Last Updated: July 28, 2026
The company: 4thewords is made and operated by Reboot CR, S.A., a company established under the laws of the Republic of Costa Rica. These Terms are a binding agreement between you and Reboot CR, S.A.; please read them. By using 4thewords (the website at 4thewords.com and app.4thewords.com, the browser extension, and any companion apps, collectively "the Service") you agree to them. If you don't agree, don't use the Service.
1. What 4thewords is4thewords is a writing game: you write, and your words power battles, streaks, quests, and rewards. Registered users get a writing platform and game features; a paid subscription unlocks more and renews automatically (see §4). We may update plans, features, and pricing over time.
2. Changes to these Terms and to the ServiceWe may update these Terms and the Service as 4thewords evolves. When we change these Terms materially, we'll update the date above and give notice on the Service (or by email) before the change takes effect. Using the Service after that date means you accept the updated Terms; if you don't, stop using the Service and, if you like, delete your account (§9).
3. Your accountYou must be 13 or older to use 4thewords, except for student accounts created through a school classroom (see below). If you're under 13, don't create an account outside a school classroom; if we learn an account belongs to a child under 13 without the required consent, we'll terminate it and delete its data. If you're under 18, a parent or guardian must agree to these Terms for you and is responsible for your use. When you register, keep your information accurate and your password private. You're responsible for what happens through your account; tell us right away at developer@4thewords.com if you think it's been compromised, and log out of shared computers. If your registration information is false or your account is used to break these Terms, we may suspend or terminate it.
Classrooms and student accounts. Teachers and schools can create classrooms and invite students to write in them. By creating a classroom, the teacher or school confirms it has the authority (and has obtained any consents the law requires, including parental consent for minors) for its students to use 4thewords, and accepts these Terms on the classroom's behalf. Teachers can read their students' classroom writing and see their activity and progress. Students and their parents should know that going in. Student accounts may have social features (like forums, battle rooms, or reading others' work) restricted by the classroom's settings, and the teacher manages the classroom per those settings. Payment features are for adults: students shouldn't purchase anything without their parent or guardian.
4. Subscriptions, Crystals, and paymentsSubscriptions. Paid plans renew automatically at the end of each period until you cancel. You can cancel anytime from your account, effective at the end of the current period. We accept major cards and PayPal (PayPal transactions are also subject to PayPal's own agreement). If a renewal payment fails or you've disabled auto-renewal, your account moves to the free tier. Gift codes buy subscription time for someone else; they're single-use and can't be resold.
Lifetime subscriptions last (a) your lifetime, or (b) until 4thewords ceases operations, whichever comes first. They're personal and non-transferable, and we may ask for proof of identity.
Crystals and in-game items. Crystals are 4thewords' in-game currency: you can earn them (rewards, referrals, Pro cashback) or buy them, and spend them on in-game items like potions, cosmetics, and stempos. To be completely clear: buying Crystals or any in-game item, cosmetic or otherwise, grants you a limited license to use that thing inside the game, not ownership of any real-world item or asset. Crystals and items aren't money or property, have no cash value, can't be redeemed, transferred, or sold outside the Service, and their prices and effects may change as we balance the game. If you delete your account, or we terminate it for breaking these Terms, unspent Crystals and items go with it. If we close your account for reasons of our own, or we retire the Service, we'll refund the unspent Crystals you actually paid for.
Community pool donations. You can voluntarily donate (in cash or Crystals) to community pools that fund community events and rewards. Donations are gifts to the community: they're non-refundable, they buy nothing for you personally, we distribute them according to the event or pool's stated purpose, and your name may be shown with your donation unless you choose to donate anonymously.
Refunds. Payments for subscriptions, gift codes, or Crystals are non-refundable, except where the law gives you a right we can't and won't fight. If you're an EU or UK consumer, you have 14 days to withdraw from a purchase: email developer@4thewords.com and we'll take care of it.
We may adjust game balances (coins, Crystals, badges, levels, items) to fix bugs or errors; where we get something wrong, we'll try to make it right.
5. Privacy and AIOur collection and use of your information is governed by our Privacy Policy. And as our AI Policy says: we don't train AI on your words, ours or anyone else's.
6. Your writing and other contentYou own your content. Everything you write on 4thewords (entries, projects, notes, forum posts, collectively "User Content") is yours. We claim no ownership, ever.
The license you give us is only what's needed to run the Service. For private content: a license to store, back up, and display it to you, and to anyone you choose to share or collaborate with, per your settings. For content you share publicly: a license to host, display, translate, excerpt, and distribute it as part of operating the Service (and, per the short-and-sweet above, we may feature public content on our channels with attribution). These licenses end when you delete the content or your account, except for short-lived backups and copies others made of what you shared publicly while it was public.
