The deal, written so you can read it.

The short version

This is a summary, not the agreement. Where it and the sections below differ, the sections below win.

• You must be 18 or over, and one person gets one account.
• You verify your face once, at sign-up. Without it there is no account.
• One connection at a time. While a world is open, the rest of the app is closed to both of you.
• You keep everything you post. We get only the permission needed to show it to the right person and to moderate it, and that permission ends when you delete it.
• Paid features are sold through the App Store and Google Play. They handle the money and the refunds, not us.
• A free trial turns into a paid subscription unless you cancel before it ends.
• Treat people decently. Harassment, lies about who you are, and content that is illegal or abusive get accounts removed, and a ban follows the person rather than the email address.
• Something wrong? The Grievance Officer, named in section 15, has to answer you.
• Indian law, Hyderabad courts, and nothing here takes away your rights as a consumer.

Who you are contracting with

Menula LLP, a limited liability partnership registered in India, LLPIN ACZ-4363, GSTIN 36ACHFM8342E1Z5, registered at HIG-A-16, Dr. A S Rao Nagar, Hyderabad, Telangana 500062, India. "We", "us" and "Sole" all mean that company. "You" means you.

The agreement between us is this page, the privacy policy, the sensitive data policy and the cookie policy. Read together they are the whole of it. Reach us at hello@soledating.app for anything ordinary and legal@soledating.app for anything legal.

Who may use Sole

• You are 18 or older. There is no version of Sole for anyone younger, and an account found to belong to a minor is closed and deleted.
• You are able to enter a contract under the Indian Contract Act, 1872 (opens in a new tab).
• You hold one account. Not two, not one for each mood. Verification is what makes this enforceable.
• You have not been removed from Sole before. If you have, coming back needs our written say-so.
• You have never been convicted of a sexual offence, or of a violent offence against a person, and you are not required to register as a sex offender anywhere.

If any of those stops being true, your permission to use Sole ends at that moment, whether or not we have noticed yet.

Verification

Everyone verifies once, at sign-up: a short liveness capture matched against your profile photos, about thirty seconds. It is a condition of having an account, not a feature you can decline and continue without.

What we keep from it, and for how long, is set out in the privacy policy and the sensitive data policy. The short version: the recording is deleted within 24 hours, and a face map stays for as long as your account does.

Three photos of your face, at all times

Your profile must carry at least three photographs that clearly show your own face, and it must carry them for as long as the account is open. Not two, and not three pictures of your dog, your car and the back of your head. This is a standing condition of the account rather than a one-off requirement at sign-up.

It exists because verification at the door is worth nothing if the profile drifts away from the person who passed it. Three photographs of the same face is what lets the person reading your profile trust that the check still means something on the day they read it.

When you replace one of them, the new photograph is checked against the face map we already hold before it goes live. If it matches, it appears. If it does not, we will not publish it and we will tell you why, and a person will look at it if you ask. Nothing about that check is a new collection of biometric data: it runs against the map taken at sign-up, which is one of the reasons that map is kept for the life of the account.

If your profile drops below three face photographs, it stops being shown until you fix it. That is a pause, not a penalty, and it reverses the moment you add one.

People change: a haircut, a beard, ten years. The check is built with that in mind and is not looking for an exact copy. It is looking for the same person.

Do not verify with anyone else’s face, a photograph, a mask, a screen, or a generated image, and do not put anyone else’s face on your profile as one of your three. Doing either is grounds for immediate removal, and depending on what you did with the account afterwards it may be an offence under the Information Technology Act, 2000 (opens in a new tab).

How Sole works, as a term rather than a pitch

• You see one profile at a time. Liking is unlimited and commits you to nothing.
• When a like lands both ways, either of you can propose a world. It opens only when you both agree.
• While a world is open, both of you are out of circulation: no browsing, no new likes, no other conversations. That is deliberate and it is the product.
• Either of you can end the world at any time, and neither of you needs a reason. When it ends you both return to searching.

We may change how Sole works, add features, and remove them. If a change takes away something you have paid for, section 11 says what happens.

What you agree not to do

• Lie about who you are: your identity, your age, your photographs, or anything else material to a person deciding whether to meet you.
• Harass, threaten, stalk, intimidate, defame or abuse anyone, on Sole or off it, where it relates to someone you met here.
• Ask another person for money, or for their bank, card or payment details. Every romance scam starts with that sentence.
• Use Sole to advertise, recruit, sell, promote, run a competition, or solicit for any commercial arrangement, including sex work.
• Take another person’s photographs, messages or voice notes out of Sole and publish, share or archive them.
• Share your account, use someone else’s, or open a new account after we have removed you.
• Scrape, crawl, harvest or bulk collect anything from Sole, by hand or by machine, and do not build a dataset out of it or train a model on it.
• Reverse engineer, decompile or interfere with the app or our servers, or probe them for vulnerabilities outside the process on the security page.
• File reports you know to be false, or use the reporting tools to punish someone for turning you down.

