Terms of Service

1Who you are dealing with

Hestia is made and sold by Jolocorp (“we”, “us”).

2What these terms cover

These terms cover two things: the Hestia app for the Mac, and this website, openhestia.com. They apply whether you use Hestia for yourself or for your work. Where the law gives consumers rights of their own, consumers have them, and nothing here is meant to take them away.

3Buying Hestia

• You pay once. There is no subscription and nothing to renew.
• The price, the taxes in it and the ways to pay are shown before you buy.
• If you buy as a consumer in the European Union, you have the right of withdrawal the law gives for purchases made online. How it works, and when it ends for a download you start right away, is explained before you pay.

4It is yours

Once you have paid, Hestia is yours to use: with no end date, on the Macs that you yourself use, anywhere, for whatever you use it for, without paying again. In the owner’s words, it is made to be used privately, forever, throughout the universe.

In the careful words: you receive a right to install and use Hestia that is not exclusive and not limited in time.

• Your copy does not depend on a subscription, on an account with us or on a server of ours.
• You may make copies for your own backups.
• Rights that the law gives you, and that a contract cannot take away, stay as they are. In the European Union these include making a backup copy, watching and testing how the program works while you use it, taking it apart as far as the law allows in order to make it work with other programs (in Germany §§ 69d and 69e of the Copyright Act), and passing your bought copy on to someone else for good if you keep none of it yourself.

5Upgrades: free, forever

Every later version of Hestia that we publish is yours at no further cost: fixes, new features and whole new versions alike, for as long as Hestia exists.

• You decide. Hestia does not update itself and does not even look for updates by itself. A new version reaches your Mac only when you fetch it and install it. If you like the version you have, keep it.
• What we cannot promise is how often new versions come, or that there will always be another one. What we promise is that whatever comes will not cost you anything.
• The updates the law itself gives you a right to, so that the app stays as agreed (for consumers in Germany § 327f of the Civil Code), are yours as well, independently of this promise.

6What you do with it is your business

We do not ask what you use Hestia for, and we could not find out. The app has no account with us and sends us nothing: no usage figures, no crash reports, none of what you say, write or store. It was built that way on purpose. What it does connect to is listed in the Privacy Statement.

That freedom comes with the usual other side: what you do with Hestia, and with what its models write or say, is yours to answer for, as with any tool.

7What we ask of you

Hestia’s own code, design and texts belong to Jolocorp and are protected by copyright. Buying Hestia gives you the right to use it, as said under It is yours; it does not make the program yours to hand out. So, unless we agree to it in writing, or the law or the licence of a part made by others (see below) allows it anyway, you may not:

• copy Hestia for other people, or give or sell copies of it to them;
• put it, or parts of it, where others can download it, or rent it out or lend it;
• take it apart to rebuild it (reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble it), or make another product out of its code;
• remove the copyright and licence notices that come with it.

In a word: please do not pirate it. That is the whole of what we ask.

8Parts made by others

Hestia is built with the work of others, and some of it is fetched when it is first needed: the program that runs the models, the models and voices themselves, and two helper programs for recordings. Each of these parts stays under its own licence. The full list, with every licence and notice, is in the app under Settings › General › Licences, and in the file THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md that comes with the app.

• Where such a licence gives you more rights than these terms, it applies to that part, and nothing here limits it. The GNU GPL and LGPL, for example, let you copy, change and pass on the part they cover, and take it apart to debug your changes to it. What we ask under What we ask of you concerns only what is ours.
• Where such a licence sets conditions, they are yours to keep for that part. This matters most for models: some come with their maker’s rules on what they may be used for, such as the Gemma Terms of Use, the Llama 3.2 Community License or the LFM Open License. You accept a model’s licence when you download and use that model.
• For the parts inside the app that are under the GNU GPL, we give you their source code as their licences ask. Write to us at the address in the Impressum.

9Providers you link

Hestia works without any cloud service. If you choose to, you can link services of other companies: at present Groq and OpenRouter (cloud models, with your own key), Microsoft (your OneNote notebooks, with your Microsoft account) and Google (sending email through your Gmail account).

• You use such a service under your own account and under that provider’s terms and privacy rules, not ours. Whatever goes there (a question, a recording, a note, an email) is handled by that provider under its terms.
• What a provider charges you is between you and that provider.
• We are not part of that relationship and receive nothing of it. We cannot answer for a provider’s service, for whether it is reachable, or for what it returns. If a provider changes or ends its service, the link may stop working; everything Hestia does on your Mac goes on without it.

10What the models get wrong

Hestia runs language and speech models, and models make mistakes. A model can state something false with complete confidence; a transcript can mishear a word; a summary can leave out the one thing that mattered. Check what matters before you rely on it, and look at what a model is about to do for you (send an email, change a note) before it does it.

Hestia is not a doctor, a lawyer or a financial adviser, and it does not replace one.

11If something is wrong with Hestia

If Hestia has a defect, you have the rights the law gives you; for consumers in Germany these are the rules on digital products (§§ 327 and following of the Civil Code). These terms do not shorten or limit them.

One thing is not a defect: how fast and how well a model runs depends on your Mac, above all on its memory, and on the model you choose. A large model on a small Mac is slow, and a small model knows less than a large one.

12Liability

We are liable without limit:

• for intent and for gross negligence;
• for injury to life, body or health;
• under the German Product Liability Act;
• where we have given a guarantee, and where we have deceitfully kept quiet about a defect.

For slight negligence we are liable only if we break a duty that is essential to the contract: one that makes carrying out the contract possible in the first place, and that you may ordinarily rely on. In that case our liability is limited to the damage that is typical for a contract of this kind and that could be foreseen. Beyond this, our liability for slight negligence is excluded.

Hestia keeps your data on your Mac, where only you can back it up. Within the limits just described, we are liable for lost data only up to the effort that restoring it from a regular backup would have taken.

These limits apply in the same way to the people who work for us or on our behalf.

13This website

The website is free to read. What it says about Hestia is meant to be true of the app as it is; if you find something that is not, please tell us. The moving examples on the site are scenes made for the page, with made-up voices and texts. They show how the app looks and behaves; they are not recordings and they are not the app. Links lead to sites of others, who answer for their own pages.

14Changes to these terms

We may change this page, for instance when the law changes or Hestia does. The date at the top says when it was last changed.

For a copy you have already bought, the terms you bought it under go on applying. A later change reaches you only if it leaves you no worse off, or if the law demands it. What is promised under It is yours, Upgrades and What you do with it is your business will not be taken back.

15Law and disputes

German law applies; the United Nations sales convention (CISG) does not. If you are a consumer and live in another country, you keep the protection of the rules of that country that cannot be set aside by contract.

If you buy as a merchant, as a legal person under public law or as a special fund under public law, the courts at our seat decide disputes arising from this contract.

Should a part of these terms turn out not to hold, the rest stays in force, and the law takes the place of that part.

16Contact

Questions about these terms go to the address in the Impressum. How Hestia handles data is described in the Privacy Statement.