Terms of Use

You retain every right to everything you write in Galley. We claim no ownership of your manuscripts, characters, notes or any other content you create.

You grant us permission to store, process and transmit your content as required to operate the service for you: saving it, laying it out, generating your PDF and EPUB, and running your checks.

That permission extends no further and ends when you delete the content.

The following apply permanently:

• your work is not used to train AI models,
• your work is not sold, licensed or shared with third parties for their own purposes,
• no AI writes or rewrites your prose. Galley's tools count, check and typeset,
• you can export everything at any time, in print PDF, EPUB, Word, Markdown, and as a single zip containing the book and its story bible.

The Privacy Policy names every processor that handles your data.

Separately from your content, we collect usage statistics. These do not include the substance of what you write. The Privacy Policy sets out what they contain.

You are solely responsible for everything you write, upload or store in Galley. You confirm that you hold the rights to it, including any images, quotations or third-party material.

Your content is not ours. It does not represent us. We do not endorse, verify or adopt it, and we are not liable for it. Where your content infringes a third party's rights or breaks the law, that is a matter between you and them. We act on a valid notice under section 4.

We do not moderate the subject matter of your book. We do not scan your prose and we do not assess its themes, morals, politics or religion.

One category of content is prohibited without exception, because it is unlawful in itself:

Do not use Galley to create or store child sexual abuse material. This applies whatever the framing. The same applies to terrorist content, incitement to violence, and any material that is unlawful to possess or distribute.

Content of that kind also breaches the acceptable-use terms of the infrastructure Galley runs on.

How this is enforced

We do not run a classifier over your prose and will not. Doing so would require reading your manuscript.

Images you upload are checked. Covers, ornaments and scene-break art are hashed and the hash is compared against databases of known illegal images. No person views the image and no text is involved. The Privacy Policy records this processing activity and states its legal basis.

The database and storage providers named in the Privacy Policy operate their own acceptable-use terms and abuse processes, which apply to anything stored on them independently of these terms.

Reporting illegal content

Under Art. 8 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (the Digital Services Act), which § 7 (1) DDG applies in Germany, we have no general obligation to monitor what users store. The applicable standard is notice and action.

Notice and action, Art. 16 DSA. To report illegal content in Galley, email [email protected] with:

• where the content is,
• why you believe it is illegal,
• an email address we can reply to,
• a statement that the report is made in good faith.

We confirm receipt and inform you of our decision.

Single point of contact, Arts. 11 and 12 DSA. The same address is our point of contact for users, for Member State authorities, for the Commission and for the Board. We correspond in English or German.

Statement of reasons, Art. 17 DSA. Where we remove content or restrict an account, we inform the person affected of what was done, why, the facts it was based on, and how to contest it, unless the law prohibits us from doing so.

Contesting a decision. Reply to the same address and the decision will be reviewed by a person. Your right to bring court proceedings, or to use an out-of-court dispute settlement body certified under Art. 21 DSA, is unaffected.

Where we become aware of child sexual abuse material, the account is terminated immediately and permanently, with no refund and no export window, and we report it to the authorities where the law requires or permits.

When purchasing opens, Galley will cost €199 once.

Prices shown to consumers are total prices and include VAT at the rate of your country of residence. The amount shown at checkout is the amount you pay. No fee is added afterwards.

That grants a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use Galley for your own writing, covering:

• every feature and every export format,
• unlimited books, chapters, versions, characters and editions,
• all future updates to the product, with no upgrade fee,
• use on up to 3 devices at a time.

There is no subscription, no renewal and nothing metered.

We do not sell your data and we run no advertising.

The licence may not be resold, rented, sublicensed or transferred.

The licence does not expire.

• No expiry date. It is granted once, for an unlimited term. It does not lapse and does not require renewal.
• Nothing further to pay. It is not revoked for non-payment, because no further payment is due.
• Updates included. It applies to every update we ship, including features that do not yet exist.

Two limits apply.

A licence of unlimited duration is not a warranty that the service will run indefinitely. Galley is a hosted application. Your licence does not expire; the continued availability of a server depends on Galley continuing to operate. Section 8 sets out the commitments that apply if it does not.

The licence may be terminated for breach of section 4 or section 11. Section 15 sets out how.

A full export is available at any time. Clause 13.4 sets out the effect of not keeping your own copies.

Email [email protected] within 14 days of purchase and we refund in full. No reason is required.

As a consumer in the EU you have a 14-day right of withdrawal for digital content. Where you request immediate access and acknowledge that you lose that right once supply begins, it can lapse under § 356 (5) BGB. We grant the 14-day refund regardless, so this policy is at least as favourable as the statutory position.

When checkout opens you will receive the statutory withdrawal instruction (Widerrufsbelehrung) and the model withdrawal form in text form with your order confirmation, separately from this page. That document states your statutory right and governs where it differs from this section.

Refunds are made by the original payment method through our Merchant of Record.

The Merchant of Record becomes the seller of record for tax purposes and appears on your invoice. It will be named here, and this section reconciled with its refund handling, before the first sale.

Galley is a one-time purchase against a service with recurring running costs. The following restrictions exist to keep that sustainable.

Permitted without limit: writing as many books as you like. There are no per-book charges, no chapter caps and no word limits, for one writer's own work.

Not permitted:

• reselling, renting or sublicensing access, or sharing one account between several writers,
• using a single licence as shared infrastructure for manuscripts written by other people, such as an agency running many writers' books through one account,
• using Galley as general file storage or a backup service for material that is not your books. Images are capped at 10 MB each, which is above print resolution,
• scripting, scraping or automating the app, or exceeding the export rate limits,
• attempting to breach security, access another person's content, or probe the service for weaknesses without asking first,
• storing or distributing unlawful content, or work you do not hold the rights to.

