Terms of Service

Last updated July 21, 2026

1. Accepting these Terms

By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you don’t agree with them, please don’t use the Service. If you use the Service on behalf of someone else (say, setting it up for a family member), you’re confirming you have their permission to accept these Terms for them.

2. What the Service is

Squirrel Reader lets you save articles, newsletters, videos, podcast episodes, and recipes from around the web — or subscribe to RSS feeds, or upload your own EPUB books and PDFs — into one personal library, then read, watch, or listen later, on any of your devices, online or offline. Storing things away for later is the whole idea; think of it as putting nuts aside for winter, except the nuts are longreads.

A few mechanics worth knowing, because they matter later in these Terms:

• When you save a link, our servers fetch the page and parse it into a clean, readable copy stored in your private library, for your personal use.
• Podcasts and videos are not copied through our servers — they stream or download directly from the publisher to your device.
• Your library also syncs across your signed-in devices and works offline by design.

The Service is for personal use. There are no ads, no algorithmic feed, and no social features — your library is yours, and it stays that way. (If you subscribe to RSS feeds or newsletters within the Service, that is content you chose to follow, not something we serve you.)

3. Who can use Squirrel Reader

You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you’re under the age of legal majority where you live, you need a parent or guardian’s permission. The Service is not directed at children under 13, and we don’t knowingly let them create accounts.

4. Your account and keeping it secure

You can sign in with Apple, Google, or an email address and password. You agree to give us accurate account information and to keep your credentials to yourself. You’re responsible for what happens under your account, so tell us promptly at support@squirrelreader.com if you think someone else has gotten into it. You can change your email and password, or delete your account entirely, from inside the app at any time.

5. The free plan and its limits

The free plan currently includes up to 500 saved items (RSS and podcast feed subscriptions themselves do not count against this limit), 3 collections, 50 highlights per month, 10 stored media downloads at a time, and search across titles, tags, notes, and transcripts. These numbers may evolve as the Service does. If we ever lower a limit, we won’t delete content you’ve already saved — you’d simply need to tidy up or upgrade before adding more. We’ll announce meaningful changes to free-plan limits with reasonable notice.

6. Premium subscriptions

Squirrel Reader Premium unlocks unlimited saved items, collections, highlights, and downloads, full article-text search, the custom reader theme builder, highlight export as Markdown, and Send to Kindle (one-tap and auto-send). The five built-in reader themes — Light, Sepia, Gray, Dark, and True Black — are free for everyone and always will be.

The details:

• Billing. Premium is an auto-renewing subscription billed through your Apple App Store account as an in-app purchase (we use RevenueCat to manage subscriptions). Current pricing is $4.99 per month or $39.99 per year. Prices may vary by region and may change; if they change, we’ll give you notice and the new price will apply from your next renewal.
• Renewal and cancellation. Your subscription renews automatically unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. You cancel through your App Store subscription settings — not inside the app, and not by emailing us (though we’re happy to point you to the right screen). You keep Premium until the period you’ve paid for ends.
• Refunds. Because Apple handles billing, refund requests go through Apple, subject to their policies.
• Apple’s EULA. For the app binary itself, Apple’s standard Licensed Application End User License Agreement applies, except where these Terms cover the same ground — in that case, these Terms apply to the Service.

Purchases are currently available on iOS. If Premium becomes purchasable on other platforms, the equivalent store terms will apply there.

7. Your content

Everything you put into Squirrel Reader — your saved items, notes, highlights, tags, collections, and imports from services like Pocket, Instapaper, or Omnivore — belongs to you. We claim no ownership of it.

So that the Service can actually function, you grant us a limited, non-exclusive license to host, store, back up, sync, parse, index for search, transcode (for example, converting an article to EPUB for Kindle delivery), and display your content back to you. That license exists solely to operate and improve the Service for you, and it ends when you delete the content or your account, apart from brief residual copies in backups. You can export your library as a JSON file from the app whenever you like.

8. Content you save from the web

Articles, videos, and podcasts you save were made by other people, and their rights are unaffected by your saving them. When you save an article, the Service keeps a private, readable copy for you — functionally similar to a browser cache. That copy is for your personal reading. Don’t use the Service to republish, redistribute, or commercially exploit content you’ve saved, and respect the copyright and terms of the sites you save from.

