Terms of Service & Data Use

v0 draft · July 1, 2026

Spotsheet is a professional spotting and cueing tool for sound editors. It is free. No tiers, no seats, no billing. These terms are meant to be read, not skimmed past; they say plainly what you can expect from us and what we do with data.

1. The service

Spotsheet lets you build spotting sheets and cues against picture, capture notes, organize sound work, collaborate with people you invite, and move your work into your digital audio workstation. The whole product is free of charge. There is no paid tier and nothing is held back behind one. We may add, change, or retire features as the product evolves.

2. Your account

• You must be at least 18 and using Spotsheet for professional or business work in audio post-production.
• You register with a real email address and must verify it. You are responsible for activity under your account and for keeping your password secure.
• One person per account. Invite collaborators instead of sharing a login; each collaborator gets their own account.

3. Collaboration

You can invite others to your projects and control what they can see and edit. You are responsible for whom you invite and for the access you grant. People you collaborate with may in turn own projects and invite you.

4. Your content stays yours

You own the projects, cues, notes, and other material you create in Spotsheet ("Your Content"). You give us permission to host, store, process, and display it, and nothing more, so we can run the service for you and the collaborators you authorize. That permission ends when you delete the content, apart from short-lived copies in routine backups.

5. What we never keep

This is the core of the deal, so it gets its own section:

• We never keep your video. Picture is referenced or processed transiently; your film is not stored in our data as media.
• We never keep your sound files. Spotsheet references your media where it already lives. We record only descriptive metadata about a sound: its name, source library, category, and characteristics.
• We never sell or share your project content or your client's material. Your spotting sheets, notes, and cue text are yours and your collaborators' to see, no one else's.

You are responsible for holding the rights to the media and libraries you reference through Spotsheet, and for honoring their license terms.

6. Data use (the plain-English grant)

To run Spotsheet and keep making it better, we use two kinds of data:

• Operating data. Your account info, projects, cues, and activity are processed to deliver the service to you: sync, collaboration, exports, notifications.
• De-identified, aggregated patterns. We derive abstracted patterns from how the tool is used, for example which cue categories tend to appear together, how spotting decisions cluster, and descriptive sound metadata. This data is stripped of identity and aggregated, and we use it to improve the product, including improving the suggestion and categorization models that power features like cue suggestions and UCS matching.

The scope is abstracted patterns only. This grant never covers your raw media, your project content, or your client files, and we do not attempt to re-identify de-identified data. We do not sell your personal information or your identifiable work.

How we handle personal information is described in the Privacy Policy.

7. Fair use of the service

Don't use Spotsheet to break the law or infringe anyone's rights. Don't try to access accounts or data that aren't yours, probe or disrupt the service, scrape or bulk-export data other than your own, resell the service, or upload malware.

8. No warranty; limits

Spotsheet is provided as is, free, without warranties of any kind. We work hard to keep it fast and reliable, but we don't promise uninterrupted service or that data will never be lost; keep your own backups of anything you can't afford to lose. To the maximum extent the law allows, our total liability for any claim relating to the service is capped at one hundred U.S. dollars ($100).

9. Ending things

You can stop using Spotsheet any time and ask us to delete your account. We may suspend or close accounts that violate these terms. Sections 4 through 8 survive account closure.

10. Changes and governing law

If we change these terms in a way that matters, we'll update the version and date above and, where appropriate, tell you. Continued use after a change means you accept it. These terms are governed by California law, with disputes handled in the state and federal courts of Los Angeles County.

11. Contact

Questions: murphy@murphyryan.com. "Spotsheet," "we," and "us" mean the Spotsheet service, currently operated by J. Murphy Ryan; we may assign these terms to an affiliated company we form, and they continue in force.