Cochain Books — Terms of Service

Version terms-2026-09

These terms are a contract between you and Cochain LLC, doing business as Cochain Books ("Cochain Books", "we", "us"). Please read section 11 (Limitation of liability) and section 13 (Disputes) carefully — they limit what you can recover from us and require most disputes to be resolved by arbitration rather than in court.

Cochain LLC d/b/a Cochain Books 5826 New Territory Blvd PMB 3027, Sugar Land, TX 77479 info@cochainbooks.com · (346) 588-5426

1. What these terms cover

These terms govern the Cochain Books story tool and the cochainbooks.com website (together, "the Service").

They do not govern our publishing packages. If you have bought a publishing package, or won one in a contest, that relationship is governed by the agreement you signed. One narrow exception: section 5.6 covers draft materials we may show you before any such agreement exists, because until you sign one there is no agreement to govern them.

Precedence. Where a signed Publishing & Distribution Agreement, Contest Prize Agreement, Influencer & Brand Ambassador Agreement, or Client Service Agreement exists between you and Cochain Books, that agreement controls over these Terms with respect to its subject matter, including all provisions regarding limitation of liability, indemnification, and dispute resolution.

The two documents deliberately resolve disputes differently: the signed agreement uses Texas courts, and these terms use arbitration. That is intentional — they are different products, and section 13 says so expressly.

Our Privacy Policy describes what information we collect and what we do with it. It is part of these terms.

2. Who may use the Service

You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a contract. In Texas, a person under 18 generally cannot be bound by a contract, so we do not accept them as account holders.

Before you can use the Service, you must confirm that you are 18 or over. We ask you to confirm it, and we keep a record of your confirmation. If you cannot give that confirmation, do not use the Service.

The account holder is an adult. Usually that is the child's parent or legal guardian. It may also be a grandparent, another relative, or a friend making a story as a gift — section 6 sets out what we require of you in that case. Children do not hold accounts, do not sign in, and cannot create or share anything. A child may read and listen to a finished story on your account, with an adult.

We do not knowingly permit anyone under 18 to use the Service. If you believe someone under 18 is using an account, tell us at info@cochainbooks.com and we will close it.

You are responsible for your account, for keeping your sign-in secure, and for everything done through it. Tell us at info@cochainbooks.com if you think someone else is using it.

One person, one account. Accounts are personal to you and may not be shared, resold, or used on behalf of a school, class, library, or other organisation without our written agreement.

3. What the Service does

You give us a child's first name, their age, a premise for a story, and a choice of one of our characters. We generate a story, and if you ask for it, narration audio.

Stories are generated by artificial intelligence. The text comes from a large language model and the narration from a synthetic voice. This means:

• Two stories from the same premise will not be the same, and we cannot reproduce a particular result on request.
• Output can be wrong, odd, repetitive, or not to your taste. We screen for unsafe content, but screening is automated and imperfect.
• You should read a story before you read it to a child. We ask you to treat that as your step, not ours.

The Service is provided as it is. We do not promise it will always be available, that it will meet a particular need, or that any specific feature will continue to exist. We may change, add, or withdraw features.

Nothing here is a promise to publish. The story tool is a creative tool. If you want a book edited, illustrated, printed, or distributed to retailers, that is a publishing package, bought separately and governed by its own agreement.

4. Your subscription

4.1 Two ways to use the Service

Free. You can create up to 5 stories a month at no cost, and read them, print them and keep them. This is not a trial that runs out. It is what the Service does for free.

A free listen on every story. Every account, free or subscribed, can have the dedication and story pages 1–3 of each story it creates read aloud at no charge. Narrating the rest of a story, and its moral, is what the subscription adds.

Subscription — US $9.99 a month. The subscription buys narration beyond the free listen: a spoken recording of every page of every story you create, and its moral. It also raises your story allowance from 5 to 20 a month.

The price is in US dollars. If you are outside the United States you may be shown and charged an equivalent amount in your own currency, converted at the rate applied when the payment is taken — so the local amount can differ a little from one month to the next even though the price has not changed.

The narration is what you are paying for. The story allowances exist so that our costs stay predictable, and both sit well above what most families use — 20 stories is about five a week.

Both allowances reset at the start of each calendar month, measured in UTC — so depending on where you live, the reset can land a few hours either side of your local midnight. Unused stories do not carry over. If you reach yours and have a genuine reason to need more, email info@cochainbooks.com — we will normally just raise it for you.

