Terms of Service

1. The short version

These are the rules for using Pulse. They are written to be read, not to be skimmed past. Here is the whole thing in six lines. Everything below is the same six lines with the detail attached.

• Pulse teaches. Pulse does not advise. Nothing in this app is investment, legal, or tax advice. Pulse is not a financial advisor and owes you no fiduciary duty. Every decision about your money stays yours.
• Pulsey is an AI, and AI gets things wrong. Pulsey can be confidently incorrect. Check anything that matters before you act on it.
• This is a beta. It will have bugs. It may lose data. It may go away. Do not use it as your only record of anything.
• Pulse can look, Pulse cannot touch. The bank connection is read only. There is no feature in Pulse that moves money, and we never built one.
• Your data is yours. You can disconnect a bank, delete a conversation, or delete your account and everything in it.
• You have to be 18 and in the United States. No exceptions, and we ask you to confirm it.

2. Agreeing to these terms

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are an agreement between you and Pulse ("Pulse," "we," "us"). They govern your use of the Pulse mobile app and anything connected to it.

By creating an account or using Pulse, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy, which explains what we do with your information and is part of this agreement. If you do not agree, do not use Pulse.

If we change these Terms, we will update the date at the top. When a change is material, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use Pulse after that means you accept the change. Earlier versions are available on request.

3. Pulse is in beta

Read this one properly

Pulse is early software distributed to a small group of testers. It is not a finished product, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

That means, concretely:

• Features will break, behave strangely, or disappear without warning.
• Numbers shown in the app may be wrong. Verify anything that matters against your bank.
• Your data may be lost. We take reasonable care, but this is a beta and you should not treat Pulse as a system of record for anything.
• We may change, suspend, or discontinue Pulse, in whole or in part, at any time, without notice and without liability to you.
• There is no service level, no uptime commitment, and no support obligation.

If any of that is not acceptable to you, that is a reasonable position, and you should not use the beta.

4. What Pulse is, and what it is not

Pulse is a personal finance app. It connects to your financial accounts on a read only basis, calculates a Pulse wellness score and spending insights, explains how economic news relates to your situation, and offers an educational money companion called Pulsey.

Pulse provides education, not advice

Everything Pulse shows you is general financial education and informational tooling, provided so that you can make your own decisions. It is not investment advice, not legal advice, not tax advice, and not accounting advice.

Pulse is not a financial advisor, not a broker-dealer, not an investment adviser registered with the SEC or any state, and not a credit counselor. We are not your fiduciary, and no fiduciary duty exists between us. Pulse does not tell you which securities to buy or sell and does not manage anything on your behalf.

Your Pulse score is a wellness score that we calculate ourselves. It is not a credit score. It has no bearing on your credit, and no lender, employer, insurer, or landlord sees it or uses it. Nothing Pulse calculates is ever used to make a credit, lending, employment, insurance, or eligibility decision about you.

Every decision is yours

When Pulse suggests something to do, it is a prompt, not an instruction, and it is your call. Before you act on anything you read in Pulse, consider whether it fits your situation, and consider talking to a licensed professional. If your situation is serious, please do talk to one. An app is not a substitute for a person who is accountable to you.

5. Pulsey, and what AI can and cannot do

Pulsey runs on an AI model. You should hold everything it says at arm's length, for a specific reason: AI models can be wrong, and they can be wrong while sounding certain. This is a known property of the technology and not something we can engineer away.

Pulsey may misread your situation, misstate a fact, do arithmetic incorrectly, or produce guidance that does not fit you. We have built guardrails, and they will not catch everything.

So: do not rely on Pulsey as your only source for a decision that matters. Verify figures against your bank. Verify anything with tax or legal consequences with someone qualified to give you that answer.

Pulsey is not a crisis service. If you are in financial distress that is affecting your safety or wellbeing, please reach out to a person. A nonprofit credit counselor, a legal aid clinic, or in an emergency, a crisis line. Pulsey will point you toward help, and it is not the help itself.

6. Your account

• Eligibility. You must be 18 or over and located in the United States. We ask you to confirm your age when you sign up. If you are under 18, you may not use Pulse.
• Accurate information. Give us real information about yourself, and keep it current. Pulse gets less useful the less true it is.
• One account, and it is yours. Do not share your login. You are responsible for what happens under your account. If you think someone else has access to it, email us at privacy@yourpulsestory.com and change your password.
• We may suspend or close an account if it is being used to break these Terms, to harm someone, or to attack the service. Where we reasonably can, we will tell you why.

7. Connecting a bank account

You link financial accounts through Plaid. When you do, you authorize us to access, on a read only basis, the account and transaction data described in our Privacy Policy, and to use it to run Pulse for you.

You confirm that any account you link is yours, or that you have the right to link it.

