Terms and refunds

Last updated: 21 September 2026

YAMP is a meal planner that runs on a server. The software is free and open source under the AGPL, and it always will be. Separately from that, the author runs it for you at meals.marcuslab.uk, and these terms cover that service.

If you self-host, almost none of this applies

Running the software yourself is a licence, not a service. What governs it is the AGPL-3.0 and nothing here: no fee, no account with anybody, no uptime promise from anyone but you, and no way for this project to switch anything off. The only sections below that are worth your time are Acceptable use, which is about a server you do not own, and The software itself.

Everything else assumes you are paying somebody to run YAMP for you.

What is on offer, and what it costs

The hosted service is the same software as the repository, running on the author's hardware, with the database backed up nightly and the backups tested.


What you get	One household on a shared server: the API, the web app, the iOS app, the MCP endpoint, and the AI skill. No feature is held back for a higher tier.
Price	£20 per year, per household. Annual only, paid up front.
Founding price	Whatever you first paid is what you keep paying, for as long as you keep paying it. It is recorded against your household rather than promised in a document.
Included	Free members of the same household up to the published limit, every endpoint, and unlimited export.

On sale since 24 August 2026. Anyone can create a household on the web app. Until it is paid for, a household lives within the free limits the server publishes (the web app's Settings shows them, and where you stand), and paying for the year lifts them.

Paying

Payment is taken on the web, from Settings, by the member the household is billed to. It goes through Stripe Managed Payments, which means Stripe is the merchant of record: the legal seller, holding the card details and issuing the receipt. Card details never reach this server or its author. What this server holds is the fact that a household is paid up, until when, and what it agreed to pay. The privacy policy (/privacy on the same server) says the same thing from the other direction, and both are updated together.

Managing or cancelling a subscription is done in Stripe's own billing page, which Settings links to directly.

VAT, where it applies, is included in the price.

Refunds

Full refund inside 30 days, for any reason or none. Ask (see Contact) and it is done. There is nothing to argue about at £20, and arguing would cost more than the refund.

After 30 days, a year already paid for is not refunded, but you can cancel at any time and simply not be charged again. If the service is shut down mid-year, see If the service ends below.

What is actually promised

This is a one-person operation and the promise is sized to match, because a number nobody can keep is worth less than an honest one.

Best effort, no SLA. No uptime percentage is promised, because there is no second person to page at three in the morning. In practice it runs on a monitored machine with alerting, and the author uses it daily for his own household, which is the real guarantee.
Nightly backups, and they are tested. A dump is taken every night and read back before it counts, retained daily and weekly, and copied off the machine encrypted. The restore procedure is written down and has been rehearsed.
Planned downtime is not announced. Deploys are zero downtime and take seconds. Anything larger will be brief.
Support is GitHub issues, with a reply within a week, which is what the support page (/support on the same server) says too.
Data loss. Backups exist and are tested precisely because no promise can replace them. Keep your own copy: GET /household/export returns everything your household owns in one request, free, on every tier, forever.

Cancelling, and what happens next

Cancel whenever you like. Nothing about it is designed to be difficult.

Nothing is deleted. Not at cancellation, not at expiry, not later. Your recipes, plans, lists and cooked history stay exactly where they are and stay readable.
There is a grace period of 14 days after the paid year ends. During it nothing changes at all.
After that, the free limits re-apply. That blocks only the writes that grow the household: no new recipe past the free allowance, no new invite. Everything already there stays readable, the plan stays usable, members stay members, and the shopping list keeps working in full. The published numbers are in the freemium plan.
Export never stops working. It is free in every tier and is not affected by lapsing, because a service that makes leaving difficult has not earned anybody staying.
Deleting your account is yours to do, from inside the app, at any time. That one really does delete things, immediately and without undo, as the privacy policy (/privacy) spells out.

If the service ends

If the hosted service is withdrawn, you get at least 90 days' notice and a pro-rata refund of the unused part of your year. The software is AGPL and the export is one request, so the migration path is the same one that has always been there: run it yourself, or ask somebody else to.

Acceptable use

Short, because it is a meal planner.

Do not use it to break the law, to attack the server, or to store other people's personal data without their say-so.
Do not use the recipe importer as a general-purpose web fetcher. It exists to read recipe pages, and it is metered.
An invite code admits somebody to your household and everything in it. Who you give one to is your decision and your responsibility.
Accounts may be suspended for any of the above. That is the only reason an account gets suspended, and it comes with an explanation and a refund of the unused part of the year.

The software itself

The software is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 and comes with no warranty, exactly as that licence says. These terms cover the service of running it for you, and they do not add any warranty to the software or take one away.

If you self-host, the AGPL is the whole agreement. There is nothing to accept and nobody to accept it from.

Changes to these terms

They live in the public source repository, so the full history is public. Material changes are noted in the changelog and the date at the top of this file changes. A change that affects what you are paying for takes effect at your next renewal, never mid-year.

Who you are dealing with

The hosted service is operated by the author of this project, in the United Kingdom. Nothing on this page limits any right you have under UK consumer law, including your statutory cancellation rights, which sit alongside the refund promise above rather than replacing it.

Contact

Open an issue at https://github.com/marco308/meals/issues, which reaches the author directly. For anything you would rather not say in public, including a billing question, use GitHub's private reporting form, which is private to the two of us and is not only for security reports.

This is a one-person project, not a company with a support desk. Expect a reply within a week.