Terms of Service

The terms under which Cadence Reader is licensed to you, including the free plan and the Cadence Plus subscription.

1. The agreement

These Terms of Service ("Terms") form a legal agreement between you and SUBVERTING COMPLEXITY (PTY) LTD, registered in South Africa (registration 2026/180066/07), at 301 Turin Street, Lombardy Estate, Paradiso, Pretoria 0081, South Africa ("Subverting Complexity", "we", "us", "our"), governing your use of the Cadence Reader application ("the app"). They incorporate, and should be read together with, our Privacy Policy.

2. Licence

We grant you a personal, worldwide, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to download and use Cadence Reader on devices you own or control, in accordance with these Terms and with the usage rules of the app store from which you obtained it. This is a licence, not a sale. We retain all rights in the app.

Cadence Reader contains no advertising. It offers one optional in-app purchase, the Cadence Plus subscription described in section 4. We do not supply books. There is no store and no catalogue inside Cadence. Everything you read in it is something you brought.

3. The free plan

Cadence is free to use and stays free. The free plan is not a trial and it does not expire.

On the free plan you keep one book or audio item at a time, and you can replace it as often as you like. Nothing counts the replacements. That one item gets nearly everything the app can do: every supported format, every system voice on your device, the speed, the pitch, the sentence pause, the skip interval, the sleep timer, both highlight modes, the themes, the type settings and per-book overrides. You also keep up to three bookmarks in a book, with notes.

Accessibility features are never restricted, on any plan, for any reason.

4. Cadence Plus

Cadence Plus is an optional auto-renewing subscription, offered on a monthly and a yearly term. The price is shown in your local currency by the App Store or Google Play at the point of purchase, and the amount you are charged is the one the store shows you. There is no free trial and no introductory offer. The free plan is the trial, and it never ends.

Cadence Plus adds:

• More than one book in your library, and more than three bookmarks in a book.
• Jumping about inside a book by its contents.
• In the iOS and Android apps, neural voices, which you download once and which then speak on your device, as described in section 30.
• On iOS, a home-screen widget that resumes your last book, and a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island.
• Your library as a browse list for Android Auto, Wear and the Assistant, and playing a title by name from any of those.
• Sync between your devices, which is the ongoing service the subscription buys. What syncs is described in the Privacy Policy.

Buying, renewing and cancelling

We do not sell Cadence Plus and we do not take your payment. Apple sells it on iOS and Google sells it on Android. Your payment, your billing details and your receipt are theirs, not ours. We never see your card.

• Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each period unless you cancel it.
• Cancel through the store, not through us. On iOS that is your Apple subscription settings, and on Android it is Google Play. We cannot cancel it for you, and neither can deleting the app or deleting your account.
• Cancelling stops the next renewal. It does not end the period you have already paid for, and Cadence Plus keeps working until that period runs out.
• Refunds are the store's decision under the store's policy, not ours.

If a payment fails, Apple's billing grace period gives you 16 days while it retries, and Cadence Plus keeps working through it. If your device is offline, Cadence Plus keeps working: once the date you have paid through has passed with no confirmed renewal, it continues for a further 16 days, after which the library freeze in section 5 applies.

Apple Family Sharing

Cadence Plus can be shared through Apple Family Sharing. Where it reaches you that way, the person who bought it is the only one who can cancel it, and the app will tell you so. Google Play does not allow in-app purchases to be shared through Family Library, so there is no equivalent on Android.

5. What happens when a subscription ends

Nothing is ever deleted from your device. Every book you imported stays where it is. All but one of them freeze.

• A frozen book is still in your library and is marked as locked. You can sort, filter, export and delete it. You cannot open or play it.
• Frozen books do not count toward the free plan's one-book limit. That one live slot behaves exactly like the ordinary free plan: delete what is in it and import something else, as often as you like.
• You choose which book stays unfrozen. The app warns you before the subscription ends and asks. If you never answer, it keeps the one you opened most recently. Once set, that choice is fixed until you subscribe again.
• Subscribing again unfreezes everything.

Bookmarks work the same way. If you lapse holding ten bookmarks in a book, you keep all ten and can use them. Only the eleventh is refused.

6. Acceptable use

You agree that you will not:

• Copy, modify, reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code of the app, except to the extent this restriction is prohibited by applicable law.
• Rent, lease, sell, sublicense, or otherwise commercially redistribute the app.
• Use the app for any unlawful purpose or in violation of any applicable law or regulation.
• Use the app to circumvent, strip, or otherwise defeat digital rights management (DRM) or other technical protection measures applied to any book, document, or recording.
• Remove or alter any proprietary notices contained in the app.
• Attempt to defeat the plan limits, to reach another reader's account or data, or to overload or probe the service.
• Breach section 31, or any extra terms for a voice pack that you accepted under section 30.