Keep your own copies. 4thewords is a writing game, not a backup service. We back up what we can and we build export tools so your writing is always yours to take, but we don't guarantee that any particular entry, project, or count can be recovered, and we're not liable if something is lost, corrupted, or deleted, whether by a bug on our side, a change on a site you write on, an outage, or an action you take. Keep your own copies of anything you'd hate to lose. Export early, export often.
Collaboration. If you use collaborative or shared-writing features (now or as we add them), the people you invite can see (and, where you allow it, edit) the shared document while they have access. Each contributor keeps ownership of what they wrote, everyone in a shared document must follow §7's conduct rules, and the person who shares a document can revoke access, though revoking doesn't unsee what was already seen. We sync and store shared documents only to make the collaboration work.
A word to authors: content you make public may count as "published" for some editors and publishers. If you plan to submit your work traditionally, keep it Private or Unlisted.
Responsibility. You're responsible for what you post, and other users are responsible for what they post: in the forums, the read section, battle rooms, chats, and anywhere else on the Service where users share writing. What other users publish is theirs, not ours: we don't endorse it, we aren't obliged to review it, and we aren't responsible for it, though we may remove content that breaks these Terms or the law. We may preserve or disclose content if the law requires it or to protect the Service and its users.
7. Community conduct and fair play4thewords is for your own writing. Don't resell, sublicense, or commercialize access to the Service itself. What you write with it is a different matter entirely: your work is yours to publish, sell, and profit from, and always will be. Don't use the Service to break the law, to harm people, or to harm the Service. That includes, without needing a lawyer to say it twenty ways:
- No content that's unlawful, hateful, harassing, threatening, or that violates someone else's rights (copyright, privacy, publicity). No posting others' private information.
- No content promoting hatred toward any group (race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity) and no threats of violence. Zero tolerance for child sexual abuse material: we terminate and report it.
- Explicit or adult content must be kept private; we may block sharing of it. No content whose purpose is distributing pornography or driving traffic to it.
- No impersonation, no accounts registered for someone else, no spam, chain letters, solicitation, or unauthorized advertising.
- No scraping, harvesting emails, automated scripts against the Service, viruses/malware, forged headers, or anything designed to overload, disrupt, or gain unauthorized access to the Service. Access the Service only through the interfaces we provide.
- Fair play: words must come from real writing. Don't generate or inflate counts with automation, scripts, macros, synthetic keystrokes, or copy-paste schemes designed to game battles, streaks, rewards, or leaderboards. We may recalculate, adjust, or reverse counts, rewards, streaks, or items that came from bugs, abuse, or manipulation.
You may run into user content you find objectionable; you use the Service at your own risk in that respect. Deliberate attempts to damage the Service may violate criminal and civil law, and we reserve every remedy the law allows.
8. Our content, your license, and copyright complaintsThe Service itself (its design, code, art, monsters, sounds, and arrangement) belongs to 4thewords and its licensors. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Service and print or save portions of it for personal, non-commercial use, with notices intact. Don't republish, sell, or data-mine Service content, and don't modify or reverse engineer the software except where the law says we can't stop you.
Copyright complaints: if you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, email developer@4thewords.com with the content's location, proof of your rights, and your contact details. We'll review promptly and remove infringing material.
9. Leaving, termination, and account deletionYou can stop using 4thewords anytime. You may deactivate your account from the Account page (data is retained), or permanently delete your account and data by emailing developer@4thewords.com with the subject "Account and Data Deletion" from your account's email. Fees already paid aren't refunded on deactivation or termination except as §4 says.
We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms or the Privacy Policy, and may modify or discontinue parts of the Service. If we ever discontinue the whole Service, we'll give reasonable notice so you can export your writing. Your words are yours, forever, including on the way out.
A deactivated account in good standing can be reactivated by logging back in or emailing developer@4thewords.com.
10. Referrals, promotions, third-party links, and adsWe may run referral and promotional programs (like Crystal rewards for referring a friend). Each program's stated rules apply, and rewards can be withheld or reversed for gaming them: self-referrals, fake or duplicate accounts, or anything that isn't a real new writer. Programs can change or end at any time; rewards already properly earned stay yours.
Sites linked from the Service belong to others; we don't screen them and aren't responsible for their content or terms. The Service may include promotions or advertisements from third parties; any dealings you have with an advertiser are between you and them.
11. The browser extension and companion appsThe 4thewords browser extension is part of the Service, and these Terms apply to it; where this section is more specific, it controls for the extension.
The same goes for other companion apps we release (for example, desktop apps): they are part of the Service; these Terms (including this section's license, fair-play, anonymous-mode, linked-device, and uninstall rules) apply to them the same way, and anything specific to a particular app will be disclosed in that app or its documentation before you use it. If you install a 4thewords desktop app alongside the extension, the extension asks your own computer whether that app is running so the two don't count the same words twice; that question and its answer stay on your machine.
