Terms of service

Terms of service

What Finalist is

Finalist mixes and masters multitrack stems. It runs in your browser and the audio processing happens on your own machine.

You can use it without an account and without paying: drop your stems, categorise them, mix, and listen to the result. You need an account, and a purchase, to download the finished file. The account is created when you press Download, and not before.

Your account

You sign in with Google. An account is for one person. You are responsible for what happens under it, so keep your Google account secure. If you sign in with a different Google account you get a different Finalist account, with different purchases in it — we cannot merge two.

Your audio is yours

We claim no rights whatsoever over the audio you put into Finalist. No ownership, no licence, no right to use it, publish it or train anything on it. The privacy policy explains why this costs us nothing to promise: your audio never leaves your machine.

In return, you must have the right to use the audio you mix here. We do not check and we could not — we never see it. If you do not have that right, that is between you and whoever does.

What you are buying

A mix is a project: a fixed set of stems, plus everything you did to them.

• A credit is spent the first time you download a mix, never when you create a project. Building mixes costs nothing.
• A mix you have paid for is downloadable in every format we offer, including formats we add later. We do not sell formats separately.
• You can keep tweaking a paid mix and re-download it as many times as you like. Gain, EQ, dynamics, panning, ordering, all of it. Saved versions are unlimited on every plan.
• Adding or removing a stem makes it a different mix. That is the only line, because it is the only one nobody can argue about. If you are paying per mix, changing the stem set creates a new, unpaid project copied from the old one — the paid project stays intact and stays downloadable. Nothing is destroyed and nothing refuses you. If you have an active subscription or a perpetual licence at the moment you make the change, it does not split; you carry on in the same project.

Your mixes live only on your machine

Read this part twice. It is the thing people are most likely to be caught out by, and it follows from the product being built the way it is rather than from a policy we chose.

• Nothing you make is stored on our servers. Not the stems, not the rendered mix. We record that you bought a mix, not the mix.
• A paid mix is re-downloadable forever — but only while you still have the stems it was made from. Your purchase is recorded against that set of files. Clear your browser storage or move to a new machine, drop the same files again, and the download comes back.
• If you delete the source files, the mix is gone. The purchase survives. The audio does not.
• We do not back your mixes up and we cannot recover them. There is no copy on our side to restore from, and no amount of asking support will produce one.

Keep your original files. Downloaded mixes are files on your computer like any other — back them up the way you back up the rest of your work.

Using it fairly

Do not resell or share access to your account. Do not try to get round the download gate, and do not distribute anything that does. Do not use Finalist on material you have no right to use. We may suspend an account that does these things, and we will tell you why.

What we can and cannot promise

We will do our best to keep Finalist working and available, but we will not promise it is uninterrupted or error-free, because nobody honestly can. Browsers change, machines differ, and this is a large amount of audio processing running inside a web page.

We are responsible for delivering what you paid for. We are not responsible for audio you did not keep a copy of — see the section above, which is there so this is not a surprise. Nothing here limits the rights the law gives you as a consumer, or our responsibility for anything the law does not allow us to exclude.

Ending it

You can stop using Finalist whenever you like, and cancel a subscription from your account. We can suspend or close an account for non-payment, for a chargeback, or for a serious breach of these terms. If we do, files you have already downloaded remain yours.

Changes

These terms will change as the product does. If a change materially affects what you have already bought we will tell you before it takes effect. Changes never remove a mix you have already paid for.

Refunds — the 14-day right and its waiver

If you are a consumer in the UK or the EU, you have 14 days to cancel a purchase of digital content and get your money back, without giving a reason.

That right has one exception, and for a product like this one it usually applies. Once you have asked us to supply the download and we have supplied it, the 14-day right is gone — but only if you agreed to the download starting straight away and acknowledged that doing so gives up your right to cancel. You give both when you create your account — accepting these terms is where we ask, in those words, and it covers the purchases you go on to make with that account. If you were never asked, the 14 days still run.

In practice:

• Bought a credit and not spent it? Within 14 days, ask and we will refund it. Nothing has been supplied.
• Bought a credit and downloaded a mix with it? That one is supplied, and the right is waived.
• Subscription. You can cancel at any time and keep access until the end of the period you have paid for. If you cancel within 14 days of starting and have downloaded nothing under it, you can have the payment back.
• Desktop licence. Once you have activated it, it is supplied. Before that, the 14 days run normally.

And outside all of that

If something is broken, or Finalist did not do what we said it does, tell us. We would rather refund someone than argue with them. That is in addition to your legal rights, not instead of them.

What a refund takes with it

Refunds go back to the payment method you used, through Lemon Squeezy. A refunded order takes its entitlements with it: credits bought with it are removed, and a mix bought with those credits stops being available to re-download. Files you have already downloaded are yours and we do not touch them — we could not if we wanted to, since they are on your machine and not ours.

A payment we cannot take — a failed card, for example — does not cut you off immediately. Downloads keep working while the payment is retried, because a bank's fraud heuristic is not your fault.

Desktop licence

This section applies to the desktop version of Finalist, bought outright rather than subscribed to.

What you get

A personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use the desktop app on your own machines, on as many projects as you like, for as long as you like, with nothing further to pay.

Activations

• Up to three activations at once. A laptop, a desktop and a studio machine.
• You can deactivate a machine yourself from the website at any time, which frees the seat for another one.
• There is a reset-all-activations button you can use yourself, once a year, without contacting anybody.
• We identify a machine loosely — a random id in the app's support folder. Upgrading your RAM or swapping a drive does not cost you a seat.

Personal use, no redistribution

The licence is for you. Do not share, sell, rent, lend, sublicense or bundle the app or your licence key, and do not put either on a public site. Do not reverse-engineer, decompile or disassemble the app, except to the extent the law says you may regardless of what this says.

Which versions it covers

Your licence file states the version range it covers: the major version current when you bought it, and every update within that range. A future major version may be a separate purchase. We have not decided what it will cost existing licence holders and we have deliberately kept our options open, including being generous about it.

We cannot take it away, and we will not build a way to

When you activate, our server issues your machine a signed licence file. The app checks that signature locally, against a key built into the app itself. After that it never contacts a server again.

Which means: there is no revocation switch and we are not going to build one. Deactivating a seat frees it for another machine; it does not and cannot kill a licence file that has already been issued. If our servers go down, your copy keeps working. If we go out of business, your copy keeps working. If we fall out with you, your copy keeps working.

That is the whole point of buying something outright, and we would rather state it than let you wonder. It has a cost on our side and we accept it: we cannot fix a broken licence remotely, and we cannot stop somebody who copies a licence file. That is why the seat count is generous and lightly enforced instead of aggressive. We would rather be occasionally taken advantage of than treat everyone who paid us like a suspect.

Who these terms are with, and which law applies

TEXT NOT YET WRITTEN.

Not draftable from this repository, because it is facts rather than prose. Needed: the contracting entity's registered legal name, company number and registered address; an address to contact for support and for the refund requests described above; the governing law and the courts that have jurisdiction; and the standard consumer carve-out that lets a consumer bring proceedings in their own country. Everything above this section is a first draft by a non-lawyer — in particular the liability wording and the consumer-cancellation wording — and needs review before any of it is relied on.