Founding member terms

The short version: one seat per person, US$8.99 a month billed once a year, and that price stays yours for every year you renew. Seats cannot be sold, shared or passed on.

1. Who we are

Epistell is run by its founder, Kai Waldon. "We" and "us" in these terms means Epistell. To reach us, reply to any email we send you.

2. What a founding seat is

There are 100 founding seats in total. A small number were given to people testing Epistell before launch, and the counter on the home page shows what is left.

Ticking the founding box when you join the list holds a seat for you. Holding a seat is free and you can drop it any time. Your seat is only confirmed when you claim it and pay for your first year.

3. Claiming your seat

• When the private beta opens to your wave, we email you a link to claim your seat.
• You have 14 days from that email to claim it. After that, the seat may go to the next person on the list.
• We may ask you to confirm your email address and your payment details match one real person before the seat is confirmed.

4. Price and renewal

• Founding Pro is US$8.99 a month, billed yearly as US$107.88, plus any tax the law requires us to charge where you live.
• Your plan renews each year at the same founding price for as long as you keep renewing without a break.
• We email you at least 14 days before each renewal.
• If a renewal payment fails, you have 14 days to fix it. If your membership lapses or you cancel, the founding seat ends. If you come back later, you join at the standard price at that time.
• Pro is planned at US$39 a month, or US$29 a month billed yearly, after the founding seats are gone. Founding members never pay more than their founding price while their seat is active.

5. What is included

Founding Pro includes everything listed on the home page at the time you claim. Two fair use limits keep the price this low:

• 10 hours of new listening a month. This covers links you paste that are not already in our library. Episodes already in the library do not count. Unused hours do not carry over.
• Five new shows of your own. You can follow as many shows in the library as you like, plus up to five shows we do not cover yet.

Epistell is in beta and will change as we build it. If we change what Pro includes, founding members keep at least what Pro includes, at their founding price.

6. One seat, one person

A founding seat is personal to you. You may not:

• sell, auction, give away or transfer your seat or your account, or offer to;
• share your login, or let a team or a business use one founding seat;
• hold more than one founding seat, whatever number of email addresses you use;
• use other people's details, made up details, or throwaway email addresses to hold extra seats;
• use bots or scripts to join the list or hold seats.

We may check names, email addresses, payment details, devices and connections to enforce this. If we find more than one seat held by the same person, we keep the earliest one and cancel the rest.

7. Fair use of what you get

Reports and briefs you make are yours to use in your own work, including work you do for your own clients. You may not:

• resell or rent access to Epistell, or sell what it produces as a data product or a feed;
• scrape, bulk download or copy the library to build another dataset or a competing service;
• get around the fair use limits, for example by sharing paste access with others.

8. If these terms are broken

We may suspend or cancel a founding seat that breaks sections 6 or 7. Before we cancel, we tell you why and give you a chance to respond, unless the breach is plainly deliberate, such as reselling seats. If we cancel, we refund the unused part of your year, unless the seat was obtained by fraud.

9. Refunds

• If you change your mind within 14 days of your first payment, we refund it in full.
• After that, you can cancel any time and keep access until the end of the year you paid for.
• If Epistell shuts down, we refund the unused part of your year.
• Nothing in these terms takes away rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that cannot be excluded.

10. Changes to these terms

If we change these terms, we email founding members at least 30 days before the change takes effect. We will never change them to raise your founding price or to make the one seat rules stricter for seats already held.

11. Law

These terms are governed by the laws of Australia.

Version 1.0 · 24 October 2026