(a) License. We grant you a personal, non-transferable, revocable license to install and use the extension for your own writing. Don't copy, modify, redistribute, or reverse engineer it except where law permits.
(b) What it does on web pages. The extension counts words on sites you choose. Counting happens on your device: the extension looks at what you type only long enough to find the word boundaries, then lets it go. It doesn't store or transmit what you write, and it never posts, modifies, or submits anything on your behalf on any website. Because your writing never reaches us, nothing you write through it is "posted" to the Service, so the User Content license in §6 is never triggered by extension use.
(c) Anonymous mode and local data. The extension works without an account. In that mode your counts, streaks, and progress live only on your device: we cannot see, back up, or recover them, and clearing browser data or uninstalling deletes them permanently. When you connect an account, the extension claims your recent anonymous progress into it (it will show you what it claimed).
(d) Connecting and linked devices. Connecting links the extension to your account through an authentication token. You're responsible for the devices you connect; don't connect on shared or public computers. You can see and revoke connected extensions anytime from your account's linked-devices settings; logging out on the website disconnects the extension too.
(e) Fair play applies. Extension word counts feed the same game as writing on the site, so §7's fair-play rules apply in full.
(f) Third-party sites. Google Docs, Notion, Substack, and the other places you write are not ours. Their changes can affect counting, and we're not responsible for those sites, their terms, or your content stored there. Your manuscripts in third-party tools remain entirely yours and entirely outside our systems. We're also not responsible for writing you lose or damage in those tools, including while the extension is installed. The extension is built to observe, never to edit, but your copy of your manuscript there is yours to protect.
(g) Availability and updates. Sync features need our servers and your connection; offline, the extension keeps counting locally where designed to. We may add, change, or remove extension features, and may temporarily pause syncing for maintenance or to protect the Service or your data. Store installs update automatically through your browser; manually installed builds don't, and should be replaced when a store version exists. Features marked beta or experimental (including pre-release builds distributed outside the store) are provided as-is and may change or disappear; feedback about them may be used to improve the Service.
(h) Uninstalling. Uninstalling removes the extension's local data from your browser. It doesn't delete your account or counts already synced; those follow §9 and the Privacy Policy.
12. No warranties, and limits on our liabilityThe Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express, implied, or statutory, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, and non-infringement. We don't warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of harmful components, that defects will be corrected, or that counting will work uninterrupted on every third-party site.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Reboot CR, S.A. and its licensors will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits or lost data (including anonymous-mode local data), arising from your use of, or inability to use, the Service, whether based on warranty, contract, tort, or otherwise, even if advised of the possibility of such damages. We're also not liable for delays or failures caused by events beyond our reasonable control (internet or equipment failures, power outages, labor disputes, disasters, government actions, and the like).
To the fullest extent permitted by law, the total liability of Reboot CR, S.A. and its licensors for all claims relating to the Service will not exceed the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) US$100. Any claim must be brought within one year after it arises, except where the law of your country of residence gives you longer.
13. Your local rights come firstNothing in these Terms limits consumer or data-protection rights that the law of your country of residence gives you and doesn't allow to be limited by contract. If a provision here conflicts with such a right, the right wins.
14. IndemnityIf a third party brings a claim against 4thewords because of something you posted, because you broke these Terms, or because you broke the law, you agree to cover the resulting damages, losses, and reasonable legal costs. This doesn't cover anything caused by our own negligence or wrongdoing, and it doesn't apply where you're a consumer and your local law doesn't allow it. We may take over the defense of any such matter, in which case you'll cooperate reasonably.
15. Governing law and everything elseThese Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Costa Rica, and disputes will be resolved by the courts of San José, Costa Rica, subject always to §13. If you're a consumer, nothing here stops you from bringing proceedings in the courts of the country where you live, where the law gives you that right. These Terms, the Privacy Policy, and the published rules of any program you choose to take part in (like a referral or promotional program) are the entire agreement between us about the Service; if they conflict, these Terms control first, then the Privacy Policy, then the program rules. The short and sweet at the top is a plain-language summary for your convenience; where it and the numbered sections differ, the numbered sections control, and "your words are yours" means you own them, not that any copy stored on the Service will always be available (see §12). If a court finds any provision unenforceable, the rest stands. A waiver only counts if we put it in writing. Using the Service doesn't make us partners, employer/employee, or agents of each other. We may assign these Terms as part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of the Service (your rights under them come along); you may not assign them. Sections that by their nature should survive the end of your account (content licenses as described in §6, §12, §14, and this section) survive it.
Questions about these Terms: developer@4thewords.com. A human will answer.