We may suspend an account that does any of the above, and we will say why if we do.

7. Your content and copyright

Cadence Reader lets you import your own documents, eBooks, and recordings for personal reading and listening. You are solely responsible for the files you import and must ensure you have the legal right to use them. You agree to import only content that you own, have created, or are otherwise authorised to use, and to use it in a manner consistent with the rights of the copyright holder. The files themselves stay on your device unless you subscribe to Cadence Plus and turn on cloud sync, in which case we store them for your own account and devices, as sections 18 to 25 and the Privacy Policy describe. We never distribute them to anyone else.

The app is designed for DRM-free files. It does not remove or bypass DRM, and DRM-protected titles from stores such as Kindle, Apple Books, and Kobo cannot be opened.

8. Text-to-speech and system voices

Cadence Reader reads text aloud using the text-to-speech voices provided by your operating system and, on Cadence Plus in the iOS and Android apps, the neural voices described in section 30. The system voices, their availability, their quality, and their own licence terms are supplied and controlled by Apple, Google, or your device manufacturer, not by us. Spoken audio generated on your device is for your personal use; you are responsible for ensuring that any further use complies with the rights in the underlying work and with the voice provider's terms.

9. Intellectual property

The app, including its design, code, branding, and all related intellectual property, is owned by Subverting Complexity and is protected by copyright and other laws. These Terms do not grant you any rights in our trademarks or branding.

10. Availability

We try to keep the service up and we do not promise that it always will be. The reading itself happens on your device, so Cadence keeps working without a connection. Sync and subscription checks need one. Where the service is unavailable, an existing subscription is unaffected for the period described in section 4.

We may change, add or remove features. Where a change removes something you are paying for, we will say so in advance.

11. Disclaimer of warranties

The app is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including but not limited to fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the app will be uninterrupted, error-free, that every file will import or parse correctly, or that defects will be corrected. You use the app at your own risk. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits any rights you may have as a consumer under the Consumer Protection Act, 2008 or other applicable law that cannot lawfully be excluded.

12. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Subverting Complexity will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, arising out of or in connection with your use of, or inability to use, the app. Because Cadence Reader stores your library on your device, and cloud sync deletes its copy of a file when you delete the book or stop syncing it (section 24), we strongly recommend you keep your own backups of any important files; we are not responsible for data lost through device failure, deletion, or uninstalling the app.

13. App store terms

Your use of the app is also subject to the terms of the platform from which you downloaded it.

Apple App Store

These Terms are between you and Subverting Complexity only, not Apple. Apple is not responsible for the app or its content. To the extent these Terms provide a licence, that licence is subject to Apple's Licensed Application End User License Agreement (Standard EULA); where these Terms conflict with that EULA, the Apple Standard EULA governs for App Store downloads. Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these Terms and may enforce them against you.

Google Play

Your use of the app obtained through Google Play is also subject to the Google Play Terms of Service.

14. Termination

This licence remains in effect until terminated. It terminates automatically if you breach these Terms. You may terminate it at any time by uninstalling the app and deleting all copies. Uninstalling the app does not cancel a Cadence Plus subscription, which has to be cancelled through the store as described in section 4.

15. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa, including the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, 2002, without regard to conflict-of-law principles. You agree to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the South African courts, subject to any mandatory consumer-protection rights in your country of residence.

16. Changes to these Terms

We may revise these Terms from time to time. The current version will always be posted at this URL with an updated date. Continued use of the app after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.

17. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Contact us at:

SUBVERTING COMPLEXITY (PTY) LTD
301 Turin Street, Lombardy Estate, Paradiso
Pretoria 0081, South Africa
Email: support@subvertingcomplexity.com
Web: subvertingcomplexity.com

18. User Content and Cloud Storage

Cadence allows you to import, store and synchronise books, documents, audio, extracted audio, recognised text, metadata and other content associated with your library ("User Content").

You retain any rights you have in your User Content. Cadence does not acquire ownership of your User Content.

You are responsible for your User Content and for ensuring that you have all rights, licences, permissions and other legal authority necessary to import, copy, upload, store, process, synchronise, download and otherwise use that content through Cadence.

You must not use Cadence to store or process User Content in a manner that infringes copyright, intellectual property rights, privacy rights or any other applicable law.

