1. Who we are and what these Terms cover
Sealed is a mobile app that lets the people at an event — a party, a wedding, a trip — take photos, voice memos, and text notes that nobody can see until the host's chosen "reveal" time arrives. Sealed is operated by Louis Krause, an individual based in Hamburg, Germany (see our Legal Notice for full contact details) — "we", "us", "our".
These Terms of Service ("Terms") form a contract between you and us for your use of the Sealed app and any related services (together, the "Service"). By creating an account, joining an event, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy, which explains how we handle your data. If you do not agree, please do not use Sealed.
2. Who can use Sealed
- You must be at least 16 years old to create a Sealed account or join an event.
- You must have the legal capacity to enter into a binding contract in your country of residence.
- If you host an event, you are responsible for deciding who you invite, including making sure your guests meet this minimum age.
- If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will delete or disable that account.
3. Accounts and guest sessions
Hosts sign in with a Google account. Guests can join an event without creating an account, using an anonymous session tied to their device; a guest can later turn that into a full account. You are responsible for anything that happens through your account or session, and for keeping your device and sign-in credentials secure. Tell us right away at support@sealed-events.com if you suspect unauthorized use.
Each event has a maximum number of guests ("guest cap") set by its plan. We count distinct devices that have joined an event to enforce this cap, and that count does not go down when someone leaves. Deliberately working around the guest cap — for example by repeatedly reinstalling the app, using multiple devices, or any other technical means to make the app think a new guest is joining — is a violation of these Terms.
4. How the Service works
- A host creates an event with a start time, end time, and a reveal time. Guests join using an invite code, QR code, or link.
- During the recording window, participants can take photos, record short voice memos (up to 30 seconds), and leave short text notes (up to 1,000 characters).
- Nobody — including the person who captured it and the host — can view this content before the event's reveal time. This time-lock is enforced on our servers, based on server time, not on any setting in the app or on your device's clock. Section 10 explains the one necessary exception to this.
- Once the reveal time passes, every participant can see everything captured during the event in a shared gallery, and download photos or play back voice memos.
- A host can push the reveal time later, but never earlier, and only before the reveal has happened.
- Captured content and the event itself are automatically and permanently deleted a set number of days after the reveal (currently 7 days) — see Section 8.
We may change, add to, or remove features of the Service at any time, and we don't guarantee that the Service will always be available, free of interruptions, or free of errors.
5. Your content
You keep ownership of the photos, voice memos, and text notes you create ("Your Content"). By submitting Your Content, you give us, the host of that event, and the other participants of that event a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to store, process, reproduce, and display Your Content for the purpose of operating the event and the Service — including generating thumbnails, applying the optional on-device film-look effect you chose, and making it visible to other participants after the reveal.
You confirm that:
- you own Your Content or otherwise have the rights needed to share it this way;
- sharing it through Sealed does not infringe anyone else's rights, including copyright and personality or image rights; and
- where Your Content shows another person, you have a reasonable basis to believe that person is comfortable being photographed or recorded at the event and having that image or recording seen by the other participants once revealed. Depending on where you are, this may be a legal requirement, not just good practice.
You can choose to show your display name or submit voice memos and text notes anonymously using the in-app toggle. "Anonymous" only hides your name from other guests — the host, and we, can still see who actually submitted something, which we need in order to act on reports and enforce these Terms.
We act as a neutral host for content that participants create about each other. We are not responsible for resolving disputes between participants about photos, voice memos, or text notes one of them created of another — for example, if one guest objects to being shown in another guest's photo. We ask that guests sort this out between themselves, using the reporting and blocking tools described below, or the host's own moderation.
6. Acceptable use
You agree not to use Sealed to:
- upload or share anything illegal, or content that is abusive, harassing, hateful, discriminatory, sexually explicit, or that sexualizes or endangers minors in any way;
- impersonate another person or misrepresent your affiliation with anyone;
- infringe someone else's intellectual property, privacy, or personality rights;
- attempt to access, read, or extract content before an event's reveal time by any technical means, including by calling our servers directly instead of through the app;
- interfere with, disrupt, reverse-engineer, scrape, or probe the Service or its infrastructure;
- circumvent an event's guest cap, as described in Section 3; or
- use the Service for any purpose that is unlawful or prohibited by these Terms.
