Terms of Service

Last updated 12 August 2026

The agreement

These terms are between you and Basis, the maker of the Basis iPhone app. By downloading the app, signing in, or buying a subscription, you are agreeing to them. If you do not agree, do not use the app, which is a real option and not a threat.

Our Privacy Policy is part of this agreement.

Your account

You can read the entire library without an account. An account exists so your favourites, notes, blocks, and widget setup follow you to a new phone.

Accounts are created with Sign in with Apple, which means Apple is vouching for you and we are not storing a password. Keep control of your Apple ID and you keep control of your Basis account. One account per person. You are responsible for what happens under yours.

You need to be 13 or older to have an account, and old enough to agree to a contract where you live.

What Basis is

An app that shows quotes from curated collections, called blocks, on your home screen. That is the whole promise. It is not a research tool, a citation manager, or a notes app, and it should not be the last word you rely on for a quotation that matters professionally.

We do try harder than most on this. Nothing in the library is marked verified without a primary source recorded against it, because quote attribution on the internet is mostly wrong and aggregator sites are not sources. When we cannot confirm a quote, it stays unverified rather than getting published on a good guess.

We will still be wrong sometimes. When we find an error, or when you report one, we correct the quote or mark it disputed and stop showing it. We do not delete quotes outright, because a deleted quote would break the widget links and the favourites of everyone who had saved it. If a quote you starred goes quiet, this is usually why.

Quotes are short excerpts, attributed to their author and source. Many are from works in the public domain. Where a quotation is from a work still in copyright, we use it as a brief attributed excerpt. If you hold rights in something quoted here and want it removed, write to us and we will deal with it promptly.

Your content

The notes you write, the blocks you create, and the names you give them stay yours. We claim no ownership of them.

We do need your permission to run the service, so you grant us a limited licence to store, back up, and transmit your content for the sole purpose of providing Basis to you. That licence covers nothing else. We do not publish it, we do not show it to other users, we do not use it to train anything, and it ends when you delete the content or the account.

Keep your own copy of anything you would be upset to lose. We take backups and we intend to keep your data safe, but no service is a substitute for a copy you control.

The free plan and Basis Pro

The free plan is genuinely usable: the entire quote library is free to read and to follow, every tile theme is free to choose, and you get a working home screen widget. Nothing in the library is behind the paywall and no block or colour is reserved for paying users. What Pro sells is capacity, not access.

On the free plan you can follow up to three blocks at a time and run one widget. Basis Pro raises those limits.

Billing

Basis Pro is sold as a monthly subscription, an annual subscription, or a one-time lifetime purchase. Current prices are shown in the app before you buy, in your local currency.

• Apple takes the payment. Every purchase goes through your Apple ID and the App Store. We never see your payment details.
• Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel, and your Apple ID is charged within 24 hours of the end of the current period.
• Cancel any time in Settings, your name, Subscriptions on your iPhone. Cancelling stops the next charge. You keep Pro until the period you already paid for runs out.
• Refunds are Apple's to give, under Apple's policy, through reportaproblem.apple.com. We cannot issue them ourselves, though we are happy to help you make the case.
• The lifetime purchase unlocks Pro in Basis for as long as Basis exists, for the Apple ID that bought it. It is a purchase of this app's Pro features, not a promise that the app runs forever, and it does not cover a different app we might make later.
• Restore purchases is in the app's settings if you get a new phone or reinstall.

If we change prices, the new price applies to new purchases and to renewals after we have given you notice through the App Store, which will ask you to agree before charging you more. A price change never reaches back into a period you already bought.

If we ever have to retire a Pro feature, we will not simply take it from people who paid for it. Either it gets replaced with something equivalent or we sort it out with you directly.

Using it reasonably

Do not:

• Scrape, bulk download, or republish the quote library. It took real work to source and it is the thing we are actually selling access to the experience of.
• Reverse engineer the app or poke at our servers looking for a way in. If you find a security problem, tell us and we will thank you for it properly.
• Use the app to break the law, to harass anyone, or to store content you have no right to store.
• Resell, sublicense, or share your account.
• Try to get around the free plan's limits by technical means. Just buy Pro, or do not, and either is fine.

Availability

Basis is offered as it is. We will work to keep it up and correct, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted service, and there will be maintenance, outages, and the occasional bug.

The app is built to survive a bad connection: the library caches on your phone and the widget draws from a queue that is generated ahead of time, so it keeps rotating whether or not the network is there. Writing to your account does need a connection, and when there is none, the app will tell you plainly rather than pretend the change was saved.

We may add, change, or remove features. If we remove something significant, we will say so rather than let you discover it.

Ending it

You can stop using Basis whenever you like. Delete the app, and ask us to delete your account if you want the data gone too. See the Privacy Policy for how.

We can suspend or close an account that is being used to abuse the service, to break these terms, or to harm other people. Except for serious cases, we will warn you first and give you a chance to sort it out. If we close your account for a reason that is not your fault, and you have paid for time you did not get, we will get you a refund for it.

Disclaimers

To the fullest extent the law allows, Basis is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that every quotation is accurately attributed. We describe our sourcing standard above and we hold ourselves to it, but a quote in this app is not a scholarly citation and you should verify anything you plan to publish.

Some places do not allow these exclusions. Where that is true, they do not apply to you, and nothing here limits rights you have under your local consumer law.

Limits of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Basis is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or lost goodwill, arising from your use of the app.

Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or fifty US dollars.

Apple

A few things Apple requires us to say, and they are true. This agreement is between you and us, not Apple. Apple is not responsible for the app or its content, and has no obligation to provide support for it. If the app fails to conform to any warranty, you can tell Apple and Apple will refund the purchase price, and beyond that refund Apple has no other warranty obligation. Apple is not responsible for addressing any claim you or a third party has about the app. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of this agreement and may enforce it against you.

Changes to these terms

We will update the date at the top when these terms change. If a change is material, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use Basis after that means you accept the new version.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of [STATE], United States, without regard to its conflict of laws rules, and the courts of [COUNTY, STATE] have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute. If you are a consumer in the UK or EU, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory laws of the country you live in, and you can bring proceedings there.

Contact

[email protected]. A person reads it.