One thing worth saying plainly. Narration is generated for a story you have created, so if you have used your 20 stories for the month, you cannot create and narrate a twenty-first until the allowance resets. We would rather tell you that here than have you find out.

4.2 It renews automatically

Your subscription renews every month until you cancel it. Billing runs monthly from the date you first subscribed — if you subscribe on the 12th, you are charged on the 12th of each month. We charge the payment method you gave Stripe at sign-up.

If a renewal payment fails, we may retry it and may suspend access until it succeeds.

4.3 Cancelling

You can cancel at any time, from your account, without contacting us and without giving a reason. Cancelling stops the next renewal.

You keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for. If you subscribe on the 12th and cancel on the 20th, your subscription runs to the 11th of the following month and then stops. Nothing is cut off early.

4.4 Refunds

We do not give refunds for a period that has already started, including partial months. You are never charged for time you have not received: cancelling always leaves you with the full period you paid for, and nothing further is taken.

Nothing here removes any right you have under the law of your state that cannot be waived.

4.5 Price changes

We may change the price. If we do, we will tell you before the change affects you, and the new price will apply from your next renewal after that notice. If you do not want to pay it, cancel before that renewal.

A movement in the exchange rate is not a price change. The US dollar price is the one we set. If you pay in another currency, the local amount follows the rate and can move between renewals — we have not changed the price, and no notice is due for that.

4.6 What happens to your stories when your subscription ends

Your stories remain in your account while the account exists, whether or not the subscription is active, unless you ask us to delete them or we close the account under section 8. Narration you have already generated stays with them, and stays playable.

Cancelling returns you to the free tier. You can still create up to 5 stories a month, and each still gets its free listen — the dedication and story pages 1–3. What stops is new narration beyond that.

We do not promise to keep them indefinitely. If a story matters to you, save a copy.

4.7 Automated and excessive use

The Service is for a person creating stories by hand, for children in their care.

We may throttle, suspend, or block access, with or without notice, if we detect automated or scripted access, access through anything other than our own website, account sharing, resale of access, or a pattern of use that places an unreasonable load on our systems or on our providers' systems.

This is separate from the monthly allowance. Staying within your allowance does not entitle you to use the Service in an automated way, and we do not have to wait for an allowance to be reached before acting.

5. Your story, and what you may do with it

This section is the one most people care about, so we have written it as plainly as we can.

5.1 We claim no ownership of your story

Cochain Books does not claim ownership of the stories you create with the Service. We do not take a share of anything you earn from one. We do not sell them, licence them to anyone, or use them to promote the Service without asking you first.

You may read your story to your child, print it, keep it, give it to family, and publish it yourself — subject to section 5.3 (our characters) and section 5.6 (publishing previews) below.

5.2 What copyright law does with AI-generated text

We want to be straight with you rather than make a claim that sounds better than it is.

We do not claim copyright in the AI-generated output, and we do not limit how you use it.

While purely machine-generated text may not qualify for federal copyright protection under current US law — because copyright requires human authorship — your unique prompts, your original story premises, and your own edits remain yours.

We therefore do not promise that you own the copyright in every word of your story, because that is not ours to promise — it depends on the law, not on us. What we promise is what we control: we claim nothing, we take nothing, and we will not stand in your way.

5.3 Our characters stay ours

Our characters — Blossom, Barnaby, Pip, Scout, Gloom, Leon, Ziggy, Mr. Pomp, Mama Bear and Rusty, as well as any other character we create, publish or trademark, whether or not it has yet appeared in a published book — and their names, designs, and personalities belong to Cochain Books. A story you generate may feature one of them.

You may use a story containing our characters for yourself and your family, freely and forever: read it, print it, keep it, share it with people you know.

You may not publish or sell a story containing our characters — commercially, or to the public — without our written permission. If you want to, ask us at info@cochainbooks.com. We are not trying to be difficult about this; we simply cannot give away characters we use across our own books.

If you would rather have a story with no such restriction, create one that does not use our characters.

5.4 What you allow us to do

To run the Service, we need permission to store your story, send it to the providers listed in our Privacy Policy, generate narration from it, and show it back to you. You give us permission to do those things, for that purpose only. It ends when you delete the story or your account.