Pulse never receives your bank username or password. Plaid's handling of your data is governed by Plaid's end user privacy policy, at plaid.com/legal.

The connection is read only, always. There is no feature in Pulse that can move, transfer, spend, or withdraw money, and there never has been.

You can unlink any bank at any time in the app. That revokes the connection at Plaid and deletes the transactions we pulled from it.

8. Money

Pulse is free today. There is no payment processor connected to the app, and nothing in it can charge you.

If we introduce a paid plan, we will update these Terms and the Privacy Policy before it happens, and you will have to agree to the new terms before you are charged anything. Payments would be handled by Apple, and we would never see your card details.

9. What you agree not to do

Do not use Pulse to break the law, to harm someone, or to attack the service. Specifically, do not:

• Link an account you do not have the right to link.
• Try to access another user's data, or probe the service for ways to do so.
• Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code of the app.
• Scrape, crawl, or automate access to Pulse.
• Try to get Pulsey to produce harmful content, or to bypass its guardrails.
• Overload the service, or use it in a way that degrades it for anyone else.
• Resell, sublicense, or commercially exploit Pulse or anything in it.
• Use Pulse to provide financial advice to anyone else.

If you find a security problem, tell us at privacy@yourpulsestory.com. We will not be upset with you. We would rather know.

10. Who owns what

• We own Pulse. The app, the Pulse score model, Pulsey, the lessons, the designs, the characters, the name, and the code are ours, and nothing in these Terms transfers any of that to you. You get a personal, limited, revocable, non-transferable licence to use the app, for yourself, for as long as these Terms hold.
• You own your content. The messages you write to Pulsey, the goals you set, and the notes you enter remain yours. You give us the licence we need to run the service for you: to store your content, process it, and send it to the providers listed in the Privacy Policy so that Pulse can answer you. That licence exists only to operate Pulse for you, and it ends when you delete the content or your account.
• Feedback. If you tell us what you think of the app, we may use that freely, without owing you anything for it. We hope you tell us a lot.

11. Third parties

Pulse runs on services provided by other companies, listed in full in the Privacy Policy. Plaid connects your bank. Clerk signs you in. Anthropic powers Pulsey. Apple distributes the app.

Those companies have their own terms, which apply to you in addition to these. We do not control them, and we are not responsible for what they do or fail to do.

12. Ending it

You can stop using Pulse at any time, and you can delete your account in Settings. Deleting your account removes your profile, transactions, chats, goals, and bank connections from our servers, and revokes the bank connections at Plaid. It cannot be undone.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you break these Terms, or if we shut Pulse down.

Sections that by their nature should survive the end of this agreement do survive it: ownership, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnification, and dispute resolution.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

Pulse is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranty of any kind.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that Pulse will be uninterrupted, secure, error free, or accurate. We do not warrant that the figures it shows you are correct. We do not warrant that anything Pulsey says is correct. This is a beta, and we have told you plainly that it may be wrong.

14. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, Pulse will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost savings, or lost opportunity, arising out of or relating to your use of Pulse, whether or not we were told such damages were possible.

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for all claims relating to Pulse will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or one hundred United States dollars.

Pulse is currently free, so in most cases that ceiling is one hundred dollars. We are telling you that plainly rather than burying it.

Some states do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties or the limitation of certain damages. Where that is the case, the exclusions and limits above apply to you only to the extent that state's law permits, and nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

15. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold Pulse harmless from any claim, loss, or expense, including reasonable legal fees, arising out of your misuse of Pulse, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of the law or of anyone else's rights.

16. Disputes, and the law that applies

• Talk to us first. If you have a problem with Pulse, email privacy@yourpulsestory.com and describe it. We will try to resolve it with you directly, and we ask that you give us thirty days to do so before starting any formal proceeding. Most things get fixed at this step.
• Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, without regard to its conflict of laws rules.
• Venue. Any dispute that is not resolved informally will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Texas, and you and we each consent to their jurisdiction.
• Small claims. Either of us may always bring a qualifying claim in small claims court.
• Nothing in this section limits any right you have under the consumer protection law of the state where you live.

17. The rest

• Whole agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and Pulse about the app, and they replace anything said before.
• Severability. If a court finds part of these Terms unenforceable, the rest still stands.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce something once, that does not mean we have given it up.
• Assignment. You may not transfer these Terms to anyone. We may transfer them if Pulse is acquired or merged, and we will tell you before we do.
• Apple. If you got Pulse through the App Store, Apple is not a party to these Terms and has no obligation to support the app. Apple is a third-party beneficiary of these Terms and may enforce them against you.

18. Contact

Pulse

privacy@yourpulsestory.com

If something here does not match what the app actually does

That is a bug, and we want to know about it. Email us.