the service, or use the app to distribute malware or spam.

No adult content, even in private. WholeFamily is a family photo journal. Pornography and sexually explicit media are not permitted anywhere on the service, including inside a family space that only you and your partner can see. By sexually explicit we mean material depicting sexual acts, or displaying genitalia for the purpose of sexual gratification. The everyday photographs families take of their own children are not sexual content and are not covered by this rule.

Zero tolerance for child sexual abuse material. There is no warning, no strike system, and no appeal. If we identify apparent child sexual abuse material, we terminate the account immediately, preserve the material and the associated account records as the law requires, report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and cooperate with law enforcement. United States federal law obligates providers to make these reports, and we will make them without notifying the uploader in advance.

We built WholeFamily to be private, and we do not read your family's posts out of curiosity, for advertising, or for product research. Privacy, though, cannot be a place where the abuse of a child becomes invisible. This section explains the narrow circumstances in which your content may be examined.

You grant us the right to scan and review content. By uploading to WholeFamily, you authorize us to access, scan, analyze, retain, and review any content you upload, together with its associated metadata, for the purposes of detecting and preventing violations of these terms, meeting our legal obligations, responding to reports, and protecting the safety of users and of the public.

That review may be automated, human, or both:

• Automated screening. We may use automated tools to screen uploaded media, including hash matching against databases of known child sexual abuse material and classifiers that detect sexually explicit or otherwise prohibited content. These tools may run when content is uploaded or at any time afterward, including on content that has already been shared.
• Human review. A person on our team may view specific content when an automated tool flags it, when we receive a report, when we are investigating suspected abuse or a technical problem, or when we are responding to a valid legal request. Access is limited to people who need it for that purpose.
• Service providers. Content may be processed by infrastructure and safety providers acting on our behalf under contractual confidentiality obligations. Our Privacy Policy describes this in more detail.

This is a right, not a promise. We take on no general obligation to monitor content, and we are not required to pre-screen anything. We may not detect every violation, and nothing in this section creates a duty to detect one. Choosing not to act in a particular case is not a waiver of these terms and is not a failure of the service.

Preservation and disclosure. Where we have a legal obligation, or a good faith belief that it is necessary to prevent harm, we may preserve content and account records and disclose them to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to law enforcement, or to other authorities. We may do so without notice to you where notice is prohibited by law, or where it would risk the destruction of evidence or harm to a person.

If these terms are violated, we may take whatever action we consider appropriate, in our sole discretion, including:

• Removing or restricting access to specific content.
• Restricting features on an account or on a family.
• Suspending an account while we investigate.
• Terminating an account permanently.
• Terminating an entire family where the violation is systemic or where the family creator is responsible for it.
• Permanently barring an individual from WholeFamily, including from creating a new account or being invited into another family.

For severe violations, including anything involving a child, we act immediately and without prior notice. For pornographic or sexually explicit material that does not involve a minor, we normally remove the content and suspend the account, and we terminate on repetition or on refusal to stop.

Effect of removal. Termination for a violation ends access to the service and to the content held in it. Where we permanently bar someone, we may keep a limited record for the sole purpose of enforcing that bar, such as a hashed identifier for the email address used. We keep that record even after an account deletion request, because it is the only way a bar can be made to hold.

Refunds. Subscriptions bought in the iPhone app are billed by Apple, and refunds for them are governed by Apple's policies. Subscriptions bought on the web are billed by us through Stripe, and we do not refund a partly used billing period. We do not issue refunds for a subscription period ended by an enforcement action, to the extent the law allows.

Appeals. If you believe an enforcement action was a mistake, write to safety@ourwhole.family and we will review it. We do not offer appeals for material involving the sexual exploitation of a child.

If you see content on WholeFamily that breaks these rules, report it to safety@ourwhole.family with enough detail for us to find it. We review reports promptly and act on the ones we can substantiate. Safety reports go to that address rather than to general support, so that they are seen first.

Do not download, forward, or re-share suspected child sexual abuse material, including in order to send it to us as evidence. Describe it and tell us where you saw it instead. If a child is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first.

You can also report suspected child sexual exploitation directly to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children at report.cybertip.org.

You can delete your account at any time from within the app. If you created your family, deleting your account permanently deletes that family along with its spaces, posts, and photos for every member. If you joined a family created by someone else, deleting your account removes you from that family and permanently deletes the posts you authored.

Deleting your account, or the family that holds the subscription, ends a subscription bought on the web; nothing further is charged, and the current period is not refunded. A subscription bought through Apple is not canceled by deletion: turn it off in your App Store account settings.

We may suspend or terminate access to the service if these terms are violated, or if we are required to do so by law. See Enforcement and Removal from the Service above for what that involves.

One limit applies to deletion. Where the law requires us to preserve material or records, or where we are cooperating with a law enforcement or child safety investigation, we will retain what we are obligated to retain even after an account deletion request, and only for as long as that obligation lasts. We may also keep a limited identifier needed to enforce a permanent bar. Nothing else survives deletion.

WholeFamily is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis, without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error free, or that content will never be lost. You are encouraged to keep your own backups of photos that matter to you.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, WholeFamily will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, arising out of your use of the service. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid for the service in the twelve months before the claim arose.

If you have questions about these terms, visit our support page. Three addresses reach us:

• support@ourwhole.family for help with your account, billing, or the app.
• safety@ourwhole.family to report harmful content or appeal an enforcement action.
• feedback@ourwhole.family for ideas, requests, and anything you wish the app did differently.