Terms of Service

The short version: Muuted is a small, independent service that reads the public feeds you choose and shows them to you calmly. Use it for that, don't use it to break the law or abuse the service, and understand it's provided as-is by Muuted LLC, a Virginia limited liability company. The detail below is the part the lawyers care about.

1. Who you are agreeing with, and what Muuted is. These terms are an agreement between you and Muuted LLC, a Virginia limited liability company ("Muuted," "we," "us"). By creating an account, buying a subscription, or otherwise using Muuted, you agree to these terms and acknowledge the Privacy Policy. If you don't agree, please don't use the service. Muuted is a personal feed reader. It gathers publicly available feeds and content you choose to add, and links you to the original sources. Muuted is a reader and tool — not a publisher. The articles in your feed come from the publishers and accounts you choose: Muuted doesn't write, own, or endorse them. Where Muuted produces something itself — a summary, a topic match, a duplicate grouping, a source suggestion — that is Muuted's output rather than the publisher's, and section 9a covers it.

2. Who can use it. Muuted is not directed to children under 13, and you must be at least 13 to use it (16 where local law requires). We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13; if we learn that we have, we'll delete the account and its data.

2a. If you're under 18. If you are under the age of legal majority where you live, your parent or legal guardian must review and agree to these terms on your behalf, and is responsible for your use of Muuted.

3. Your account. Keep your sign-in secure. You're responsible for activity under your account. A Muuted account is for one person — use it on your own devices, with up to five signed in at once, but please don't share one account between different people. We don't sell family or team plans. If an account's sign-ins look shared beyond one person we may reach out — and we judge that only by how many devices are signed in at once, never by inspecting your IP address, location, or any device fingerprint.

4. The feeds you add are your responsibility. You choose your sources. You're responsible for the feeds and content you add and for keeping your use lawful and consistent with the terms of the sources you follow. Your feed is private to you.

5. License to provide the service. When you add a feed or source, you give Muuted permission to access, fetch, process, cache, and display that feed and its related content — titles, excerpts, thumbnails, and metadata — solely to provide the service to you. You are authorising access, not granting ownership: you keep any rights you have in what you submit, and nothing here gives you ownership of a publisher's content or lets you grant Muuted rights you do not hold. Publisher content stays the publisher's.

6. What Muuted stores and caches. Muuted is a reader, not a publisher. To show you your feed, it fetches and temporarily caches feed metadata (titles, links, and the excerpts publishers include in their feeds), and — only if you use the optional AI features — the article text and summaries those features need, for a limited time. Publisher images shown in your feed are fetched and briefly cached by Muuted rather than loaded directly by your browser, so your device does not contact each publisher for every thumbnail. Muuted honors feed removals and access blocks: if a source becomes unavailable or a publisher blocks access, Muuted stops fetching it and it drops from your feed. Tapping a story takes you to the original publisher.

7. Acceptable use. Don't use Muuted to: break any law or add, store, or access illegal content; infringe copyright or other rights; abuse, overload, scrape, reverse-engineer, or disrupt the service; or resell or redistribute it without permission. You must be 18 or older to add sources containing adult content. Muuted displays only content from sources you choose to follow; you are responsible for the sources you add. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate this.

7a. Security and automated access. A few limits keep the service stable and other people's accounts safe. Please use Muuted through its normal interface — not through bots, crawlers, scrapers, headless browsers, or scripts, and not by creating accounts automatically or in bulk. The service's protections (sign-in, rate limits, quotas, paywalls, and the anti-bot check) are there to be used rather than circumvented, disabled, or scanned for weaknesses. Don't try to reach another person's account or any system you haven't been given access to; don't send malware, or use Muuted to reach or overload anyone else; and don't use the service or its output to train or fine-tune a machine-learning model. Where we reasonably believe it's needed to protect the service or the people using it, we may rate-limit, block, or suspend access straight away and sort it out afterwards — access comes back once it's resolved, if the account did nothing wrong.

7b. Reporting a security problem. If you find a security flaw, please email [email protected] and give us a fair chance to fix it before telling anyone else. Good-faith research reported that way is welcome and we won't come after you for it — but it has to stay inside your own account, must not access, change, or take anyone else's data, and must not degrade the service for other people. Automated scanning, brute-force or credential-stuffing attempts, denial-of-service testing, and social engineering are not authorised.

8. Copyright & takedowns (DMCA). Muuted respects copyright and complies with the DMCA. To report content you believe infringes your copyright, contact our designated agent with the information the DMCA requires (identification of the work and the material, your contact details, and the required good-faith and accuracy statements). To report infringement, contact our designated agent at [email protected] with the details above. We remove or disable access to material within Muuted and terminate repeat infringers.

9. Third-party content & sites. Content comes from third-party publishers and accounts and is provided "as is." We don't guarantee accuracy and aren't responsible for third-party content or the sites you tap through to.

9a. AI features and what they're worth. Some parts of Muuted — article summaries, smart filtering, topic matching, duplicate-story grouping, and source suggestions — are produced by automated systems and language models rather than by a person. They get things wrong. A summary can misstate or leave out what an article actually says; a filter can hide something you wanted or let through something you muted; a suggestion can simply be off. Treat all of it as a convenience and not as a substitute for reading the original, and never as professional, legal, medical, or financial advice. Muuted doesn't warrant that this output is accurate, complete, or current, and you're responsible for checking anything you plan to rely on. Optional AI features can be left switched off; the ones that run while your feed is built are described in section 6.

