The Litter Tray

Terms of Service

Operated by: The Litter Tray, based in the Isle of Man.

Postal address: Mike @ PO Box 5, Ramsey, Isle of Man, IM99 4RE.

Email: office@thelittertray.app

Last updated: 20 September 2026

These terms are a contract between you and The Litter Tray ("we", "us"). By creating an account or using The Litter Tray, you agree to them. If you do not agree, do not use the service. We mean that kindly, not sternly.

We have written these in plain language on purpose. Where a sentence has to carry legal weight, it does; we have not hidden anything important in long words.

1. What The Litter Tray is

The Litter Tray is a comment-moderation service for YouTube channel owners. You connect your own channel; the service keeps a private archive of its comments, uses an AI classifier to flag likely bad-faith attacks, and carries out moderation actions on YouTube using your channel's own authority: the same actions you could take yourself in YouTube Studio.

2. Where the product is today: read this section, it is the honest one

The Litter Tray is young software, newly opened to its first customers. That means:

  • Creating an account is open. A verified identity may create a tray while capacity allows; free-plan places are limited and may close from time to time even while paid places remain. Sign in with Google to create your account, free. A verified Google identity may then create one tray. Connecting a YouTube channel is part of setting that tray up; it is not a separate invitation or guest-list step. The launch capacity is 125 trays. When that number is reached, new trays are refused until a place is free. That limit is about how many trays we take on during launch, not about who is invited. Free-plan places may close before it is reached. A tray's owner may invite collaborators into that tray; those invitations are not a way of creating a new tray.

    24 August 2026. The sentences above replace the tester-week wording: "Creating an account is open to anyone; connecting a channel takes a seat. Sign in with Google to create your account, free. Connecting a channel takes one of a limited number of seats, first come and first served. We may decline, limit, or withdraw a seat at our discretion. A seat is personal to you and may not be transferred or shared." The named-email seat allowlist that wording described was retired on 23 August 2026. The launch capacity remains as published above. Suspension and closure are still governed by section 11; this amendment does not add a new discretion to withdraw a tray.

  • There is a Free Plan, and there are paid ones. The Free Plan takes no payment method and does not expire. It is kept by being used instead: a free tray that nobody who administers it has signed into for 3 days is paused and its owner is emailed, and if nobody signs in by day 5 the tray is closed and its imported data is wiped. Signing in stops that and puts the tray back as it was. Paid plans never pause and are never closed for going unused. Paid-plan prices are listed on the plans page; we will tell you before we ever take a payment from you. Billing, cancellation and refunds are in section 10.
  • It will have rough edges. Features may change, break, or disappear without notice. There is no service-level commitment, no uptime guarantee, and no support commitment beyond our honest best effort.
  • If we ever have to end the service. We may close it, or migrate it to a different product. If ending it means deleting your data, we will give you reasonable notice and a chance to obtain a copy of your archive first. That is the one promise we do make firmly, because the archive is the point of the product.
  • Feedback is the price of admission. We may ask what is working and what is not. You are never obliged to answer, but we will ask.

3. Eligibility and your account

  • You must be at least 18 years old.
  • You must be the owner of the YouTube channel you connect, or have the channel owner's explicit authority to operate it, and if it is the latter, you are responsible for having that authority in fact.
  • Keep your login credentials secret and your account secure. You are responsible for activity on your account. Tell us promptly at office@thelittertray.app if you believe your account has been compromised.
  • Give us accurate information and keep it current.

4. Connecting your YouTube channel

You connect your channel through Google sign-in (OAuth). By using The Litter Tray's YouTube features, you also agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google's handling of your data is described in the Google Privacy Policy.

You can revoke The Litter Tray's access to your Google account at any time via Google's security settings. Revoking access stops the tray for that channel. Wiping the imported archive is a separate, deliberate Disconnect inside the app.

We store the OAuth tokens Google issues us encrypted on our servers. We never see your Google password.

5. What the service does, and who is responsible

  • The service mirrors your channel's comments into a private archive, classifies them with an AI model, and, only under the modes and rules you configure, holds, releases, or removes comments on YouTube using your channel's authority.
  • You are the moderator; the tool is your instrument. Moderation decisions carried out through the service are your decisions, made under your channel's authority and your configuration. You are responsible for them, including for complying with YouTube's policies and any law that applies to how you run your community.
  • AI classification is assistance, not judgment. Classifiers make mistakes. The service is designed to be conservative, but you should not treat any automated flag as a fact about a person or a comment. Destructive actions require your explicit confirmation.
  • The archive is a private working record. It contains comments YouTube returned to the tray and the moderation around them, not a complete YouTube history. Comments you have acted on, pending decisions, comments by banned or probated authors, and name-pattern matches currently keep stored text even if they later become unavailable on YouTube. Other stored text can later be removed after a delay from the last successful sighting. This describes present behavior, not a promise of permanent storage or a YouTube policy exemption. Our Privacy Policy describes it, and by using the service you instruct us to operate the archive as that policy describes.

6. Acceptable use

Use the service only to moderate channels you legitimately control. Do not:

  • use it to harass, stalk, or build dossiers on people beyond the legitimate moderation of your own community;
  • attempt to access another customer's archive, probe or overload the service, or bypass its security;
  • scrape the service, resell access, or share your account;
  • use it for anything unlawful, or in ways that would put us in breach of YouTube's or Google's terms;
  • misrepresent the archive's contents: the record is only worth keeping if it is honest.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that break this section (section 11).

