Terms of Service

1. Agreement

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of The Joy Project website and services at joy-project.org (the "Services"), operated by Aaron Smith ("we," "us," "The Joy Project"). By using the Services — including subscribing to a hosted instance of one of our tools — you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Services.

2. The Services

The Joy Project offers free devotional resources and a set of practical tools for parishes. Some tools are offered as hosted instances — a private, ready-to-use copy of an application (such as Vestry Stack or the Parish Prayer List) running on your own web address — provided on a paid monthly subscription.

A free, shared demo of each hosted tool is available so you can evaluate it before subscribing.

3. Your Account and Instance

To subscribe you provide your parish or organization name and a contact email. You are responsible for keeping this information accurate, for the use of your hosted instance by your members, and for the content placed in it. You must be authorized to act on behalf of the parish or organization you register.

4. Subscriptions, Billing, and Renewal

Hosted instances are billed as recurring monthly subscriptions. Payments are processed securely by Stripe; we do not receive or store your full card details. By subscribing you authorize us, through Stripe, to charge your payment method the applicable monthly fee.

• Subscriptions renew automatically each month until cancelled.
• Prices are shown at checkout. We may change pricing with reasonable advance notice; changes take effect at your next renewal.
• You are responsible for any applicable taxes.

5. Cancellation and Refunds

You may cancel your subscription at any time through the billing portal link provided to you, or by emailing us. When you cancel:

• Your instance remains available until the end of the current paid billing period, after which it is deactivated and no further charges are made.
• Fees already paid for the current period are non-refundable, except where required by law or at our discretion if something has gone wrong on our end.
• Because a free demo is available before purchase, we encourage you to try it first.

If a technical problem prevented you from using your instance, contact us — we will make it right.

6. Your Content and Data

Content you and your members place in a hosted instance — such as prayer requests, files, and notes — belongs to you. We process and store it only to provide the Services, as described in our Privacy Policy. You are responsible for having the right to share any content you upload and for handling sensitive or pastoral information appropriately.

After a subscription ends, your instance and its data are deleted following a short retention window. Please export anything you wish to keep before cancelling.

7. Acceptable Use

You agree not to use the Services to:

• violate any law or the rights of others;
• store or share unlawful, harmful, harassing, or infringing content;
• attempt to disrupt, overload, reverse-engineer, or gain unauthorized access to the Services or other users' instances.

8. Availability and Disclaimers

We work to keep hosted instances reliable and backed up, but the Services are provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis without warranties of any kind. We do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free operation, and may perform maintenance that briefly affects availability.

9. Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, The Joy Project will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from your use of the Services. Our total liability for any claim relating to the Services is limited to the amount you paid us for the Services in the three (3) months before the claim.

10. Suspension and Termination

We may suspend or terminate a hosted instance for non-payment or for violation of these Terms. You may cancel at any time as described above. Sections that by their nature should survive termination (such as content ownership, disclaimers, and limitation of liability) will continue to apply.

11. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, we will revise the "last updated" date above. Your continued use of the Services after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the updated Terms.

12. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules.