How we build Terms of Us.

Where our words come from

The clause registry holds sixty-five records: fifty from the book and fifteen from the platform. sixty-four records are browseable in the app. One book clause is held for specialist review and is not shown there. fifteen platform clauses can be suggested from your answers. Each record says what it settles, when it applies, and what it cannot do.

The book is Written Down: An honest guide to cohabitation and relationship agreements, which Terms of Us will publish.

We never state the law in our own voice. Every sentence about the law on this site is a pointer to an official page — GOV.UK, legislation.gov.uk, the Law Commission, Parliament or the Judiciary — marked in force or proposed, and a test refuses a page that states it any other way.

Held byAn automated check of every post and the home page, before every release

Safety

• Get help now is free, works signed out, and stores nothing.

  No account, no cookie, no analytics, no server log of any answer. Every contact detail on it is verified at source and rendered from one record; a hand-typed phone number cannot compile in.

  Held byAutomated tests, and a walk in a real browser, before every release

• A safety flag withholds the couples work, through one reader that fails closed.

  Where the flag is set, the support modules, the witnesses, the mutual undertaking and the clause recommendations are replaced with a notice routing to specialist services. A missing record is not a licence. The intake that sets the flag is still being built.

  Held byAn automated test of the one reader, before every release

• A quick exit sits wherever it is needed.

  On Get help now, the legal pages and the Front Door’s safe path: one press leaves for a weather site, and it says plainly that it does not clear your history.

  Held byAn automated test, before every release

• No upgrade prompt renders inside a crisis, breach, reset or parting flow.

  Not the plan badge either. There is no wording of a plan name that is neutral in a room someone entered in trouble.

  Held byasserted by test on the refuge routes

Privacy

• Every kind of data we hold has a published rule.

  The retention table lists every data class, what ends it, and what happens to it when you leave. A class with no public row fails the build.

  Held by/legal/retention, and the build fails on a class with no row

• No advertising, no data sold, no third-party analytics.

  The site loads from one origin. The fonts are our own files. Nothing on any page reports to anyone else.

  Held byAn automated test and the payload budget, before every release

• Your raw answers are never shown to your partner.

  Not in the report, not in any joint document. Enforced where the data is read, not where it is drawn.

  Held byrule 11, at the query layer

• Every message we send is discreet on the outside.

  The subject line, the preview and the sender name say nothing about relationships, assessment, counselling or difficulty. Only the product name, which says nothing on its own.

  Held byasserted by test on every template

• When the pilot ends, what it held is deleted unless you ask otherwise.

  The pilot ends when Terms of Us opens to everyone. At that moment, everything held for pilot accounts is deleted, unless you ask for yours to be carried into Terms of Us. Your partner makes their own choice, and neither of you is told what the other chose.

  Held byThe retention table

Accessibility

Every public page is scanned in both themes at two widths for critical and serious issues before a build can ship, every interactive element has all of its states, and reduced motion shows every end state. The accessibility statement says what we have not yet met.

Held byScanned in a real browser, in both themes, before every release