Terms of Service

These terms are written to be read. If anything here is unclear, or seems to conflict with what our marketing pages promise, email us at [email protected] — the stricter reading in your favor applies until we've clarified it.

1. What Readster is

Readster ("we", "us") is a personal research tool operated for individual users. You connect sources you already have lawful access to — RSS/Atom feeds, email newsletters (via a private forwarding address), SEC EDGAR filings, podcasts, YouTube channels, and Bluesky accounts. Readster also follows public news coverage of the topics, companies, people and organizations on your watchlist. It delivers a private, cited brief — daily on Readster Pro, weekly on Readster Free — plus a web archive of what you ingested. Section 6 describes what each plan includes.

Separately from any account, Readster publishes AI-generated summaries of selected public-record documents, such as SEC filings, on public pages. Section 2 applies to those pages too.

Readster is currently in beta. Features may change, and occasionally things will break. We commit to the data-portability terms in Section 7 regardless of beta status.

2. Not professional advice

Readster is an information tool. Briefs are AI-assisted summaries of your sources — not investment, legal, medical, or other professional advice. We make no warranty of completeness, accuracy, or timeliness of any item or alert.

In particular:

• Briefs are AI-assisted summaries of sources you selected and of news coverage of your watchlist. Every item links to its sources — verify with the original before acting on anything, especially a filing, a study, a ruling or an official notice.
• Filing alerts and brief items are delivered on a best-effort schedule. "Flagged within the hour" describes normal operation, not a guarantee; ingestion, upstream feeds, and email delivery can all be delayed. Do not rely on Readster as your sole or time-critical source for any decision.
• Readster does not make buy/sell recommendations, price targets, or valuation judgments, and nothing in a brief should be read as one.
• The public filing pages Readster publishes are AI-generated summaries of public-record documents. They can be incomplete or wrong; each page links to the official filing, which is the authoritative version.

3. Your account

You are responsible for your account credentials and for activity under your account. Notify us of any unauthorized use. You must be able to form a binding contract to subscribe (in most places, this means being 18 or older).

4. Your sources and acceptable use

You may only connect sources you have lawful access to. Do not:

• forward or connect content you are not authorized to receive (for example, someone else's paid newsletter subscription);
• use Readster to circumvent paywalls or access controls;
• publicly republish the AI-generated summaries in your briefs. Briefs are delivered privately, for your own research use — the summaries in them are derived from third-party content and are not licensed for republication;
• attempt to gain unauthorized access to our systems, disrupt the service, or use it to send spam or malware;
• violate applicable laws.

If a publisher asks us to stop processing their content, we will — including removing it from our processing caches. Your briefs may lose a source for this reason; that is the deal we make to stay a legitimate tool.

5. Plans, billing and trials

• Readster has two plans: Readster Pro, at $20/month or $192/year, billed in advance through Stripe, and Readster Free, at no charge. Section 6 describes what each includes. Prices are shown before checkout; we notify existing subscribers before any price change takes effect for them.
• The 30-day free trial gives you Readster Pro and requires no credit card. When it ends and you haven't subscribed, your account moves to Readster Free (which needs a verified email address). Nothing is deleted, and you can subscribe at any time to return to Pro.
• The academic discount (50% off Readster Pro) applies automatically when your account email is on a recognized academic domain (.edu, .ac.*, or equivalent). We may review discounted accounts and ask for reasonable evidence of academic affiliation; discounts obtained with misleading email addresses can be revoked.
• You can cancel anytime from your billing settings; cancellation stops future charges. You keep Readster Pro until the end of the period you have paid for; then your account moves to Readster Free and keeps its data (Section 7). If we materially break something and can't fix it, ask us about a refund — we handle these case by case and err toward the subscriber.

6. What each plan includes, and metering

Your brief is never metered: it does not use up any allowance, on either plan.

Readster Pro delivers your brief on the schedule you choose and includes on-demand AI actions (asking questions of your archive, instant summaries, full-article translation) up to 50 actions per day.

Readster Free includes:

• one brief a week, on a fixed day of the week that we assign (shown in your settings), written by a smaller AI model than Readster Pro's brief;
• up to 5 watchlist entries across all your watchlists, with news coverage, official sources and, for SEC-registered companies, SEC filings — if you had more entries on Pro, they are kept, and your brief and coverage follow the first 5 you added;
• adding up to 10 RSS or Atom feeds of your own;
• at most 1 instant SEC filing alert per day;
• your archive, search and export.

Readster Free does not include on-demand AI actions, the newsletter inbox, podcast, YouTube or Bluesky sources, connecting AI clients (MCP), or using your own AI key. Pro-only sources you set up are kept but do not reach your Free brief, and newsletters that arrive at your private address while you are on Readster Free are not added to your archive.

If you hit a limit or a cost safeguard on either plan, we tell you in the product — we never silently degrade what your plan includes.

7. Your data, export, and deletion

• Your content stays yours. Connecting sources gives us permission to process them to operate the service for you — nothing more.
• Export is always available, on every plan — Readster Pro, the trial and Readster Free: sources (OPML), archive, and briefs, in one click.
• Ending a subscription or a trial deletes nothing. Your account moves to Readster Free and keeps its data while you use it. We do not delete Free accounts for inactivity; if we ever start, that is a material change under Section 11.
• Accounts on no plan. If a subscription has ended and the account holds no plan at all (for example, because its email address was never verified), export stays available for 90 days after the subscription ended; after that window we delete its archive.
• Deletion on request. You can delete your account in your settings, or ask us to delete your data, at any time.
• If Readster ever shuts down, we commit to an export window of at least 90 days from the announcement.
• We never train AI models on your content. See the Privacy Policy and Data Export Policy for details; if those pages and this one ever disagree, the version most protective of you controls.

8. Intellectual property

The Readster software, site, and brand are ours. The content of your sources belongs to its authors and publishers; your notes, watchlists, and configuration belong to you.

9. Termination

You can close your account at any time (Section 7 applies). We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate Section 4, with notice and a chance to export unless the violation makes that impossible (for example, ongoing abuse of publisher content).

10. Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law: the service is provided "as is"; we are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages, including trading or investment losses; and our total liability is capped at the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

11. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. For material changes we will email account holders — on every plan — and update the date at the top of this page before the change takes effect. Continued use after the effective date means acceptance.

12. Contact

[email protected]. We read everything.