If you find a security weakness, report it to [email protected].

These restrictions do not depend on how many books you write, who you write them for, or whose name appears on the cover. A ghostwriter doing the writing is within the personal use the licence covers. The test is whether the account holder is the person writing.

Where use causes a problem we will contact you by email first. We suspend an account outright only for abuse, illegality or a threat to the service.

13.1 Unlimited liability

We are liable in full, with no cap and no exclusion, for:

• intent (Vorsatz) and gross negligence (grobe Fahrlässigkeit),
• injury to life, body or health, however caused,
• fraudulent concealment of a defect, and any characteristic expressly guaranteed (Garantie),
• claims under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz),
• anything else the law does not permit us to limit, including your statutory rights over digital products under §§ 327 ff. BGB and your rights under the GDPR.

13.2 Limited liability

For ordinary negligence (einfache Fahrlässigkeit) we are liable only for breach of a duty essential to the purpose of this contract, being a duty you must be able to rely on for the contract to function (a Kardinalpflicht).

For Galley those duties are: storing the writing you entrust to us and returning it, allowing you to export it in full, and observing section 3 and the Privacy Policy.

Liability for breach of those duties through ordinary negligence is limited to the damage typically foreseeable for a contract of this kind at the time of conclusion.

13.3 Excluded liability

Beyond 13.1 and 13.2, liability is excluded. In particular we are not liable for lost profits, lost sales, lost royalties or advances, lost goodwill, lost writing time, wasted print runs, third-party fees, or other indirect or consequential loss.

On the same basis we are not liable for damage arising from:

• use outside the purpose of the service, including use contrary to these terms, as general file storage, or as shared infrastructure for other people's manuscripts,
• scripting or automating the app, circumventing rate or device limits, probing or interfering with the service, or using it through unofficial clients or modifications,
• activity under your sign-in by a person you shared it with, or resulting from credentials or an email account that were not kept secure,
• your production decisions. Trim size, margins, typography, metadata, ISBN and cover choices are yours, and Galley applies them as specified,
• imported files, images, fonts, quotations or other third-party content you add to a book.

13.4 Data loss and backups

The safeguards in section 12 apply to your content. They are not a substitute for your own copies.

• Where we are liable for loss or corruption of your data, that liability is limited to the restoration cost that would have been incurred had the data been backed up properly and regularly, meaning by use of the export function.
• Failure to keep your own copies may reduce or exclude a claim under § 254 BGB (contributory fault). This does not apply where the loss was caused intentionally or by gross negligence on our part.

13.5 Matters not warranted

• Retailer and printer acceptance. We do not warrant that any retailer, distributor or printer will accept your file. Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Apple Books, Kobo and local printers set their own specifications and change them without notice to us. Galley produces standards-compliant print PDF and EPUB 3. Acceptance is their decision.
• Preflight checks. The KDP and print checks flag common problems. They do not catch everything and passing them is not a warranty of a clean print. Proof the final file, and for print a physical proof copy, before publishing.
• Advice. Nothing in the product or on this site is publishing, legal, tax or business advice. Trim sizes, ISBNs, rights, contracts and metadata are your decisions.
• Third-party services. Galley runs on infrastructure operated by others, named in the Privacy Policy, and payment runs through a Merchant of Record. Beyond our own responsibility under 13.1 and 13.2 we are not liable for their outages, acts or omissions.
• Beta features. Features labelled beta in the app, currently offline writing, are provided as such.
• The sandbox. It is provided free and as-is. It deletes itself after about 30 minutes by design and its contents cannot be recovered. Subject to 13.1, we are not liable for anything lost there.
• Force majeure. We are not in breach where performance is prevented by events outside our reasonable control, including infrastructure or network failure at a provider, denial-of-service attack, power or internet outage, natural disaster, war, or a binding official or legal order.

13.6 User content and indemnity

Content created, stored or made available through Galley is the responsibility of the person who created it. It does not reflect our views and we do not endorse, verify or adopt it. Under Arts. 6 and 8 of Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 (the Digital Services Act), which § 7 (1) DDG applies in Germany, we have no general obligation to monitor it and we act on notice under section 4.

Where a third party brings a claim against us arising from content you stored in Galley or from your use of the service, you indemnify us against that claim, including reasonable legal costs, and are liable for damage caused to us by your breach of these terms.

This applies only where you are responsible for the breach, only to the extent of your fault, and not where the claim arises from our own act or omission.

13.7 Scope

The limitations and exclusions in this section apply equally in favour of our employees, contractors, agents and subcontractors.

They do not shorten any statutory limitation period and do not reverse the burden of proof to your disadvantage.

Your mandatory statutory rights as a consumer are unaffected. Where a provision of these terms conflicts with a mandatory rule of German or EU consumer law, that provision is ineffective and the statutory rule applies in its place under § 306 (2) BGB. The remainder of these terms continues in force.

These terms are governed by the law of the Federal Republic of Germany, excluding the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods.

If you are a consumer resident in the EU you retain the protection of the mandatory law of your country of habitual residence, and you may bring proceedings there.

We are neither obliged nor willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board (Verbraucherschlichtungsstelle) under the Verbraucherstreitbeilegungsgesetz. Where a dispute cannot be settled between us, we will inform you of the competent body under § 37 VSBG.