Terms of Service

Using Penny Pincher means agreeing to what's on this page. It is written in plain English because the deal is simple: we watch prices, we tell you when they move, and neither of us pretends that makes us your shopkeeper. Plain English still counts as an agreement — this is the contract between you and Penny Pincher, operated from the United States.

The app, the service, and Apple's licence

Two different things, and it's worth being exact about which one this page is. The app — the software sitting on your iPhone — is licensed to you by Apple's standard licence for apps distributed through the App Store, the Licensed Application End User License Agreement. We don't write a competing one, and nothing here replaces it.

This page is the agreement for the service behind the app: the account, the watching, the checking, the alerts, and anything you pay for. That is what you're agreeing to by using Penny Pincher.

Penny Pincher is young software, published on the App Store. It has bugs. Features move, and occasionally one disappears because it wasn't good enough. We can change, suspend or shut the service down — in whole or in part — at any time; if a paid subscription is running when we do, the Penny Pincher Pro section below is what happens next.

No warranty

Penny Pincher is provided as is and as available, without warranty of any kind. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free, or that any price, alert or other information in it is accurate, complete or current.

Nothing here removes rights your local consumer law gives you and can't sign away. Some places don't allow the exclusion of certain warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

Prices are observations, not offers

Every price in Penny Pincher is a best-effort reading of a public page or a third-party data feed at one moment in time. It is not an offer, a quote or a promise, from us or from the retailer. Pages change, shops make mistakes, readings go stale, and prices vary by region, by variant and by whatever is in your basket — and shipping and tax happen after we look.

The price at the store's checkout is the only real one. Always check it there before you buy. We report prices; we can't honor them.

We can't promise an alert

Checks run on a schedule, not continuously, and extraction can fail. A drop can be missed, reported late, or reported wrong. Sites go down, pages get rebuilt, notification services hiccup, phones go offline. A missed alert is a bug we want to hear about, not a debt.

So, plainly: we are not liable for a deal you missed, a price you paid, a purchase you made or didn't make, or anything you decided on the strength of something Penny Pincher showed you. Nothing in the app is financial, tax or purchasing advice. Your buying decisions are yours.

We're not the store

Penny Pincher is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or in partnership with any retailer or brand it watches. Store names, product names, logos, images and trademarks belong to their owners and appear only to identify the products you chose to track. Your watch list and your targets are yours; the app, the name and our own marks are ours. Because you're asking us to watch them, you give us permission to store, copy, process and display the links, variants and targets you share, and to keep the resulting price history against the product, for as long as we run the service.

Affiliate links

Some outbound links to retailers — particularly from the "at other stores" and "similar deals" features, and possibly other store links — may be affiliate links, which means we may earn a commission if you buy, at no extra cost to you. It never affects which prices we show or when an alert fires. Once you tap through, you're dealing with that retailer under their terms, not ours. The same disclosure is on Privacy.

Who can use it

You need to be at least 13. If you're under the age of majority where you live, you need a parent or guardian to agree to these terms with you. You also confirm you're not barred from using the service under the laws that apply to you.

Your account

Give accurate information, keep your password to yourself, and tell us if you think someone else is in there. Everything done under your account is your responsibility. Deleting your account is always available in the app — see Privacy for exactly what deletion removes.

Penny Pincher Pro

Penny Pincher has a free tier and a paid one, and the free tier is a real product rather than a trailer for the paid one — it just has limits on it: how many products you can start watching each week, and how often we check them. Penny Pincher Pro lifts those limits: far more frequent checks, 90 days of price history, back-in-stock alerts and a much larger weekly allowance. What each tier includes is shown in the app, and it can change as the product does.

Pro is an auto-renewable subscription, billed monthly. In the United States it is $4.99 per month; everywhere else, the price your App Store shows for your region is the one that governs — local currency, local taxes, and that is the number to trust. New subscribers get a one-week free trial. If your Apple Account has already used the trial for this subscription, billing starts straight away, and the App Store says so before you confirm.

Apple takes the money, not us. Payment is charged to your Apple Account when you confirm the purchase. It renews automatically for another month unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the current period ends, and Apple charges the renewal within 24 hours of the period ending. A free trial works the same way: it turns into a paid month unless you cancel at least 24 hours before it runs out.

Cancelling is yours to do, and it lives in Settings. On your iPhone: Settings → Apple Account → Subscriptions. We cannot cancel it for you from our end, and deleting the app doesn't cancel it — nor does deleting your Penny Pincher account. Cancelling stops the next charge; Pro stays on until the period you've already paid for runs out, and there is no partial refund for the rest of it.

Refunds are Apple's to give. Every payment goes through Apple, so every refund request does too — reportaproblem.apple.com is the route, and the decision is Apple's, under Apple's terms. If the reason you want your money back is something we did, write to us anyway: we can't issue the refund, but we can tell Apple what happened, and we can fix the thing.