We have zero tolerance for objectionable content and abusive behavior. We may remove content, suspend or block a user from an event, or terminate an account at any time, with or without notice, if we reasonably believe these Terms have been violated.
7. Reporting, blocking, and moderation
You can report a photo, voice memo, or text note you believe violates these Terms, and you can block another participant, which hides that person's content from your own gallery. Hosts can additionally hide or delete any content in their own event and remove or block a guest from it.
We review reports and aim to act on them — which may include removing content or suspending an account — within 24 hours. Blocking or reporting someone does not guarantee a particular outcome; we use our judgment based on these Terms and applicable law.
8. How long we keep content, and deleting your account
- Photos, voice memos, text notes, and an event's cover photo are automatically and permanently deleted a set number of days after that event's reveal (currently 7 days). After that, the event itself still appears in participants' event lists, marked as expired, but without any of its media content.
- You can delete your Sealed account at any time from Settings. This permanently closes your account and signs you out. Any events you host are deleted along with their content. Content you contributed to other people's events (photos, voice memos, text notes) stays visible to those events' other participants, but your name is removed from it, the same way "Anonymous" content is shown.
- Account deletion cannot be undone, and we cannot restore a deleted account or re-attach your name to content after the fact.
9. Payments
Sealed is currently free to use. We may introduce paid plans in the future — for example, higher guest limits for an event. If we do, purchases will go through Apple's or Google's in-app purchase systems, and we'll update these Terms and tell you what you're paying for before you pay. Refunds for any future paid feature are handled under Apple's or Google's own refund policies, not by us directly, since those platforms process the payment.
10. An honest note about our own access
The reveal time-lock is enforced by our servers and is designed so that no participant — including the person who captured the content and the host — can see content before the reveal, no matter what. It is not designed to be a barrier against us, the operator. Administrative access to our infrastructure (for example, to fix a bug, respond to a valid legal request, or investigate a report of abuse) can technically reach stored content before a reveal. We do not look at content as a matter of routine, and no one manually previews photos, voice memos, or text notes before a reveal in the ordinary course of business. See our Privacy Policy for more detail.
11. Third-party services we rely on
Sealed depends on infrastructure we don't operate ourselves — our database and file storage provider, Apple's and Google's push-notification and app-store systems, and similar infrastructure named in our Privacy Policy. We are not responsible for outages, data loss, or other problems caused by those third-party services themselves, though we'll try to help where we reasonably can.
12. Disclaimers
The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including any warranty that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that content you submit will never be lost, delayed, or corrupted. Photos, voice memos, and text notes can be lost — for example because of a network failure during upload, a device problem, or an outage at a service we rely on — and we recommend you don't treat Sealed as your only copy of anything irreplaceable.
13. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, content, goodwill, or profits, arising from your use of, or inability to use, the Service.
Nothing in these Terms limits our liability for intent or gross negligence, for injury to life, body, or health, for liability under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), or for any other liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law. Where our liability is limited, it is limited to the damage that was typically foreseeable at the time the relevant obligation was assumed. If you are a consumer, the mandatory consumer-protection laws of your country of residence are not affected by this Section.
14. Indemnification
To the extent permitted by applicable law, you agree to compensate us for any claim a third party brings against us arising from your breach of these Terms or your violation of applicable law or someone else's rights through your use of the Service, including reasonable legal costs — except to the extent the claim is caused by us.
15. Suspension and termination
You can stop using Sealed and delete your account at any time (Section 8). We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service if you violate these Terms, if required by law, or if we discontinue the Service or a feature of it. Where reasonably possible, we will give you notice first.
16. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time, for example as we add features or as the law changes. If we make a material change, we'll let you know in the app or by email before it takes effect. Continuing to use Sealed after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms.
17. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of Germany, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. If you are a consumer habitually resident in another EU member state, you also keep the protection of any mandatory consumer-protection provisions of that country's law. To the extent legally permitted, the courts of Hamburg, Germany have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from these Terms.
We are not obliged and not willing to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board (Verbraucherschlichtungsstelle).
18. Contact
Questions about these Terms? Reach us at support@sealed-events.com. Our full legal contact details are in the Legal Notice.