What you agree not to post

This list follows Rule 3(1)(b) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (opens in a new tab), put into ordinary words. Do not put anything on Sole, in a profile or in a world, that:

• belongs to someone else and is not yours to post, or infringes a copyright, trademark, patent or other right;
• is obscene or pornographic, involves a child in any sexual way, or invades someone’s privacy, including their bodily privacy;
• insults or harasses on the basis of gender, or is libellous, or is racially or ethnically objectionable;
• is harmful to a child in any way;
• impersonates another person, or misleads anyone about where a message came from;
• is knowingly false, and published to mislead or harass someone for money or to cause them harm;
• encourages money laundering or gambling, or relates to anything otherwise unlawful;
• promotes enmity between groups, or incites an offence, or obstructs an investigation, or insults another country;
• threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, its friendly relations with other States, or public order;
• contains a virus or any code meant to interrupt, destroy or limit any computer system;
• promotes self-harm, an eating disorder, or violent extremism.

Also, for your sake rather than the law’s: do not put your home address, your bank details, your government ID numbers or your workplace in a profile. A profile is read by strangers. That is the whole idea.

Your content, and the permission you give us

Everything you post stays yours. Your photographs, your prompts, your voice note, your messages. We do not acquire them and we do not sell them.

You give us a licence to host, store, copy, resize, reformat and display what you post, for one purpose: running Sole. That means showing your profile to people it is meant to be shown to, delivering your messages to the one person in your world, keeping it working across your devices, and reviewing it when it is reported.

The licence is non-exclusive, worldwide because servers and networks are, and royalty free. It is not perpetual. It ends when you delete the content or your account, except for backup copies that age out on the schedule in the privacy policy, and anything we are required to keep for a live report or a legal claim.

We will not use your face, your photographs or your words in advertising or marketing unless we ask you first, for that specific use, and you say yes in writing.

You confirm that what you post is yours to post, that anyone else appearing in your photographs agreed to be in them, and that posting it breaks no law and no one else’s rights.

Our content

The Sole name, the wordmark, the app, this website, the design language and everything in them that is not yours belongs to Menula LLP. You get a personal, revocable, non-transferable licence to use Sole as it is meant to be used, and nothing more. Do not copy the brand, and do not build something that pretends to be us.

Reporting, moderation and bans

Every profile and every world has a way to report and a way to block. Use them. Reports are read by people, not only by software.

Where a complaint is about content that shows a person in a sexual act, or nude, or in a state of undress, or that impersonates someone including by morphing their image, we will remove it within 24 hours of a valid complaint, as Rule 3(2)(b) requires. Everything else is acknowledged within 24 hours and resolved within 15 days.

What follows a confirmed breach depends on what it was: a warning, a feature restricted, an account suspended, or an account banned outright. Serious harm, and anything involving a child, goes straight to a ban and, where the law requires it, to the authorities.

A ban attaches to the verified person, not to the email address, so opening a new inbox does not get anyone back in. If you are banned, you can appeal to the Grievance Officer and a person who did not make the original decision will look at it.

We may not be able to tell you everything about why an account was removed, when saying so would put the person who reported it at risk. That is not evasiveness; it is the only way reporting stays safe to do.

Paying for Sole

Where the money goes

Subscriptions and any paid feature are sold through Apple’s in-app purchase system on iOS and Google Play billing on Android. The charge is made by Apple or Google to the payment method on your store account. We never see or hold your card details.

Your purchase is therefore also governed by the store’s terms. Where they and these terms conflict on billing, the store’s terms decide what actually happens to your money, because they are the ones moving it.

Free trials

We may offer a free trial. Its length and what it includes are shown to you before you start it. Unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the trial ends, it becomes a paid subscription automatically, at the price shown when you started, and the store charges you. One trial per person; verification is what makes that stick.

Renewals

Subscriptions renew automatically for the same period until you cancel. The store charges you within 24 hours of the end of each period. Cancelling stops the next charge; it does not refund the current period, and you keep what you paid for until that period runs out.

Prices can change. If we raise the price of a subscription you already hold, you will be told before it takes effect and you can cancel rather than accept it.

