Terms of sale and use.

Effective 28 July 2026. These are the terms your purchase is made on, and the terms you use Glacier under.

1Who you are contracting with

Glacier is made and sold by Obake Studio Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales. In these terms, "we", "us" and "our" mean Obake Studio Ltd, and "you" means the person buying or using Glacier.

Email is how you reach us for everything — support, refunds, cancellations and complaints — and it is the fastest way. We answer as promptly as a small studio can, and within one working week at the outside.

2What Glacier is, and what it needs

Glacier is writing software: a tree of scenes, a board of cards and a prose editor, holding the plan of a story and the draft of it in the same place. It supports prose, screenplay, TV drama, TV sitcom, comic and radio formats.

Where your work is kept — read this one

Glacier stores your manuscript on your own device. It is not uploaded to us and we keep no copy of it. Exactly how it is stored depends on where you run it:

• Desktop Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave and similar, on macOS, Windows and Linux) — your story is written to a real file on your drive as you type.
• Other browsers, including Safari, Firefox and browsers on mobile — your story is held in your browser's own storage for this site. Back up and Open move it in and out.
• The desktop application — a native build for macOS, Windows and Linux, around 5 MB, which talks to the real filesystem whichever browser you otherwise prefer.

Two consequences follow, and they are part of what you are buying rather than fine print:

• If you clear your browser's site data for glacierwriting.com, you delete your work. So does uninstalling a browser, or using private browsing, in the cases above where the work sits in browser storage. We cannot recover it, because we never had it.
• Backups are yours to keep, and Glacier gives you the tools. Back up, Export to plain text, and automatic backup are built in. Please use them. Section 10 says the same thing in the language of liability, but this is the version that matters.

Signing in, and the licence check

Glacier has no passwords. You sign in with Google, Apple, Microsoft or GitHub, or with a one-time link sent to your email address. Once you have, a licence is stored on your machine and Glacier works with no connection at all. That licence lasts 30 days and renews quietly whenever you happen to be online, so in practice you need a connection about once a month. If you go longer than that entirely offline, you will be asked to sign in again to carry on.

Compatibility

Glacier needs a current version of a modern browser. Writing straight to a file on your drive needs the File System Access API, which today means a Chromium browser on a desktop operating system; everywhere else Glacier falls back to browser storage, which works but requires you to move files in and out yourself. We test against current releases of Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox on macOS and Windows. If Glacier does not work on a setup you reasonably expected it to, that is a fault and section 9 applies.

The iPad app is a different thing

Glacier for iPad, if and when it is available, is sold through the App Store, unlocked there, and governed by Apple's terms and your contract with Apple — not by these terms. It uses no account with us and touches nothing described here.

3Your licence

When you buy Glacier we give you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use it on the platform or platforms you bought, for as long as you like. You are buying a licence to use the software, not the software itself; we and our licensors keep the intellectual property in it.

You may install and use Glacier on as many of your own devices as you actually use — there is no device count and no activation limit, because a writer working on a laptop and a desktop is one customer, not two.

You may not sell, rent, sub-licence or share your licence with someone else; remove or defeat the licence check; or reverse-engineer Glacier except to the extent the law says you may do so despite a term like this one. Nothing here limits any right you have under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to decompile for interoperability.

4Your writing belongs to you

Everything you write in Glacier is yours. We claim no ownership, no licence and no rights of any kind over your manuscripts, your characters, your notes or anything else you create with it. We are not able to claim any, in practical terms, because we never receive it — but we would not claim it if we could.

We will never read your work, train anything on it, quote it, or use it as an example. There is no exception to this, and no setting that changes it.

5Price and payment

Glacier is sold per platform, as a single payment. Prices are in pounds sterling and are the total you pay — there is no UK VAT to add, because we are not VAT registered, and there is nothing to deliver.

The upgrade prices are set so that buying in two steps never costs more than the bundle would have cost on day one. If you already own everything, nothing is offered for sale to you.

If you are buying from outside the United Kingdom, your own country's sales tax, VAT or GST may be added at checkout where we are required to collect it. Where that happens the amount is shown before you pay, and the figure you confirm is the figure you are charged.

Payment is taken by Stripe. Your card details go to Stripe and never reach us. The contract between you and us is made when we confirm your purchase by email, not when you press the button, and we will send that confirmation to the address on your account.

6No subscription

Glacier is not a subscription. There is no recurring charge, no renewal date, nothing to cancel and no way for us to bill you again without you buying something. If you stop paying attention to us entirely, Glacier keeps working.

The contract runs for as long as you use the software. Section 12 covers ending it.

7Your right to cancel — 14 days

How to cancel

Tell us. Email hello@glacierwriting.com, or write to the registered office in section 1, with a clear statement that you are cancelling. Any unambiguous wording will do — "I'd like to cancel and get a refund" is plenty. You may use the model form at the end of this page, but you are not obliged to.