5.5 Everything else is ours

The Service itself — the software, the website, our name, our logo, our characters, and our designs — belongs to Cochain Books. Using the Service does not give you any right to it.

5.6 Publishing previews and drafts

This section is about our publishing packages, not about the stories you make with the story tool. Nothing in it narrows section 5.1.

Any draft layout, proof, mock-up, cover design, or formatted file generated or provided by Cochain Books in connection with a publishing package ("Publishing Previews") is provided solely for your personal evaluation prior to purchase. Publishing Previews are not governed by section 5.1.

You may not print, distribute, display, sell, or commercially publish any Publishing Preview unless and until you execute the formal Publishing & Distribution Agreement and complete payment for the applicable publishing package.

Once you have, that agreement governs the finished book and this section stops applying to it.

6. How you may use the Service

Use it for its purpose: making stories for children you are responsible for.

We ask that you do not:

• create material that sexualises, endangers, or degrades a child, in any way at all
• use the Service to harass, threaten, defame, or impersonate anyone
• deliberately try to make the Service produce harmful, hateful, or sexually explicit content, or work around our safety measures
• give us a real child's first name and age without being their parent or legal guardian, or without that parent or guardian's permission
• use anyone else's personal information without their permission
• use the Service for anything unlawful
• copy, scrape, resell, or reverse-engineer the Service, or use it to build a competing product
• share your account, or use automated tools against the Service

Making a story for a child who is not in your care

You may. A grandparent, an aunt or uncle, a godparent or a friend of the family can make a story as a gift. What we require is that you already have the permission of that child's parent or legal guardian before you give us the child's first name and age, and that you confirm you have it when you create the story.

You are responsible for that confirmation being true, and the responsibility is yours alone. We have no way to check the permission and we do not pretend to — we rely entirely on what you tell us. If the confirmation was not true, and the child's parent or guardian objects to the story or to our holding the child's name, section 12 applies: you agreed to defend and indemnify us, and this is precisely the kind of claim it covers.

If you do not have that permission, do not use a real child's name. Use a made-up name instead — the Service works just as well, and nothing in this section restricts you.

⚠ This does not extend to publishing. Making a story as a gift is one thing; turning it into a published book is another, and the rules are stricter. You may pay for a publishing package as a gift, but the child's parent or legal guardian must personally sign the publishing agreement and the consent and publicity release before anything is printed or distributed. Nobody else can give us those rights. See section 1 — publishing packages are governed by their own agreement, not by these terms.

These are the terms on which we let you use the Service, not a code we adjudicate. We do not operate a complaints process, a review board, or an appeal. If we think you have broken them, we act under section 8.

7. Content screening — what we do and do not do

We use automated, algorithmic content filters. Text you write is checked before a story is generated, and every page we generate is checked before you see it.

Automated filtering is imperfect and does not constitute human editorial review, manual oversight, or active monitoring of user activity. Cochain Books does not manually review, approve, or verify stories or generated output.

We do not read your stories as a matter of course; access is limited to a single administrator, for support and troubleshooting.

Because automated filters cannot anticipate every context, the adult account holder assumes sole responsibility for reviewing and approving all generated text and audio before sharing or reading it to a child. That is why section 3 asks you to read a story before reading it to a child.

We keep a record when a filter blocks something. Section 7 of our Privacy Policy explains what those records hold and how long we keep them.

8. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or close your account, and remove any story, at any time, in our sole discretion, for any reason or for no reason, with or without notice.

We would normally only do this for a reason — non-payment, a breach of section 6, or a risk to someone — but we are not agreeing to a standard, a process, or an appeal, and none should be inferred.

If we close your account for a reason other than your breach of these terms, we will refund the unused part of the period you have paid for. If we close it because you breached them, we will not.

You may close your account at any time by cancelling and asking us to delete it. Section 8 of the Privacy Policy explains what is deleted and what is kept.

10. Your responsibility

You are responsible for what you put into the Service and what you do with what comes out. That includes deciding whether a story is suitable for your child, and whether anything you publish elsewhere is lawful and does not infringe anyone's rights.

11. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or loss of goodwill, arising out of or relating to the Service, whether or not we were told such damages were possible.

Our total liability to you, for all claims combined, is limited to the greater of (a) $100 or (b) the total amount you paid us in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Some states do not allow these limits. Where that is so, this section applies to the fullest extent permitted, and nothing in it removes a right you have that cannot be waived.

