Terms of Service

Penshift is a web application that paraphrases, humanises, summarises, translates, grammar-checks, and analyses text the user provides. Outputs are generated by third-party machine-learning providers acting as our processors. Penshift does not guarantee that outputs are accurate, original, suitable for any specific purpose, or free of errors.

You must create an account to use most features. You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for all activity under your account. You must be at least 13 years old (or older if your local law requires) to create an account.

One account, one user.A Penshift account is licensed to the named individual who created it. Only that person — the intended recipient of the account — may sign in to it or use it. You may not share your password, session, magic-link, or any other credential with another person, household member, classmate, colleague, or third party. You may not use the service on behalf of another person, lend the account, sell or transfer the account, or operate any arrangement (including paid “shared” accounts, group buys, or pooled subscriptions) that lets people who have not subscribed in their own name use a paid plan. The Student plan is additionally personal to the verified student.

Consequence. Accounts found to be shared, sold, transferred, or used by anyone other than the named account holder may be suspended or permanently terminated without notice and without refund. Where account sharing has been used to provide paid features to users who would otherwise have to subscribe themselves, we may also recover the unpaid value as a debt under Section 5 (Refunds and cancellation) and Section 11 (Indemnity). If you genuinely need multi-seat access for a team, contact us at [email protected] for a written arrangement; do not attempt to share a single-seat account.

You agree not to use Penshift to:

• commit academic dishonesty, misrepresent authorship, or violate the policies of an institution that requires original human work;
• generate, paraphrase, or humanise content that is unlawful, defamatory, harassing, infringing, fraudulent, or invades another person's privacy;
• scrape, reverse-engineer, or attempt to extract our prompts, models, or system internals;
• circumvent quotas, share account credentials or API access, distribute access to non-account-holders, or use automation to exceed fair use of free or paid plans;
• build a competing service using our outputs as training data; or
• upload personal data of others that you do not have a lawful basis to share with us.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that breach these rules, with or without notice. Account sharing — letting any person other than the named account holder sign in — is in itself grounds for permanent termination under Section 2.

Free accounts are available subject to the daily caps shown on the pricing page. Paid plans (Student, Pro, Studio) are billed in advance, monthly or annually, in US dollars, by our payment processor. The Student plan is available only to users who have completed our student-verification process (see Section 15). Prices are listed at penshift.app/#pricingand any price increase for existing subscribers takes effect with at least 14 days' written notice. You authorise us to charge your payment method for the recurring fee until you cancel.

Quotas and usage limits. Daily and per-request word allowances (rewrite, plagiarism, AI Detector, and any future caps) are part of the service definition, not the price. We may modify, reduce, increase, restructure, split, or remove any quota at our sole discretion, including changing how usage is counted, when the daily counter resets, and how caps differ across tiers. For Free accounts, changes take effect immediately on publication and do not require advance notice. For Pro and Studio, a material reduction to a paid quota will be communicated to existing subscribers at least 14 days in advance and gives the affected subscriber the right to cancel and receive a pro-rated refund of the current billing period. Quota changes are not, by themselves, a price change and do not trigger any refund obligation other than the one stated in this paragraph.

Cancellation. You may cancel a paid plan at any time from your account or through the customer portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; you keep access to the paid features until that date. Monthly plans are not refunded for the unused portion of the cancelled month, and annual plans are not refunded for the unused portion of the cancelled year, except as set out below.

7-day satisfaction window — first paid subscription only. If you are dissatisfied with the service, you may request a refund of the first payment on your account by emailing [email protected] within seven (7) days of that payment. The window applies only to the very first paid subscription on a Penshift account; it does not apply to renewals, to plan switches (Pro to Studio, monthly to annual, etc.), or to any subsequent payment after the first has been kept past seven days.

Active use is treated as satisfaction.Where the account's activity within the seven-day window indicates that the service has been used in good faith — for example, recurring rewrite or detector activity across multiple sessions, scanning of substantial documents, or any use pattern from which we can reasonably infer that the user has obtained the benefit of the service — Penshift may decline the refund. We reserve sole discretion to decide when use has crossed the line from “trying the product” to “consuming the product” and to refuse a refund on that basis. The refund right is not a free week of access.

Renewals and subsequent payments. All payments after the first are non-refundable. If we charge an annual renewal, you may cancel to prevent the next renewal but you cannot recover the renewal payment that has already been taken. If we charge a monthly renewal, the same applies.

Discretionary exceptions. We may, entirely at our discretion, issue a refund or credit outside this policy where there has been a genuine billing error (for example, a duplicated charge), where the service has materially failed (for example, an outage of more than one full business day), or where local consumer law gives you a non-waivable right to a remedy. Granting one such exception does not create a right to similar treatment in other cases. To request a discretionary refund, write to [email protected] with the relevant facts and we will respond within five business days.

