Terms of Service

These terms are the agreement between you and Sowarly for use of the service at sowarly.com. By creating an account or using the service you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

1. What the service is

Sowarly hosts photographs you upload and presents them to people you choose, as galleries reachable by a web address you can protect with a password, restrict to a subset of photos, or set to expire. Your clients can view those photographs and download them at full resolution.

We add and change features over time. We will not remove something you depend on without notice where we can avoid it, but the service is not frozen and these terms do not promise any particular feature will exist forever.

2. Your account

• You must be at least 18 years old and able to enter into a contract.
• Give accurate account information and keep your email address current — it is how we reach you about your subscription and your data.
• You are responsible for your password and for what happens under your account. Tell us promptly at support@sowarly.com if you think it has been compromised.
• One account is for one photographer or studio. You may not resell access to your account or share credentials with people outside your studio.

3. Your photographs stay yours

You keep every right you had in the photographs and other material you upload. We claim no ownership of them.

So that we can actually run the service, you grant us a limited licence to store your files, generate the smaller preview versions used for browsing, transmit them to the people you have given access, and make the technical copies that hosting and caching require. That licence exists only for the purpose of operating Sowarly for you, it is not exclusive, and it ends when you delete the material or close your account, subject to the short clean-up window described in our Privacy Policy.

We will not use your photographs to advertise Sowarly, show them to anyone you have not given access to, sell them, license them onward, or use them to train machine-learning models. If we ever want to feature a photographer’s work, we will ask first and take no for an answer.

4. What you are responsible for

You must have the rights and the consents needed for everything you upload and for showing it to the people you show it to — including, where it applies, releases from the people photographed. You are the one who decides who receives a gallery link, and you are responsible for that decision.

Treat a gallery link as a key. Anyone holding the link, and the password if you set one, can open the gallery. Set passwords on anything sensitive, use guest links to narrow what a group can see, and set an expiry date where a gallery should not stay open indefinitely. Note also that image links already issued remain valid for up to 24 hours after you unpublish a gallery; if you need an immediate cut-off, ask us.

5. Acceptable use

You may not use Sowarly to store, send or publish:

• material that is unlawful, or that infringes someone else’s copyright, trademark or privacy;
• sexual imagery of minors, or intimate images of anyone shared without their consent — either will result in immediate termination and, where required, a report to the authorities;
• material intended to harass, threaten or defame a person, or to incite violence;
• malware, or anything designed to compromise a visitor’s device.

And you may not:

• attempt to bypass storage limits, access another account’s data, or probe, scan or interfere with the service’s security;
• use the service as general file storage or a content delivery network for material unrelated to delivering photographs to clients;
• scrape or bulk-download galleries you were not given access to, or automate access in a way that degrades the service for others;
• resell the service, or present it as your own product.

Security research is welcome. If you find a vulnerability, report it to support@sowarly.com before disclosing it, do not access data belonging to anyone else, and we will not pursue you for a good-faith report.

6. Plans and storage

Each plan includes an amount of storage, listed on our pricing page. Storage is measured across your original files and the preview versions generated from them. When you reach your limit, further uploads are refused until you delete something or move to a larger plan — we do not delete your files to make room, and we do not charge overage fees.

The free plan is a real plan rather than a trial, and it does not expire.

7. Payment and renewal

Paid plans are billed monthly in advance through Paddle, which acts as merchant of record for the transaction. That means your contract for the payment is with Paddle, Paddle’s terms apply to it, your invoice comes from Paddle, and Paddle collects any sales tax or VAT due in your country. Card details are entered with Paddle and never reach us.

Prices are listed in US dollars before tax. The amount you actually pay is shown at checkout in your own currency and includes any tax, so it may differ from the listed figure. A subscription renews automatically each month until cancelled.

If we change the price of a plan you are on, we will give you at least 30 days’ notice by email before it takes effect, and you may cancel instead of accepting it.

If a payment fails, we do not immediately cut off access — your galleries keep working while the payment is retried, because your clients should not lose access to their photographs over a card that expired. If it cannot be collected, the subscription ends and your account returns to the free plan.

8. Cancellation and refunds

You can cancel at any time from the billing page in your account. Cancellation stops the next renewal; you keep your paid plan until the end of the period you have already paid for, and after that your account returns to the free plan. Your galleries stay online and the links your clients hold keep working — but your storage allowance drops to the free amount, so uploads are refused until you are back within it.

We do not refund the unused part of a period that has already started, except where consumer law gives you a right to one. Where you have such a right — for example the 14-day right of withdrawal for consumers in the UK and EU — it applies, and any refund is processed by Paddle as the merchant of record. If you believe you are owed a refund, email support@sowarly.com and we will deal with it fairly.

9. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the service and close your account at any time; see the Privacy Policy for how deletion works and how long it takes.

We may suspend or terminate an account that breaches section 5, that we are legally required to act on, or whose payment cannot be collected. Except where the material is unlawful or the delay would cause harm, we will tell you first and give you a reasonable chance to put it right and to get your files out.

10. Availability, and what we do not promise

We work to keep Sowarly available and fast, and we do not offer a contractual uptime guarantee. This is a young, independently built product; maintenance, a provider outage or a bug can make it unavailable for a period.

11. Disclaimer

The service is provided as it is and as it is available. To the extent the law allows, we make no warranties of any kind, express or implied, including of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or uninterrupted or error-free operation. Nothing in these terms excludes a right or guarantee that the law where you live does not allow to be excluded.

12. Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows, neither party is liable to the other for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for lost profits, lost revenue or lost data, however caused.

Our total liability arising out of or relating to the service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or 100 US dollars.

These limits do not apply to liability that cannot lawfully be limited — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

13. Indemnity

You agree to cover our reasonable losses and legal costs if a third party brings a claim against us because of material you uploaded, because you did not have the rights or consents you needed for it, or because you used the service in breach of these terms.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. For a material change we will give account holders at least 30 days’ notice by email, and the effective date at the top will change. If you keep using Sowarly after a change takes effect, the updated terms apply; if you do not accept them, cancel before then.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Arab Republic of Egypt, and the courts of Cairo have jurisdiction over any dispute. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country where you live, nor of the right to bring proceedings there.

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us about the service.

16. Contact

Legal notices: legal@sowarly.com. Everything else: support@sowarly.com.