What Agora is

Agora is a place to write to interpretations of five dead philosophers — Seneca, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Kierkegaard and Montaigne — and to keep what they say to you.

The answers are generated by a language model. They are not written by the philosophers, who are dead, and they are not a reconstruction of what those men would have said. They are an interpretation, built from the work published under their names, and they can be wrong about anything, including that work.

Nothing here is advice — not medical, legal, financial, or psychological. If you are making a decision that needs a professional, the professional is the one to ask. If you are in danger, the app says so and points you at a line that can actually help; it is not that line.

Your account

You sign in with an email address and a password, or through Google. A code sent to the address confirms it once, and stands in for a forgotten password. One account belongs to one person. You are responsible for what is sent from it.

You need to be old enough to enter a contract where you live. Agora is not built for children.

What is free, and what costs money

Every account gets three answers and one council — five voices answering one question — at no cost and without a card. The two counters are independent and the order you spend them in does not matter. An answer that fails to arrive is not counted.

After that, the composer closes and a subscription opens it again. There are two plans: Companion, with 150 answers a month, at €6 a month or €58 a year; and Symposium, with 500 answers a month, at €12 a month or €115 a year. Prices include VAT where VAT applies. There is nothing inside a plan that costs extra.

An answer is one voice answering once: a question to one voice is one answer, a council of five voices is five, and a request to say it shorter or differently is one. An answer that fails to arrive is not counted. The allowance starts again every month from the day the plan began, whether it is paid monthly or yearly, and unused answers do not carry over. When the month's answers are spent, the composer closes until they start again or until you move to the larger plan; everything already read stays readable.

Staying free is a state, not a lock. Everything you have already read stays readable, searchable and exportable for as long as the account exists.

Cancelling

You can cancel at any time, from Settings, without giving a reason and without talking to anyone. Access runs to the end of the period you have already paid for; nothing is charged after that, and nothing is refunded for the part of the period you did not use, except under the withdrawal right below.

Cancelling does not delete anything and does not reset the free counters.

Withdrawal, and the waiver

If you are a consumer in the EU you have fourteen days to withdraw from a contract for digital services and get your money back.

Because the service starts working the moment you pay, the checkout asks you to agree that it may start immediately and to acknowledge that this ends the withdrawal right. That box is ticked by default and you can untick it; if you do, the service waits.

[LAWYER: confirm that the default-ticked waiver is lawful in the country of incorporation and under the Consumer Rights Directive as implemented there. This is the single most likely thing in this document to be wrong.]

What not to do with it

Do not use Agora to generate material that is illegal where you are, to harass anyone, or to impersonate a real person. Do not try to extract the prompts, resell the answers as a product, or automate the service against its interface.

We can close an account that does these things. If we do, you can still export everything in it first, unless the law says otherwise.

Availability

The service is offered as it is. It will sometimes be slow, and sometimes a voice will not answer — when that happens nothing is counted against you.

We do not promise a particular uptime. If the service is unavailable for a long stretch of a period you paid for, write and we will sort it out.

Liability

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, liability is limited to the amount you paid in the twelve months before the thing complained about, and does not extend to decisions you made after reading an answer.

[LAWYER: this clause has to be checked against consumer law in [COUNTRY OF INCORPORATION]. A liability cap that is unenforceable against consumers is worse than none, because it looks like protection and is not.]

Changes

If these terms change in a way that matters, the change is announced in the app and by email at least thirty days before it takes effect, and you can cancel before it does.

Law

These terms are governed by the law of [COUNTRY OF INCORPORATION]. If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory law where you live, and it does not stop you bringing a claim in your own courts.

What is stored

Your email address, and your password — only as a one-way hash, held by Supabase, which nobody can read back, us included. Your conversations: every question you wrote, every answer a voice gave, which voices were in the room and when they joined or left, which lines you kept, and any draft you have not sent.

Two counters for the free tier; which plan you are on and when it renews; Paddle's identifiers for your subscription and last payment; and a label for the payment method such as "Visa ·6411". Card numbers are never stored here and never reach this service.

When you were last here, which is what decides whether the app greets you as someone returning.

There is no analytics, no advertising identifier, no third-party tracker and no profiling. The only cookie is the one that keeps you signed in.

Why, and on what basis

To run the service you asked for: that is the contract between us, and it covers your account, your conversations and your subscription.

To keep invoices, which tax law requires for a fixed number of years whatever either of us would prefer.

To keep the service working and not abused — a legitimate interest, and the reason there are rate limits on sending sign-in codes.

Who else touches it

Supabase — the database and the sign-in system. Your account and every conversation live there.

Railway — the hosting. The application runs there and its logs pass through it.

Anthropic — the language model. Your question and the conversation it belongs to are sent so that an answer can be generated.

Resend — the mail. Your address is used to deliver sign-in codes and receipts.

Paddle.com — the payment provider, and the merchant of record for every subscription: it sells the subscription, takes the payment, works out and pays VAT, and issues the invoice. Your card details go to Paddle and never reach Agora; what Agora keeps is a label such as "Visa ·6411".

[LAWYER: this list has to be checked, each processor's data-processing agreement signed, and any transfer outside the EEA documented with its safeguard.]

How long

Conversations are kept until you delete them or delete the account. Nothing is archived, nothing expires and nothing is deleted for being old — threads are meant to run for years.

Deleting the account removes it and everything hanging off it: conversations, messages, the roster, kept lines. Invoices are kept for as long as tax law requires, because they have to be.

What you can do about it

Export everything, as Markdown or as JSON, from the account menu or from Settings, without asking anyone. That is the right of access, built as a button.

Delete a conversation, or the whole account, from Settings. Deletion is immediate and there is no copy kept.

Correct your email address, object to processing, or complain to the supervisory authority where you live.

Your words and the model

Your conversations are sent to the model so that it can answer them. They are not used to train it.

[LAWYER: confirm this against the commercial terms in force with the model provider before it is published as a promise.]