Abuse. Where we reasonably believe a refund request is part of a refund-and-reuse pattern, multiple-account abuse, account sharing, a coordinated refund across linked accounts, a card-testing pattern, a chargeback filed without prior contact, or any other attempt to obtain the service without paying for it, we will decline the request and may also suspend or terminate the account under Section 3 (Acceptable use). A non-exhaustive list of disqualifying patterns is published on our refund page. Reversed payments and chargebacks following abusive activity remain a debt owed to Penshift LTD and may be referred to collections.

You retain all rights to text you submit to Penshift (“Input”) and to outputs generated from it (“Output”). By submitting Input you grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide licence to process it solely to deliver the service. We do not store Input or Output beyond what is needed to render the immediate response, and we do not use either to train any machine-learning model.

The Penshift name, logo, website design, and underlying software are owned by Penshift LTD. We grant you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive licence to access and use the service while these Terms are in force. No other licence is granted, expressly or by implication.

Penshift uses third-party services to deliver functionality, including authentication (Clerk), payment processing, hosting (Vercel), and machine-learning inference. Your use of Penshift is also subject to those providers' terms where they apply directly to you. We are not responsible for the acts or omissions of third parties.

Penshift is provided “as is” and “as available” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that AI-detection scores or plagiarism scans will be accurate.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Penshift LTD's total liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the service is limited to the greater of (a) the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) US $100. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including lost profits, lost data, or business interruption. Some jurisdictions do not allow these limits — in that case, the limits apply only to the maximum extent permitted.

You agree to indemnify and hold Penshift LTD harmless from any claim, loss, or liability (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your Input, your Output, your breach of these Terms, or your violation of applicable law or third-party rights.

You may stop using Penshift at any time. We may suspend or terminate your account if you breach these Terms or if we are required to by law. On termination, your right to use the service ends immediately; sections that by their nature should survive (intellectual property, disclaimers, liability, indemnity, governing law) will survive.

We may modify the service at any time. We may amend these Terms by posting the updated version and changing the “last updated” date; material changes that affect your subscription will be notified by email at least 14 days before they take effect. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance.

These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. Any dispute will be resolved exclusively by the courts of England and Wales, except where applicable consumer law gives you a right to bring a claim in your country of residence.

The Student plan is offered at a reduced price to verified students only. To qualify, you must add and verify a recognised academic email address (such as a .edu, .ac.uk, .edu.au, or other domain we recognise as belonging to an accredited educational institution) on your Penshift account. By adding the address you confirm that it has been issued to you by your institution and that you are currently a student at that institution.

• Verification is valid for 12 months from the date your academic email is verified. We may ask you to re-verify before any renewal of the Student plan and we reserve the right to disqualify accounts that cannot complete re-verification.
• The Student plan is for personal, non-commercial use by the verified student. You may not share the account, resell access, or use it on behalf of an institution or another person.
• You must inform us if you cease to be a student. We may downgrade you to the Free plan or migrate you to Pro at the next renewal if we have reasonable grounds to believe you are no longer enrolled. Any such migration will be communicated by email at least 14 days in advance and you may cancel before it takes effect.
• Submitting an academic email you do not own, were not assigned by an enrolled institution, or are using to circumvent these terms is a breach of these Terms and may result in suspension of the account and reversal of any Student-tier billing benefit received.
• We may modify, suspend, or terminate the Student programme at our discretion, including changing the price, the recognised domain list, the verification process, or the duration of a verification cycle. Where changes affect existing Student-plan subscribers, the notice provisions in Section 4 apply.

Penshift may, at its discretion, operate a referral programme that rewards an existing user (the “Inviter”) when a person they refer (the “Invitee”) completes a paid Pro subscription. Where the programme is active, the rules below apply in addition to these Terms.

• The reward is one (1) month of Pro service applied to the Inviter's account, credited against the next renewal. Rewards are stackable: each qualifying paid Invitee earns one further month.
• A referral qualifies only when the Invitee uses the Inviter's referral link, creates a new Penshift account that is not associated with the Inviter, and completes a paid Pro subscription that has not been refunded, charged back, or cancelled within the seven (7) day refund window described in our Refund Policy.
• The credit is applied seven (7) days after the Invitee's qualifying paid Pro subscription begins, once the refund window has closed. If the Invitee refunds, charges back, or cancels within those seven days, the referral is voided and no credit is granted.
• Rewards are not redeemable for cash, transferable, or combinable with other promotional credits unless we expressly state otherwise.
• The following activity disqualifies a referral and may result in suspension or termination of the Inviter's account: creating Invitee accounts yourself or with shared payment methods, paying for an Invitee's subscription on their behalf in order to claim the reward, refund-and-reclaim cycles, automated or bulk distribution of the referral link in violation of third-party platform rules, and any conduct intended to claim rewards without a genuine third-party Invitee.
• We may modify, suspend, or terminate the referral programme, withhold rewards, or reverse credits at any time and in our sole discretion, including where we suspect abuse. Where we make material changes, existing accrued rewards will be honoured.
• The referral programme is governed by these Terms and any additional terms and conditions we publish on the invite page or elsewhere on the Penshift website. Where any conflict arises, the most recently published terms prevail.

Questions about these Terms: [email protected]. Penshift LTD is a private limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 17189590.