To meet the deadline it is enough that you send your message before the 14 days are up. We will acknowledge it by email.

What happens then

We will refund everything you paid, without undue delay and in any event within 14 days of being told you are cancelling. The refund goes back by the same means you paid, and you will not pay any fee for it. Your licence ends, and Glacier will stop opening on that account — but your manuscript is a file on your own drive, and it stays exactly where it is. Export it to plain text first if you want it out of Glacier's format.

8Refunds after the 14 days

The 14-day right above is the law's, and it is unconditional. Beyond it:

• If Glacier is faulty, or not as we described it, you are entitled to a repair, a replacement, a price reduction or a refund under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 — see section 9. That right does not expire after 14 days and we will not argue about it.
• If you have simply changed your mind after 14 days, we are not obliged to refund you. In practice, write to us and tell us what happened. We would rather part on good terms than hold £39.99 off someone who is never coming back.
• We do not charge restocking fees, processing fees or administration fees of any kind. There are none to charge.

9Your rights as a consumer

If you live in the European Economic Area, you keep the mandatory consumer protections of the country you live in, and section 14 does not take them away from you.

10Availability, updates and changes

Updates are included. Improvements, fixes and new features for the version of Glacier you bought come to you at no extra cost, for as long as we sell and support it.

A future major version might be a separate purchase. If we ever build a Glacier so substantially different that it amounts to a new product, we may charge for it. We will not do that quietly, we will not turn off the version you own to push you towards it, and we would expect to offer existing customers a fair upgrade price. The version you bought stays yours either way.

We may change features over time. We will not remove something you rely on without a good reason, and we will not remove the ability to export your work in an open format, ever. If we discontinue Glacier entirely, we will say so with reasonable notice and make sure you can get your work out.

The website and the sign-in service may occasionally be unavailable for maintenance or for reasons outside our control. That is why the licence works offline: our being down should not stop you writing.

11Acceptable use

There is not much to say here, because Glacier runs on your own machine and touches nothing of ours except a sign-in endpoint. Please do not attack, overload or probe our systems, use the sign-in form to send mail to people who did not ask for it, or use Glacier to do something unlawful.

If someone is doing one of those things we may suspend their access. If we suspend yours and you think we are wrong, email us and a person will look at it. We will not suspend a paying customer over a disagreement, and if we ever end your licence for a reason that turns out not to be your fault, we will refund you.

12Ending the agreement

You can stop using Glacier at any time — sign out, delete it, and ask us to delete your account. Because there is no subscription there is nothing to cancel and no final bill.

We may end this agreement if you seriously or repeatedly break these terms and, where the problem can be fixed, do not fix it after we have asked. If we end it for that reason your licence stops. Your files remain yours and remain on your device.

Ending this agreement does not undo a refund you are already entitled to, and does not affect sections 4, 9, 13 or 14, which carry on.

13Our liability

Some things cannot lawfully be limited, and we do not try to limit them. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for any breach of the terms implied by sections 34, 35, 36, 37 or 41 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Subject to that, and if you are a consumer: we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking this contract or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss or damage that is not foreseeable.

Beyond the statutory rights preserved above, and to the extent the law allows, our total liability to you in connection with Glacier is limited to the amount you paid for it.

On backups, plainly: your manuscript lives on your device, and keeping copies of it is genuinely yours to do. Glacier gives you Back up, Export and automatic backup to make that easy, and we strongly recommend you use them. We are not liable for work lost because your device failed, your browser storage was cleared, or a backup was never made — but we are liable, under section 9 and the paragraph above, if work is lost because Glacier itself was defective. Those are different things and we are not trying to blur them.

If you are buying as a business rather than as a consumer, we exclude all implied terms to the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, business interruption or loss of business opportunity, and the cap in this section applies to everything else.

14Complaints, and the law that applies

If something has gone wrong, email hello@glacierwriting.com. Say what happened and what you would like done about it. We will acknowledge it within five working days and try to resolve it within 14. If we cannot, we will tell you why and what we propose instead.

We are not signed up to an alternative dispute resolution scheme. If we cannot settle a complaint between us, you are free to take it further, and nothing here stops you.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer living elsewhere in the UK or in the European Economic Area, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, and you may bring proceedings in your own country's courts.

If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest carries on. If we do not insist on something straight away, that does not mean we have given it up.

15Changes to these terms

We may update these terms — for new features, or because the law changes. The terms that apply to your purchase are the ones in force on the day you bought, and a later change cannot take away something you paid for. If we make a material change affecting existing customers we will email everyone with an account before it takes effect.

• 28 July 2026 — first version.

16Model cancellation form

You only need this if you want it. An email saying you are cancelling does the same job — see section 7. It is here because you are entitled to have it available.