10. Subscriptions & billing. Pro is billed monthly or yearly through Stripe. Pro renews automatically unless you cancel before the renewal date. Before you subscribe, checkout clearly shows the price, billing interval, renewal date, and how to cancel, and you affirmatively agree to those terms to complete your purchase. You can cancel anytime from your account settings — cancellation is as simple as signing up — and access continues through the end of the period you've already paid for, with no further charges.

11. Refunds. Email [email protected] within 15 days of a charge for a full refund — no questions asked. After 15 days, payments are non-refundable, but you can cancel anytime to stop future charges.

12. Service changes & discontinuation. Muuted is an evolving product; features may change. If we ever discontinue it, we'll give reasonable advance notice and let you export your data. Your access is to the service while it operates — it's not a personal lifetime guarantee.

Changes to these terms. We may update these terms and will post the revised version with a new effective date. If a change materially affects your rights or obligations — including any change to the arbitration section — we'll give reasonable advance notice in the app or by email, so the opt-out rights described below are meaningful rather than theoretical.

12a. Muuted's own rights. Muuted — its software, interface, design, branding and logo, source-directory organisation, documentation, and original copy — belongs to Muuted LLC or its licensors. You get a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the service for your own lawful purposes. That licence doesn't include copying the software, reselling access, scraping the service, or using the service or its output to train, fine-tune, or evaluate a machine-learning model.

12b. General. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between you and Muuted LLC about the service, and replace any earlier understanding. If any part of them is held unenforceable, the rest stays in force and the unenforceable part is limited or removed to the smallest extent necessary. If we don't enforce something straight away, we haven't waived it. Muuted LLC may assign this agreement as part of a sale, merger, financing or restructuring of the business; you may not transfer your account to someone else without our permission. You agree to receive notices from us electronically — by email to your account address, or in the app — and those count as being in writing. Section headings are for reading convenience and don't affect interpretation. The sections that by their nature should outlive your account — payment obligations already incurred, licences you granted us to operate the service, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity, and dispute resolution — survive termination.

13. Disclaimer of warranties. Muuted is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose. We don't warrant it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that content will be accurate or available.

14. Limitation of liability. To the fullest extent allowed by law, Muuted LLC and its members, managers, officers, employees, contractors, and agents won't be liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost data, profits, or goodwill. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or $50 if you paid nothing.

15. Indemnification. You agree to cover (indemnify) Muuted LLC and its members, managers, officers, employees, contractors, and agents against any claims, losses, or costs arising from your use of the service, the feeds or content you add, or your violation of these terms or the law.

16. Termination. We may suspend or terminate accounts that abuse the service or violate these terms. You can stop using Muuted and delete your account from Settings at any time. If you have an active Pro subscription you'll be asked to cancel it first, so a deleted account can never keep being billed. Deleting before the end of a paid period ends access and does not by itself create a refund.

17. Let's try to sort it out first. If you have a problem with Muuted, email [email protected] and describe the issue and what you'd like done about it. Most things get fixed this way. Both you and Muuted agree to try to resolve a dispute informally for 60 days after that notice before starting arbitration or any other proceeding. Any deadline for bringing a claim pauses while this is going on.

18. Arbitration and class-action waiver. This section affects your legal rights, including your right to go to court or take part in a class action. Please read it.

If the informal step above doesn't resolve things, you and Muuted agree that any dispute relating to Muuted or these terms will be settled by binding individual arbitration, administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court. You and Muuted each waive the right to a jury trial.

Individual basis only. Claims may be brought only in your or Muuted's individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative action. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any form of class proceeding, and may award relief only to the individual party seeking it.

What this section does not cover. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small-claims court instead, if it qualifies. And either of us may ask a court for an injunction to stop infringement or misuse of intellectual property. Those don't have to go to arbitration.

You can opt out. If you don't want to be bound by this arbitration section, email [email protected] within 30 days of first accepting these terms (or within 30 days of being notified of a material change to this section) and say you're opting out. That's all it takes. Opting out affects only this section — the rest of the terms still apply, and opting out will never affect your account or your service.

Costs and where it happens. Muuted will pay filing, administration, and arbitrator fees to the extent the AAA Consumer Arbitration Rules require, and will not seek its attorneys' fees from you unless the arbitrator finds your claim was frivolous. Arbitration will be handled by documents, phone, or video where possible; if an in-person hearing is needed, it will take place in the county where you live, or somewhere else we both agree on.

Coordinated mass filings. If 25 or more similar claims are brought against Muuted by or with the coordination of the same lawyers or firm, those claims will be arbitrated in batches of up to 50 — each batch before a single arbitrator, as a single set of proceedings with a single set of fees — and the results of the earlier batches may be used to help resolve the rest. This keeps arbitration a way to resolve real disputes rather than a way to generate fees, and it applies equally to both sides.

If part of this doesn't hold up. If the class-action waiver above is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim (and only that claim) will proceed in court, while everything else stays in arbitration. If any other part of this section is found unenforceable, the rest of the section still applies. The Federal Arbitration Act governs the interpretation and enforcement of this section.

19. Governing law & venue. These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, USA, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any lawsuit must be brought in the state or federal courts located in Virginia, unless applicable law requires otherwise.

20. Changes to these terms. We may update these terms; we'll post changes here and update the effective date. Continued use means you accept the updated terms.

Effective July 29, 2026. Questions: [email protected]