Terms of Use

This agreement

These terms are between you and Joseph Hagan, doing business as Binary Data Technology ("we", "us"), and they govern your use of the Curio app and the Curio web scanner. Installing or using Curio means you accept them. If you do not, do not use it - and if you have paid, ask your store for a refund.

Our Privacy Policy is part of these terms. Read it; it is short, and it is the more interesting of the two.

You must be at least 13 years old to use Curio. If you are under 18, use it with a parent or guardian’s permission, and do not make a purchase without it.

What Curio is

Curio is a reference tool. You photograph a collectible, an AI vision model reads the photograph, and the app tells you what the item most likely is, what its notable features appear to be, and a rough range of what comparable items have been worth. You can save items to a collection that lives on your device and see what the whole collection adds up to.

That is the entire product. It is a well-informed opinion formed from a picture, presented with its uncertainty visible, so that you can decide what to do next.

What Curio is not

Read this section even if you skip the rest. It is the difference between using Curio well and being disappointed by it.

Curio is not an appraisal. It is not an authentication. It is not a professional grade, and it produces nothing that a grading service, an insurer, a customs officer, a probate court, or an auction house will accept as evidence of anything. It is not financial or investment advice, and nothing in the app is a recommendation to buy, sell, insure, or hold any item.

A value range in Curio is an estimate produced from a photograph by a machine. It has never handled the object, cannot weigh it, cannot feel its edges, cannot test its metal, cannot see under the patina, and cannot tell an excellent forgery from the real thing. Forgeries and reproductions are specifically the case where a photograph-based tool is least reliable, and the more valuable the item, the more motivated the forgery.

If money, insurance, tax, an estate, or a dispute depends on the answer, get a qualified specialist to look at the object in person. Curio is a good way to work out whether that is worth doing. It is not a substitute for having done it.

You use Curio’s output at your own risk and you remain responsible for your own decisions.

Accuracy and confidence

We do not publish an accuracy percentage. We could invent one, as several competing apps do, but no honest number exists across every item in every condition photographed in every kitchen in the world, and quoting one would be a claim we could not stand behind.

Instead every result carries a confidence band, and the band changes what the app is willing to say:

High - the model recognised clear, specific evidence in your photo. Treat it as a strong starting point, and still check it yourself using the "check this yourself" steps on the card.
Medium - the identification is plausible but something is missing or ambiguous. The card will show alternatives and tell you what would settle it.
Low - Curio refuses to name the item. You get capture advice instead of an answer. This is deliberate: a confident wrong answer is worse than no answer, and we would rather spend one of your scans saying "I cannot tell" than sell you a guess dressed as a fact.
Alternatives are listed with a distinguishing feature wherever the model can supply one, so you can settle the question with your own eyes.
Attributes the model could not read from the photo are shown as not legible, never filled in with a plausible-looking guess.

Value estimates

Curio never shows a single price. Every estimate is a range, and every range is labelled with where it came from and the date it was produced:

Sold comparables - derived from recent completed sales of similar items. The strongest basis we offer, and where available we show how many sales are behind it. A median of 47 sales and a median of 2 sales are very different claims and we show you which one you have.
Reference guide - derived from published catalogue or guide pricing. Guide prices describe what a book says an item is worth, which is not always what anyone pays.
Model estimate - the model’s own judgement, with no sale records behind it. Treat this as the roughest of the three.
None - we found no defensible basis for a number, so we show none. An empty field is more honest than a wide guess.
Every range is stated in the currency shown next to it and is exclusive of buyer premiums, seller fees, shipping, insurance, and tax.
Estimates go stale. Condition drives collectible values more than any other single factor, and a difference invisible in a photograph can move a value by an order of magnitude. Collectible markets also move on their own. The date on the range is there so you know how old the opinion is.

Fair-use caps

Every plan, including the paid ones, is subject to fair-use caps of 50 scans per day and 300 scans per calendar month. "Unlimited" in our store listing means unlimited within those caps, and we state the numbers rather than burying them.

Without a subscription you get 5 scans per calendar month, plus 1 free scan when you first set the app up.

The caps exist because each scan costs us real money at a model provider, and an uncapped account is the one thing that can make this app unaffordable to run for everyone else. They are enforced on our servers. If you hit one, the app tells you which cap and when it resets.

Please do not try to work around them. Automating the app, driving it from a script, reinstalling to reset an allowance, or running scans on someone else’s behalf at volume are all breaches of these terms, and we may throttle or block an installation that does it.

If you have a genuine need above these caps - a museum catalogue, a house clearance, a dealer’s stock - email us. We would rather talk about it than have you fight the limiter.

Acceptable use

When you use Curio, you agree not to:

Upload a photograph you do not have the right to use, or one containing another person, a document, or private information that they have not agreed to share.
Use Curio to help you misrepresent an item to a buyer, an insurer, a tax authority, or a court, or to pass any Curio output off as an independent expert opinion.
Present a Curio result as though it came from a grading service, a laboratory, an auction house, or any body that we are not.
Scan items whose sale or possession is restricted where you are - protected wildlife material, human remains, archaeological finds subject to reporting duties, weapons, or stolen goods. Curio is not a compliance check and having scanned something here means nothing about its legality.
Attempt to extract, reverse engineer, or reproduce our prompts, our model outputs at scale, or our result database, or use Curio to build a competing dataset or service.
Interfere with the service, probe it for vulnerabilities without telling us, circumvent quota enforcement, or use it in a way that degrades it for other people.
Resell, sublicense, or commercially redistribute Curio itself or bulk output from it.
If you find a security flaw, email binarydatatechnology151@gmail.com before you tell anyone else. We will not pursue anyone who reports in good faith and gives us a reasonable chance to fix it.