Cadence does not verify that you own, have purchased or are otherwise entitled to use User Content and does not routinely inspect private libraries for copyright compliance.

To the extent permitted by applicable law, you are responsible for claims, losses, liabilities or costs arising from your User Content, your unlawful use of User Content or your breach of these Terms. You are not responsible to the extent that a loss is caused by Cadence's breach of these Terms, gross negligence, wilful misconduct or failure to comply with applicable law.

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or limits liability or rights to the extent that doing so is prohibited by applicable law.

19. Licence to Cadence

By storing or synchronising User Content using Cadence, you grant SUBVERTING COMPLEXITY (PTY) LTD a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide licence to receive, reproduce, copy, store, access, process, transmit, convert, transcode, extract, transcribe, index and delete User Content, and to create technical or derived representations of User Content, only to the extent reasonably necessary to:

• provide cloud storage and synchronisation;
• provide features you choose to use, including audio extraction, text recognition and related processing;
• make your content available to your own Cadence account and devices;
• verify the integrity of uploaded files;
• maintain, secure and troubleshoot the service;
• provide technical support requested by you;
• detect or investigate malware, abuse or security threats;
• comply with applicable law or valid legal process; and
• investigate and respond to specific reports of unlawful or infringing content.

This licence does not permit Cadence to sell, publish or commercially exploit your User Content independently of providing and operating the Cadence service.

The licence ends when the relevant User Content is deleted from Cadence, except to the limited extent that copies remain temporarily in backups, disaster-recovery systems or service-provider recovery systems, or must be retained under applicable law.

20. Private Libraries

User Content is not made available to other Cadence users except where expressly described in these Terms or where you expressly choose to share content through a feature that Cadence may introduce.

Where Cadence Plus is shared with family members, each member has a separate private library. Family members cannot access one another's books, files, recognised text or other library contents through the family-sharing functionality.

The subscriber responsible for the shared Cadence Plus subscription may see the name each member chose to give when joining and when they joined. The subscriber sees the family's total storage use, but not each member's share. They cannot see a member's email address, book titles, authors, files, recognised text or other library contents through the family management functionality.

Cadence personnel do not routinely open synced files. We may access a particular file where the law requires or permits it, for example to investigate a specific legal complaint, as described in the Privacy Policy. Our service providers process content to operate storage and synchronisation under our instructions.

21. Copyright and Unlawful Content

Cadence provides private storage, processing and synchronisation functionality. You are responsible for determining whether your use of particular User Content is lawful in the jurisdiction applicable to you.

If we receive a sufficiently detailed notice alleging that User Content stored through Cadence is unlawful or infringes another person's rights, we may investigate the notice and may restrict access to, disable or delete affected content where reasonably necessary or required by applicable law.

Where applicable law requires us to act on a valid notice, we will take the action required by that law.

We may notify the affected account holder and provide information about the complaint where appropriate and legally permitted. Where applicable law provides a counter-notice, appeal or similar process, we may make that process available to the affected account holder.

Reports concerning copyright infringement or other unlawful content may be sent to support@subvertingcomplexity.com, unless Cadence provides a separate reporting address or reporting mechanism for the applicable jurisdiction.

A notice should include, as applicable:

• the complainant's full name and contact details;
• a physical or electronic signature where required by law;
• identification of the copyright, right or legal interest allegedly infringed, or an explanation of why the content is alleged to be unlawful;
• enough information to identify and locate the affected content or account;
• the action requested;
• a statement that the complaint is made in good faith;
• a statement that the information supplied is accurate and that the complainant is entitled to make the complaint, including a statement under penalty of perjury where required by applicable law; and
• any other information required by applicable law.

Cadence may request additional information where reasonably necessary to assess or process a notice.

Nothing in this section limits any notice-and-action, takedown, counter-notice or similar procedure that Cadence is required to maintain under applicable law.

22. No General Monitoring

Cadence does not routinely monitor, review or classify the contents of private libraries for copyright infringement or other unlawful content.

We may use automated technical measures or access particular User Content where reasonably necessary to:

• verify file integrity;
• provide functionality requested by you;
• detect or investigate malware, abuse, fraud or security threats;
• provide technical support requested by you, using information you choose to send in a problem report;
• investigate a specific legal complaint;
• comply with applicable law or valid legal process; or
• protect Cadence, its systems and its users, through automated measures or access permitted by applicable law.

Nothing in these Terms requires Cadence to conduct general monitoring except where such an obligation is imposed by applicable law.

