Terms of service
Effective 2026-09-10 · version 2026-09-15
These terms are the agreement between you and Exalink for the use of Story Builder. By creating an account you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.
1. Who may use it
You must be at least 16 years old. You confirm your age when you register.
One account belongs to one person. Keep your password to yourself; anything done through your account is treated as done by you. Tell us at the contact form if you think someone else has access.
2. What we provide
Story Builder is a tool for writing and world-building, and a library where writers can publish finished work for readers. We provide it as it is, and we improve it continuously — features change.
The service is currently free. If we introduce paid plans, we will say so clearly before anything is charged, and nothing you already have will be taken away without notice.
3. Who owns what
We claim no ownership of anything. Nothing in these terms transfers your work to us. What follows is about you and the people you work with, not about us.
Your own projects are yours. Every manuscript, character, world, map and image in a project you created belongs to you.
A project belongs to one person: whoever created it. Everything the project contains belongs to that person — including work contributed by everybody else who was invited into it. If you write a chapter, draft a character or edit a map in someone else's project, that work is theirs, not yours, from the moment you save it. You assign it to them, and where the law does not permit an assignment you grant them an exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use it for any purpose, for as long as copyright lasts.
This is the rule that makes shared projects work: a story with four contributors has one owner who can publish it, license it, sell it or take it down, without needing to find everyone who ever touched a paragraph.
What it does not take from you. Your name and your authorship are not transferable and are not transferred — where the law gives you moral rights, you keep them. Nothing here affects work you brought with you: material you already owned before putting it into someone else's project stays yours, and you licence it to the project owner rather than assigning it.
Work contributed before 2026-09-10. Earlier versions of these terms said contributors kept ownership of what they wrote in a shared project. That is still true of what was written then: this section applies to contributions made after you accept this version, and does not reach back and take work that was already there. If you and the project owner would rather it did, you can agree that between yourselves.
Decide before you contribute. If you are not willing for your writing to belong to the person whose project it is, do not write it in their project. Ask them to work in yours, or agree something separate between you — a private agreement between contributors overrides this section as between the two of you, though we have no way to know about it and cannot enforce it.
To run the service we need a narrow permission from whoever owns the content: you allow us to store it, back it up, transmit it to you and to people you invite, and — for work chosen for publication — display it in the public library and in the places that show excerpts and covers. That permission exists only so the product can function, lasts only as long as the content stays on the service, and covers nothing else. We do not licence your work to anyone, we do not sell it, and we do not use it to train anything.
4. What you may not do
Do not use Story Builder to store, publish or send:
- content you have no right to use, including other people's writing;
- sexual content involving minors, in any form, real or fictional;
- material that incites violence against people, or harasses or threatens someone;
- content that is illegal where you are or where we operate;
- malware, or anything designed to break the service or reach other people's accounts.
Do not scrape the library, resell access, or use automated means to load the service beyond ordinary reading and writing.
Fiction covers dark subjects — that is what fiction is for. These rules are about real harm and other people's rights, not about the darkness of your themes.
5. Publishing and ratings
Publishing is your choice, made per story, and reversible. When you publish, you tell us the story is yours to publish and that it does not break the rules above.
Rate your story honestly using the content ratings we provide. Mature-rated stories are shown only to signed-in readers who have confirmed their age. Misrating adult content to reach a wider audience is a breach of these terms.
6. Collaboration
Projects can be shared. Inside a shared project, members see and edit what the project contains, according to the role they were given.
Everything in the project belongs to the person who created the project — see section 3. Being removed from a project, leaving it, or closing your account does not take your contributions with you: they stay with the project, because they belong to its owner. Equally, the owner cannot make you responsible for what you did not write.
If you own a project, that cuts both ways: you are answerable for everything in it, including work somebody else contributed. Section 4 applies to the project as a whole, and the person we will contact about it is you.
Think about this before you invite someone, and before you accept an invitation.
7. Reporting content
If something on Story Builder infringes your rights or breaks these rules, write to the contact form with a link and an explanation. Our process, our response times and how an author can appeal are set out in the content policy.
8. Suspension and termination
You can stop using the service at any time, and ask us to delete your account by writing to the contact form.
Deleting your account removes your account, the projects you created, and everything in them. It does not remove what you contributed to other people's projects, because that work belongs to those project owners and deleting it would take away something that is theirs — see section 3. Your name comes off it: contributions stop being linked to you, and comments you wrote keep their text but lose their byline. If you need something specific removed rather than unlinked, ask the project's owner; if you believe it should be removed regardless, write to the contact form and we will look at it.
We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that puts other users or the service at risk, or that we are legally required to close. Except where the breach is serious or we have no choice, we will tell you why and give you a chance to put it right first.
If we close the service itself, we will give reasonable notice and time to take your work with you.
9. Availability
We work to keep Story Builder running, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or free of faults, and we do not promise that your data can never be lost. Keep your own copies of work you cannot afford to lose — the export tools are there for that.
10. Liability
Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.
Subject to that: we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits, or for lost or corrupted content beyond what the law requires of us. Where liability can be limited, ours is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or €100.
If you are a consumer, you keep all the rights your local law gives you, and nothing here takes them away.
11. Changes to these terms
We may change these terms. If a change is material we will ask you to read and accept the new version the next time you sign in, and you can decline by closing your account. The version at the top of this page tells you which one you accepted.
12. Law and disputes
These terms are governed by the law of Ukraine, and disputes go to the courts of Ukraine. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory rules of the country you live in, and you may also bring proceedings in your own courts.
Contact
Exalink
Ukraine