Subscriptions and payment

Curio has a free tier and three paid options. Prices below are the reference prices in US dollars:

Yearly - 7 days free, then $39.99 per year. The subscription renews automatically each year unless you cancel before the current period ends. Cancel any time in Google Play under Payments and subscriptions.
Weekly - $6.99 per week. The subscription renews automatically each week unless you cancel before the current period ends. Cancel any time in Google Play under Payments and subscriptions.
Lifetime - $79.99 once. This is a single payment, not a subscription. Nothing renews and there is nothing to cancel. It covers unlimited scanning, within the fair-use caps, for as long as the app is available.
Prices are shown in US dollars as a reference. Google Play displays your local price and any applicable tax; the amount on the Google Play confirmation screen is the amount you pay.
The free trial is available once per store account. If you have used it before, the yearly plan starts charging straight away and the paywall will say so before you confirm.
Auto-renewing subscriptions renew at the end of each period at the then-current price unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends. Your store charges the renewal within 24 hours of the period end.
Cancelling is done through Google Play, not through us, because Google holds the subscription: Google Play > Profile > Payments and subscriptions > Subscriptions. Deleting the app does not cancel anything.
Cancelling stops the next charge. It does not shorten the period you have already paid for; you keep access until it ends.
If you cancel during a free trial, the trial runs to its end and you are not charged.
Payment is taken by Google Play, never by us. Refunds are handled under Google Play policies through its refund form or your order history.
Restoring a purchase: use Settings > Restore purchases on an Android device signed in to the Google Play account that paid. Curio does not currently sell paid access on iOS or transfer Google Play purchases to another store.
If we change a price, the change applies from your next renewal and your store notifies you in advance and asks you to agree, as its rules require.
Statutory rights are not affected by any of this. In the UK and the EU in particular, your right to cancel a digital purchase within 14 days may apply, subject to the store’s process and to any waiver you agreed to when you started using the content immediately.

Your photos, your notes, your collection

You keep every right you have in the photographs you take and the notes you write. We claim no ownership of them.

To run a scan we need a narrow licence, and it is limited to exactly what the feature requires: you grant us permission to process the image you submit in order to produce an identification, and to store the resulting perceptual hash and structured result in the shared cache described in the Privacy Policy. That cached entry is a fingerprint and a description of an object, not your photograph - your photograph is deleted when the scan finishes.

The shared cache means another user who photographs a visually identical item may be served the result your scan produced. That is how the app stays cheap enough to have a free tier. It never exposes your image, your notes, or anything about you.

Your collection is yours and is stored on your device. Export it from Settings whenever you like. We hold no copy and cannot recover it for you.

Our intellectual property

Curio, its name, its interface, its design, its source code, its prompts, its taxonomies, and its result database belong to Binary Data Technology and are protected by copyright and other intellectual property laws. We grant you a personal, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the app on devices you own or control, for your own non-commercial collecting purposes.

You may use individual results however you like for your own purposes - list an item, keep an inventory, settle an argument with a fellow collector. What you may not do is systematically extract results to build a rival product.

Curio is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any mint, manufacturer, publisher, foundry, grading service, auction house, or brand whose products it can identify. Trade marks and product names belong to their owners and are used only to describe the item in front of the camera.

Availability and changes to the service

Curio depends on a third-party model provider, on Google Cloud, and on your network. Any of them can be unavailable, and when they are, scanning stops working until they come back. Your saved collection remains readable offline because it is on your device.

We may change, suspend, or discontinue features. If we discontinue something you paid for, or shut the service down, we will give reasonable notice in the app and, for a lifetime purchase, we will make a good-faith effort to give you a way to export everything before we go.

A "lifetime" purchase means the lifetime of the product, not of the purchaser. We are being explicit about that because it is the usual point of disagreement.

Disclaimers

Curio is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

We do not guarantee that any identification is correct, that any value range reflects what an item would actually sell for, that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that a defect will be fixed. A Curio result is not certified by any grading service or other body, and a correct outcome is not guaranteed.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain warranties. Where that is the case, the exclusions above apply only to the extent permitted, and your non-excludable statutory rights as a consumer stand regardless of anything in this document.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost data, or lost opportunity, arising from your use of Curio.

In particular, and to be blunt about the case that actually matters: we are not liable for a loss you suffer because you bought, sold, insured, declined, or disposed of an item on the strength of what Curio told you. That is precisely the decision the "What Curio is not" section asks you not to make on our say-so.

Where liability cannot be excluded, our total aggregate liability to you is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for Curio in the twelve months before the claim, or fifty US dollars.

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

Termination

You can stop using Curio at any time by deleting the app. Cancel any subscription through your store first, because deleting the app does not cancel it.

We may suspend or terminate access if you breach these terms, in particular the acceptable-use and fair-use sections, or if we are required to by law. Where it is reasonable to do so we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right.

The sections on intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, and governing law survive termination.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and disputes will be heard in the state and federal courts located in Hampden County, Massachusetts.

If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer-protection rules of the country where you live, and you may also be able to bring proceedings there. Consumers in the EU can use the European Commission’s online dispute resolution platform.

Before starting anything formal, please email us. Most complaints are a misunderstanding about what a value range means, and those are quicker to fix by talking.

General

If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Not enforcing a right straight away does not waive it. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours to a successor of the business, on notice.

These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us about Curio.

We may update these terms. The date at the top changes, the new version appears in the app and at the hosted address, and where a change materially affects your rights we will show it to you in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use Curio after that means you accept it.

Google is not a party to these terms and has no obligation to provide support for Curio. Google Play’s own terms govern the payment transaction.

Contact

Questions about these terms, or about anything Curio told you: binarydatatechnology151@gmail.com. Privacy specifically: binarydatatechnology151@gmail.com. On the web: https://curio-collectible-app.web.app/legal.