23. Malware and Security

Cadence may use automated security measures to detect malware, malicious files, abuse or threats to Cadence's systems or users.

Cadence does not guarantee that every uploaded file will be scanned or that its security measures will identify every malicious, unsafe or compromised file. You remain responsible for files you choose to import, download or open.

24. Storage and Deletion

Deleting a synced book or other synced content causes Cadence to delete the active cloud copy of the associated User Content, subject to temporary retention in backups, disaster-recovery systems or service-provider recovery mechanisms.

Disabling synchronisation stops Cadence storing and processing your User Content for synchronisation, and causes Cadence to delete the active cloud copy, subject to the temporary retention described in this section.

If your Cadence Plus entitlement ends, or if you leave or are removed from a Cadence family, synced User Content may remain available for up to 30 days to allow you to download it. After that period, Cadence may delete the active cloud copy.

Deletion from active systems may not immediately remove information from backups, disaster-recovery systems or service-provider recovery mechanisms. Such copies are not maintained as active User Content and are deleted or overwritten according to the applicable retention cycle.

Cadence may retain limited information where reasonably necessary to comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce these Terms, prevent fraud or abuse, or establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

25. Storage Limits

Cloud storage is subject to the storage allowance associated with your Cadence plan.

Where a Cadence Plus subscription is shared with a family, the storage allowance is shared between the subscriber and participating family members.

If the shared storage allowance is reached, further uploads or synchronisation may be prevented until sufficient storage becomes available.

Cadence may enforce reasonable technical limits concerning file size, storage use, upload frequency or other service resources where necessary to operate the service reliably and securely.

26. International Availability

Cadence is intended to be available internationally, subject to applicable law, platform availability, sanctions, export controls and other legal or operational restrictions.

You are responsible for ensuring that your use of Cadence and the User Content you store or process through the service is lawful in the country or territory from which you use it.

This does not transfer to you any legal obligation that applicable law places on SUBVERTING COMPLEXITY (PTY) LTD as the operator of Cadence.

Features, subscriptions or services may be restricted, modified, suspended or unavailable in a particular country or territory where required by law, regulation, sanctions, platform requirements or circumstances outside our reasonable control.

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or limits any consumer, privacy or other statutory right or protection that cannot lawfully be excluded, restricted or limited.

27. Age Requirement

You must be at least 18 years old to create or hold a Cadence account.

Cadence is not intended for account holders under 18, and you may not create or maintain a Cadence account on behalf of a person under 18 unless Cadence expressly introduces a service or account process permitting this.

An app-store age or content rating does not change the minimum age required to create or hold a Cadence account.

28. Privacy and Personal Information

Cadence processes personal information associated with accounts, libraries and use of the service in accordance with the Cadence Privacy Policy and applicable data-protection law.

User Content may itself contain personal information relating to you or other people. You are responsible for ensuring that you have a lawful basis or other legal authority to provide that personal information to Cadence where required by applicable law.

Cadence may use third-party service providers to host, transmit or process User Content and other personal information on its behalf. Such processing is subject to the safeguards and arrangements described in the Privacy Policy and required by applicable law.

29. Service Provider

Cadence is operated by:

SUBVERTING COMPLEXITY (PTY) LTD
Registration number: 2026/180066/07
Registered in: South Africa
301 Turin Street
Lombardy Estate, Paradiso
Pretoria 0081
South Africa
Email: support@subvertingcomplexity.com
Website: cadencereader.app

The physical address above may also be used for the service of legal notices unless Cadence publishes a different address for that purpose.

Any additional company, consumer-protection, takedown-agent, telephone, regulatory or jurisdiction-specific information required by applicable law will be made available through Cadence's website, legal notices or other legally required disclosure mechanism.

30. Voices

Cadence reads text aloud with two kinds of voice:

• System voices are the text-to-speech voices that come with your device, as section 8 describes.
• Neural voices are part of Cadence Plus in the iOS and Android apps, not in the web reader. A neural voice is a synthetic voice produced by a machine-learning model. You download the model to your device once, from a server operated for us, and from then on the voice turns text into speech on your device, without a connection.

Every neural voice is synthetic. It is not a recording of a person reading your text.

The models behind neural voices are made by third parties and are provided to you under their own licences. The app shows those licences in full. Some voice packs also come with extra terms of use. Where a pack has them, the app shows them to you before you first download or use that pack, and you cannot use the pack until you accept them. Extra terms you accept in this way form part of these Terms. Section 31 sets out the extra terms for the Supertonic voices.