If you’re a rights holder and believe content stored through the Service infringes your copyright, send a takedown notice to support@squirrelreader.com including: identification of the copyrighted work, enough information for us to locate the material, your contact details, a good-faith statement that the use is unauthorized, a statement under penalty of perjury that your notice is accurate and that you’re authorized to act, and your physical or electronic signature. We’ll respond in accordance with the DMCA and comparable laws.

9. Shared podcast transcripts

When you transcribe a podcast episode on your device, the resulting transcript text is contributed to a shared pool, keyed to that episode’s public audio URL, so other listeners of the same episode can use it instead of re-transcribing. By generating a transcript, you grant us and other users of the Service a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to store, display, search, and use that transcript within the Service. Only the transcript text is shared — the audio itself never leaves your device — and episodes from private or tokenized feeds are never matched to other users.

10. Acceptable use

Squirrel Reader is built for one person saving things they intend to read. Please don’t:

• use the Service for anything unlawful, or save content that’s illegal for you to possess;
• abuse the ingestion infrastructure — for example, bulk-saving programmatically, scraping at scale, or using the Service as a general-purpose crawling or archiving tool;
• circumvent plan limits, rate limits, or technical protections of the Service;
• interfere with the Service’s operation or other users’ use of it; or
• resell, sublicense, or provide the Service to third parties as your own offering.

Some features have specific rate limits — for example, Send to Kindle is capped at 25 sends per account per day. We may adjust limits like these to keep the Service healthy for everyone.

11. On-device AI features

Article summaries, key points, questions, the “Ask” chat grounded in an article’s text, and podcast transcription all run on your device using Apple Intelligence, and require iOS 26 or later on hardware where Apple Intelligence is available. Availability of these features varies by device, operating system version, region, and language, and depends on Apple’s platform — so we can’t guarantee them on any particular device, and they may change as the underlying platform does.

12. Changes to the Service

We’re always improving Squirrel Reader, which means features may be added, changed, or occasionally retired. If we ever discontinue the Service entirely, we’ll give you reasonable advance notice and keep the library export available so you can take your data with you before the lights go out.

13. Disclaimers

We work hard to keep Squirrel Reader reliable, but we have to say this part formally: THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, WHETHER EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, OR THAT ANY PARTICULAR CONTENT WILL PARSE PERFECTLY OR REMAIN AVAILABLE. Some jurisdictions don’t allow certain warranty exclusions, so parts of this may not apply to you.

14. Limitation of liability

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, SWIFTFOX SOFTWARE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR ANY LOSS OF DATA, PROFITS, OR GOODWILL, ARISING FROM YOUR USE OF THE SERVICE. OUR TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICE IS CAPPED AT THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM AROSE. Some jurisdictions don’t allow certain liability limitations, so parts of this may not apply to you; in that case, our liability is limited to the smallest amount the law permits.

15. Indemnification

If your use of the Service in violation of these Terms — or content you submit in violation of someone else’s rights — leads to a third-party claim against us, you agree to cover our reasonable resulting costs, including reasonable legal fees. We’ll let you know about any such claim promptly and won’t settle it on your behalf without your consent.

16. Termination

You can stop using the Service at any time, and you can delete your account from inside the app, which permanently erases your data. We may suspend or terminate your account if you materially violate these Terms; where reasonable, we’ll notify you and give you a chance to export your library first, unless the violation makes that inappropriate. Sections of these Terms that by their nature should survive termination (such as sections 8, 13, 14, and 15) do survive.

17. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction where Swiftfox Software is established, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Nothing in these Terms limits any consumer rights you have under the mandatory laws of the place where you live.

18. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. For material changes, we’ll give you reasonable advance notice — in the app or by email — before they take effect. If you keep using the Service after the new Terms take effect, that means you accept them. If you don’t, you can stop using the Service and delete your account; the export tool will be there for you either way.

19. Contact

Questions, notices, and takedown requests all go to support@squirrelreader.com. We’re Swiftfox Software, and we read our mail.