7. Your data and privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect, why, who we share it with, and how deletion works. It is part of the deal, and we wrote it to be read.

Three points worth restating here because they are contractual:

  • Your private moderation record is held in the live tray under the retention rules described in the Privacy Policy. Account closure and Disconnect wipe imported data from the live tray. Backups made before a disconnect or switch are retained separately. Backup rotation does not guarantee a fixed deletion date. A comment no longer returned by a successful YouTube check is unavailable; that is not proof of who removed it.
  • For your channel's comment data we act as your processor, handling it on your documented instructions as expressed through these terms and the app's controls; we act as an independent controller only for our own account records and the limited platform-safety purposes the Privacy Policy describes. A fuller data-processing addendum will accompany paid launch.
  • We do not sell your data, run advertising against it, or train AI models on it.

8. Intellectual property

  • The service, its software, and its branding are ours. We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the service, for as long as your account is open, for moderating your own channel(s). That licence is all these terms transfer; we keep everything else.
  • Your channel's comments belong to whoever wrote them, under YouTube's terms; your configuration and moderation record are yours. We claim no ownership over any of it: we process it to provide the service, as the Privacy Policy describes.

9. Feedback

If you send us ideas, suggestions, or bug reports about the service, we may use them to improve the product without owing you anything. We will not name you publicly as the source without asking first.

10. Plans, billing, cancellation and refunds

There is a Free Plan and there are paid plans. The Free Plan collects no payment method and does not expire. Subscriber count is not an eligibility gate. The plans, what each one costs and what each one includes are set out in the pricing on our plans page. That page is the authoritative price list; these terms quote no prices, so a stale number can never bind you here.

Plans differ by allowances (how much AI reading, and how often we check for new comments), never by features.

A paid plan is a subscription. You choose monthly or annual billing, and it renews automatically until you cancel. Payment is taken through Paddle, who act as merchant of record: your purchase is made from Paddle, their buyer terms apply to that purchase, your receipt comes from them, and your card details go to them and never reach us. If you hold an account today, we will tell you before we ever take a payment from you; nothing starts charging quietly.

Your first subscription payment comes with a 14-day no-quibble refund: tell us within 14 days and we refund it in full. You can cancel any time; your plan then runs to the end of the period you have paid for, and we do not make partial refunds for unused time. Nothing here limits any consumer rights the law gives you where you live.

For payments after that first one, we refund where the law requires it, and otherwise case by case at our discretion: write to us and we will deal with you straight. Paddle, as merchant of record, can also issue refunds under its own buyer terms; a refund from Paddle counts as a refund from us.

If a paid subscription lapses, the tray continues on the Free Plan and the Free Plan attendance rule applies (section 2). Nothing is deleted because a subscription lapses.

11. Suspension and termination

  • You can leave at any time: email us to close your account. Closure triggers deletion of your imported data as the Privacy Policy describes.
  • We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially breach these terms, if we must for legal or security reasons, or if we end the service (section 2). Where it is reasonable to do so, we will warn you first and give you a chance to take a copy of your archive.
  • Free trays close for inactivity, and never without warning. Under the Free Plan's attendance rule (section 2), a free tray nobody has signed into for 3 days is paused and its owner is emailed at the address on the account; if nobody has signed in by day 5, the tray is closed and its imported data is wiped, on the same terms as a closure you asked for. Signing in at any point before then stops it. We do not close a tray this way unless that email was actually sent, so a tray we cannot reach stays open and waits for a person instead. This applies to the Free Plan only: paid plans never pause and are never closed for going unused.
  • Sections that by their nature should survive termination do: 8 (IP), 12 (disclaimers), 13 (liability), 15 (governing law).

12. Disclaimers

The service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. In particular, we do not warrant that:

  • classification will be accurate, complete, or timely;
  • the service will be uninterrupted or error-free (it is young software; it will sometimes be both);
  • YouTube's API will behave, or that actions taken there are reversible: some YouTube moderation actions are irreversible by design, and the service warns you before those.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud.

13. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses, loss of profits, loss of data (beyond our Privacy Policy obligations), or loss of goodwill arising from the service. Our total aggregate liability to you for all claims arising out of the service is capped at £100, or the amounts you paid us in the 12 months before the claim if you have paid, whichever is greater. If you have not paid us, the cap is £100.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. For anything material we will notify you (in-app or by email) reasonably before the change takes effect; continuing to use the service after that is acceptance. If you do not accept a change, email us to close your account before it takes effect and the old terms govern the ending of the relationship.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the Isle of Man, and the Isle of Man courts have exclusive jurisdiction, except that if you are a consumer with mandatory protections in your home country, you keep those and may bring proceedings there.

16. General

  • If part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.
  • These terms plus the Privacy Policy and Cookie Notice are the whole agreement between us about the service.
  • We may assign this agreement as part of a reorganisation or sale of the business; you may not assign it without our consent.
  • Not enforcing a term today does not waive it tomorrow.

17. Contact

The Litter Tray
the trading name of Evolved Software Studios Ltd, an Isle of Man company
Mike @ PO Box 5, Ramsey, Isle of Man, IM99 4RE
office@thelittertray.app