If your Cadence Plus subscription ends, the neural voices you downloaded stay on your device until you delete them, and Cadence reads with a system voice in the same language until you subscribe again. You can delete a downloaded voice at any time, on any plan.

We may stop offering a voice pack, or change which version of it we offer, where its licence or its licensor requires it, or where we find a problem with it.

31. Supertonic voices

The Supertonic voices use the Supertonic 3 model, made by Supertone Inc. and licensed under the BigScience Open RAIL-M License dated 18 August 2022 ("the Open RAIL-M licence"). That licence requires us to make its use restrictions binding on you, and this section does that. The full, unmodified text of the Open RAIL-M licence is shown in the app, and the app links to it before you first use a Supertonic voice.

In this section, "the Supertonic model" means the Supertonic 3 model and its voice styles, any modification of them or work based on them, and any other model created, initialised or trained by transferring patterns from their weights, parameters, activations or output, for example by distillation or by training on data they generated. "Supertonic output" means any speech, audio or other output produced with the Supertonic model, including through Cadence. "Use" includes running the Supertonic model, creating any content with it, and fine-tuning, updating, training, evaluating or reparametrising it.

You agree to use the Supertonic model only for lawful purposes and in accordance with the Open RAIL-M licence. You agree that you will not use the Supertonic model, or any Supertonic output:

(a) in any way that violates any applicable national, federal, state, local or international law or regulation;

(b) for the purpose of exploiting, harming or attempting to exploit or harm minors in any way;

(c) to generate or disseminate verifiably false information or content with the purpose of harming others;

(d) to generate or disseminate personal identifiable information that can be used to harm an individual;

(e) to generate or disseminate information or content (for example images, code, posts or articles), and place that information or content in any context (for example a bot generating tweets), without expressly and intelligibly disclaiming that the information or content is machine generated;

(f) to defame, disparage or otherwise harass others;

(g) to impersonate or attempt to impersonate others (for example with deepfakes) without their consent;

(h) for fully automated decision making that adversely impacts an individual's legal rights or otherwise creates or modifies a binding, enforceable obligation;

(i) for any use intended to, or which has the effect of, discriminating against or harming individuals or groups based on online or offline social behaviour or known or predicted personal or personality characteristics;

(j) to exploit any of the vulnerabilities of a specific group of persons based on their age, social, physical or mental characteristics, in order to materially distort the behaviour of a person pertaining to that group in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm;

(k) for any use intended to, or which has the effect of, discriminating against individuals or groups based on legally protected characteristics or categories;

(l) to provide medical advice or to interpret medical results; or

(m) to generate or disseminate information for the purpose of it being used for the administration of justice, law enforcement, immigration or asylum processes, such as predicting that an individual will commit fraud or a crime (for example by text profiling, drawing causal relationships between assertions made in documents, or indiscriminate and arbitrarily targeted use).

In this section, "or" is not exclusive, and "information or content" includes information and content together.

You are accountable for the Supertonic output you generate and for how it is used afterwards, and no use of Supertonic output may contravene the Open RAIL-M licence.

If you copy or pass the Supertonic model itself to anyone else, the Open RAIL-M licence's conditions for distribution apply to you, including that you must make these use restrictions binding on whoever receives it and give them a copy of the licence.

Reading aloud is not endorsement. When a Supertonic voice, or any other voice in Cadence, reads text aloud, it reads the text you chose. Neither Cadence nor the voice endorses, interprets or adopts that text or its content. This paragraph describes what Cadence does. It does not narrow any of the restrictions (a) to (m) above, which apply to what you do with the Supertonic model and Supertonic output.

We do not read or scan your books to check how you use a Supertonic voice. These restrictions are an agreement between you and us, and section 33 says what happens if you break them.

32. Speech you generate, and copyright

Being able to have text read aloud in Cadence gives you no right to copy, publish or distribute that text, or any recording made from it. This applies to every voice, system or neural.

Speech that Cadence generates from a book or document is for your personal listening, as section 8 says. You must not publish, sell, share or otherwise distribute the source text, or a recording or synthetic audiobook made from it with any voice, unless you hold the rights needed to do so from the copyright holder, or applicable law allows it. Generating the speech does not give you those rights, and neither do we. Sections 7 and 18 continue to apply to the text you import.

33. Breach of the voice terms

A breach of section 31, or of any extra terms for a voice pack that you accepted under section 30, is a breach of these Terms. We handle it as we handle any other breach of these Terms, including by suspending your account under section 6 and by ending your licence under section 14.

Nothing in these Terms limits any right that the licensor of a voice model has under that model's own licence.