This section, together with sections 9 and 12, allocates risk between us and is a basis of the price we charge.

12. Indemnification

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Cochain LLC, Cochain Books, and their officers, directors, employees, contractors, and agents from any claim, demand, loss, liability, damage, penalty, cost, or expense — including reasonable legal fees — arising out of or relating to:

• your use of the Service
• anything you submit to the Service
• your confirmation that you are a child's parent or legal guardian, or that you have their permission — including any claim brought by that parent or guardian
• what you do with a story you created, including publishing it
• your breach of these terms or of any law
• your violation of anyone else's rights

We may take over the defence of any such claim at your expense, and you will cooperate with us. You will not settle anything that imposes an obligation on us without our written consent.

13. Disputes

Publishing agreements are outside this section. This section does not apply to any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to a book, manuscript, author page, or publishing service governed by a signed Publishing & Distribution Agreement, Contest Prize Agreement, Influencer & Brand Ambassador Agreement, or Client Service Agreement. Any such dispute shall be resolved in accordance with the dispute resolution provisions of that agreement.

Please contact us first. Email info@cochainbooks.com and describe the problem. Most things are resolved this way, and we ask you to try for 30 days before starting anything formal.

13.1 Arbitration

You and Cochain Books agree that any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the Service will be resolved by binding arbitration, not in court, before a single arbitrator, administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this section.

You are giving up the right to a trial and to a jury. Arbitration is less formal than court, uses more limited discovery, and the arbitrator's decision is subject to very limited review.

Who pays. Payment of all filing, administration and arbitrator fees will be governed by the AAA Consumer Arbitration Rules. Cochain Books will pay all filing fees for claims totalling less than $10,000, unless the arbitrator finds the claim frivolous.

You can opt out, and you have 30 days. If you do not want this arbitration agreement to apply to you, email info@cochainbooks.com within 30 days of opening your account, saying so and giving the email address on your account. Opting out costs you nothing and affects nothing else in these terms — the rest continues to apply, and we will not treat you differently for it. If you opt out, disputes go to the courts named in section 13.2.

Batching of similar claims. If 25 or more claims of a substantially similar kind are filed against Cochain Books by or with the assistance of the same lawyers or coordinated group, those claims will be arbitrated in batches of up to 50, with the remaining claims stayed until each batch concludes. The AAA will administer each batch as a single arbitration for fee purposes. This applies equally to claims Cochain Books might bring.

Individual claims only. Claims must be brought individually. Neither of us may bring a class action, a collective action, or a representative action, and the arbitrator may not consolidate claims or preside over any form of group proceeding.

Exceptions. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small-claims court if it qualifies. Either of us may ask a court for an injunction to protect intellectual property or to stop unauthorised access to the Service.

13.2 Governing law and venue

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.

Any arbitration will be seated in, and any court proceeding permitted under section 13.1 will be brought in, Fort Bend County, Texas, and you consent to the jurisdiction of those courts.

13.3 Time limit

Any claim must be brought within two years of when it arose, or it is permanently barred, except where the law does not allow that limit.

14. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. We will post the new version on this page with a new version number and effective date.

Please check this page from time to time. We will not be sending you an email each time. Continuing to use the Service after a new version is posted means you accept it. If you do not accept it, stop using the Service and cancel your subscription.

15. General

Notices to you may be given by email to the address on your account or by posting on the Service. Notices to us must go to info@cochainbooks.com and to Cochain LLC d/b/a Cochain Books, 5826 New Territory Blvd PMB 3027, Sugar Land, TX 77479.

Assignment. You may not transfer these terms. We may, in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets.

Severability. If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest continues in force. In section 13.1, if the prohibition on class proceedings is unenforceable, the whole of section 13.1 does not apply, and disputes go to the courts named in section 13.2.

No waiver. If we do not enforce something, that is not a waiver of it.

Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service, and replace anything said beforehand — except a signed Publishing & Distribution Agreement, which controls as described in section 1.

Survival. Sections 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and 15 survive the end of your subscription or account.

16. Contact

Cochain LLC d/b/a Cochain Books 5826 New Territory Blvd PMB 3027, Sugar Land, TX 77479 info@cochainbooks.com · (346) 588-5426