Cancelling

Cancel in the store, not in Sole: on iOS, Settings, then your name, then Subscriptions. On Android, the Play Store app, then Payments and subscriptions. Deleting the Sole app does not cancel a subscription, and neither does deleting your Sole account. This catches people out constantly, which is why it is in bold type in two places.

Refunds

Because Apple and Google take the payment, they also handle the refund. We cannot refund an App Store or Google Play purchase from our side, however much we might want to.

• App Store: reportaproblem.apple.com, or Apple Support.
• Google Play: the Play Store order history, or Google Play support.

If a store refuses and you think it is wrong, write to hello@soledating.app with the order number and we will take it up with them on your behalf. We cannot promise the outcome, only the effort.

If we withdraw a paid feature you are currently paying for, or close your account for a reason that turns out not to be your fault, we will arrange a refund of the unused part of what you paid.

Nothing here removes your rights under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (opens in a new tab). If a service is deficient, you keep every remedy that Act gives you, no matter what any other paragraph on this page says.

Ending it

You can delete your account from inside the app, at any time, without asking us and without giving a reason. Deletion removes your profile from Sole immediately and starts the clock in the privacy policy retention table. Remember to cancel the store subscription separately.

We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, that puts someone at risk, or that we are required by law to remove. Where we can give notice first, we will. Where someone is in danger, we act first and explain after.

The sections that are meant to outlive the account do: your content licence to the extent set out above, the disclaimers, the liability cap, the indemnity, and the law and jurisdiction clauses.

What verification is not

Sole verifies that you are a real, unique, living human being. It does not run a criminal record check, and it is not a character reference. We do not vet anyone’s intentions, their honesty, their relationship status or their health, and we cannot.

You are responsible for your own interactions with the people you meet here. Meet in public the first time. Tell someone where you are going. Do not send money to anyone, ever, for any reason, however good the reason sounds. The security page has the longer version of this.

Availability, and changes to these terms

Sole is provided as it is and as it is available. We will try to keep it up and we will not always succeed. Maintenance, outages, a change of platform requirements and acts outside our control all happen.

We may change these terms. The date at the bottom of the page is when they last changed. For a change that materially affects your rights or what you pay, we will give you notice before it takes effect and, where the law requires your agreement, ask for it. Continuing to use Sole after that is how you accept the change; if you would rather not, delete the account.

Disclaimers, and how far our liability goes

Sole is a place to meet people. We do not promise that you will meet anyone, that anyone will like you back, that a connection will go anywhere, or that any particular number of people will be on the app.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of data, or loss of the intangible kind. Where we are liable, our total liability for all claims connected to Sole is limited to whichever is greater: what you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or five thousand rupees.

That cap does not apply, and we do not try to exclude liability, for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for a breach of your rights as a consumer under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (opens in a new tab), or for anything else the law does not permit us to limit.

We are an intermediary under section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (opens in a new tab) in respect of what users post. We are not the author of it, and we do not check it before it appears. That protection depends on us acting on valid complaints, which is what section 9 commits us to.

If you cost us something

If a third party brings a claim against us because of what you posted, what you did to another person on Sole, or your breach of these terms, you agree to cover the reasonable costs and damages that follow. This is limited to what your own acts actually caused, and it does not apply to anything that was our fault.

The Grievance Officer

Required by Rule 3(2) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (opens in a new tab), and by the Consumer Protection (E-Commerce) Rules, 2020 (opens in a new tab). This is a real route with real deadlines, not a suggestion box.

If you are not satisfied with the answer, you can take it to a Consumer Commission under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (opens in a new tab), or, for anything about your personal data, to the Data Protection Board of India (opens in a new tab). You do not need our permission to do either.

Law, courts and arbitration

These terms are governed by the law of India. The courts at Hyderabad, Telangana have jurisdiction.

If a dispute between us cannot be settled by talking, either of us may refer it to arbitration by a single arbitrator under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996 (opens in a new tab). The seat is Hyderabad and the language is English. Before that, both of us have to spend thirty days actually trying to resolve it, in writing.

That arbitration clause does not apply to you as a consumer if you would rather not use it. You keep the right to take a complaint to a District, State or National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (opens in a new tab), and nothing on this page can sign that right away.

Everything else

• If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of it stands.
• If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• You cannot transfer your account or these terms to anyone else. We can transfer them to a company that takes over Sole, and we will tell you if that happens.
• Nothing here creates a partnership, an agency, an employment relationship or a joint venture between us.
• These terms are written in English. A translation, if we ever publish one, is for convenience and the English governs.
• Notices to us go to legal@soledating.app or to HIG-A-16, Dr. A S Rao Nagar, Hyderabad, Telangana 500062, India. Notices to you go to the email address on your account, so keep it current.