Prices change sometimes. If we change what Pro costs, Apple tells you before the new price takes effect and — depending on the size of the rise and where you live — asks you to agree to it; a subscription you don't agree to simply stops renewing. If we materially cut what Pro includes, or shut the service down while yours is running, you'll hear it from us before your next renewal, in time to cancel.

Fair use

Penny Pincher is for your own personal, non-commercial use. Watch as many products as you actually want to buy — the weekly allowance on your tier is the ceiling, and it is set for exactly that. Don't script the app or our API, don't use it as a scraping backend for something else, don't hammer or overload our servers, don't resell or redistribute our data, don't probe our systems or go looking for other people's accounts, and don't reverse engineer the service except to the extent the law says you may anyway. Ordinary personal use is generous by design; automated abuse is what ends an account. We may rate-limit, suspend or close accounts that do any of the above.

Feedback

Telling us what's wrong is how this gets better. If you send us ideas, bug reports, suggestions or feature requests, you give us the right to use them freely — to build, ship and improve Penny Pincher — with no obligation to you, no confidentiality, and no payment. You keep the right to use your own ideas however you like.

Ending it

You can stop using Penny Pincher and delete your account whenever you want. We can suspend or terminate an account that breaks these terms or the law, and we can discontinue the service. If we close your account, we'll tell you why where we can. Deleting your account does not cancel a Pro subscription — that lives in your Apple Account, and "Penny Pincher Pro" above says where. The sections that should outlive the account do: "Prices are observations, not offers", "We can't promise an alert", "No warranty", "We're not the store", "Penny Pincher Pro", "Feedback", "Apple's part in this", "What we owe you if it goes wrong", "If your use causes us trouble", "Which law applies" and "Housekeeping" — plus anything else that by its nature should survive, and any obligation that accrued before the account closed.

Apple's part in this

The app is distributed by Apple through the App Store, and Apple's own terms — the App Store terms — apply alongside these ones; if you are running a pre-release build through TestFlight, Apple's TestFlight terms also apply. A few things Apple requires us to say, and they're true:

• Your licence to use the app itself is Apple's, not ours: the standard Licensed Application End User License Agreement covers it — a limited, non-transferable licence to run Penny Pincher on an Apple-branded device you own or control, under Apple's App Store usage rules (and its TestFlight rules, if you are running a pre-release build). These terms cover the service the app talks to.
• These terms are between you and Penny Pincher only. Apple is not a party to them.
• Penny Pincher, not Apple, is responsible for providing any maintenance and support for the app. Apple has no obligation to provide any, and no warranty obligation of any kind for the app beyond this: if the app ever fails to conform to an applicable warranty, you can tell Apple and Apple will refund you the purchase price of the app — which is nothing, because the app itself costs nothing to install. Refunds for a Pro subscription are Apple's too, and "Penny Pincher Pro" above is how to ask for one. Any other claim about the app — product liability, legal compliance, intellectual property — is ours to handle, not Apple's.
• Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms, and once you accept them, Apple has the right to enforce them against you.
• You confirm you are not located in a country subject to a US Government embargo or designated as a "terrorist supporting" country, and that you are not on any US Government list of prohibited or restricted parties.

What we owe you if it goes wrong

To the fullest extent the law allows, Penny Pincher is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost savings, lost deals, lost data or loss of goodwill — even if we were told such damage was possible.

Our total liability for everything arising out of or relating to Penny Pincher is capped at the greater of fifty US dollars ($50) or the amount you actually paid for Penny Pincher in the twelve months before the claim — subscription payments included, whether they reached us through Apple or any other way. Never used a paid tier? Then the cap is the $50. Some places don't allow certain limits on liability, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

If your use causes us trouble

If someone brings a claim against us because of how you used Penny Pincher — breaking these terms, breaking the law, or stepping on someone else's rights — you agree to cover the reasonable costs and damages that come out of it. We will tell you promptly if that ever happens and let you take part in sorting it out.

Which law applies

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute goes to the state or federal courts located in Texas, and we both agree those courts can hear it. If your local consumer law gives you the right to sue closer to home, it keeps it.

Changes to these terms

These terms will change as Penny Pincher grows up. When they do, we'll post the new version with a new date at the top, and flag anything material in the app or by email. You agree we can send notices about the service and these terms by email or in the app, and that keeping your address current is on you. Carrying on using Penny Pincher after a change means the new version suits you. If it doesn't, the way out is both halves, in this order: cancel Pro in Settings → Apple Account → Subscriptions, then delete your account. Deleting alone leaves Apple still charging you.

Housekeeping

If a court decides some part of these terms can't stand, the rest stays in force. These terms, plus Privacy — and, for the app software itself, Apple's standard licence — are the whole agreement between us about Penny Pincher and replace anything said earlier. If we don't enforce something straight away, we haven't given up the right to enforce it later. You can't transfer your account or these terms to someone else; we can transfer them if the service moves to new hands.

If something goes wrong

Email contact@pennypincher.com before anything else. Almost everything that looks like a dispute is a bug, and a bug is faster to fix than an argument. More on how to reach us is on Contact.