A plain agreement, in our own voice.

1. Agreement to these terms

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) are an agreement between you and Mataron, the non-profit steward of Sembrae (“Sembrae,” “we,” “us”). They govern your use of our website and app at the Sembrae domains (the “Service”). By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated here by reference. If you don’t agree, please don’t use the Service.

If you use Sembrae on behalf of a church or organization, you represent that you’re authorized to accept these Terms for it, and “you” includes that organization.

2. What Sembrae is

Sembrae is a non-profit, Scripture-grounded ministry: an AI study companion that turns a sermon into cited study guides, devotionals, and grounded answers — so the weight of Sunday can carry into the week. It is offered on a cost-recovery basis, not for profit.

3. Who can use Sembrae

You must be at least 13 years old (or the minimum age required in your country) to create an account. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use Sembrae only with the involvement of a parent, guardian, or your church. If a church uses Sembrae in ministry to minors, the church is responsible for obtaining any consent its context requires. You must provide accurate information and keep it current.

4. Your account

• You’re responsible for activity under your account and for keeping your credentials secure.
• Use a strong, unique password, or sign in with a trusted provider. Tell us promptly at support@mataron.org if you suspect unauthorized access.
• Don’t share your account, impersonate others, or create accounts by automated means.
• We secure passwords as a strong one-way hash and never see them — but account security also depends on you.

5. Acceptable use

To keep Sembrae safe and sustainable for everyone, you agree not to:

• Break the law or use the Service for anything unlawful, harmful, deceptive, or abusive.
• Infringe others’ rights — including by submitting content you don’t have the rights to (see “Sermons & third-party sources”).
• Upload harmful or hateful content, harass others, or post material that is obscene, threatening, or that incites violence.
• Misrepresent AI output as authoritative doctrine, or use Sembrae to generate misleading religious claims attributed to a church without its consent.
• Probe, scrape, overload, or circumvent the Service, its rate limits, security, tenant isolation, or usage metering; or attempt to access another church’s or member’s data.
• Reverse engineer the Service except to the limited extent that mandatory law permits, or resell or commercially exploit it without our written permission.
• Use the Service to build a competing dataset or model, or to train machine-learning systems on content you’re not entitled to.

We may set technical and fair-use limits (for example, on AI generations or speech-to-text minutes) to keep the free tier sustainable, and we may update them as needed.

6. Your content & license

You keep ownership of the content you create — your questions, journals, prayers, notes, and the study guides and devotionals you generate or save. We don’t claim ownership of it.

To operate the Service, you grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, process, encrypt, back up, and display your content solely to provide the Service to you (and, where you choose to share, to the people or group you share it with). This license exists only so the Service can function; it ends when you delete the content or your account, except for residual copies that age out of encrypted backups on our normal cycle. We do not use your private content to train AI models, and we don’t sell it.

You’re responsible for your content and for having the rights to submit it. If you share content with a group or church, others in that context may see it as designed.

7. Sermons & third-party sources

Sembrae lets you bring a sermon — a public link, an upload, or pasted text — and turns it into cited, studyable resources. When you submit a sermon, you represent that you have the right to do so: that you own it, your church does, or it’s publicly available and your use is permitted by its license and the source platform’s terms.

We retrieve public sources (for example, video captions) on your behalf and respect the access controls and terms of the platforms they come from. Don’t use Sembrae to access content behind a paywall or login you’re not entitled to, or to circumvent a platform’s rules.

8. Copyright & takedowns

We respect intellectual property and ask the same of you. If you believe content on Sembrae infringes your copyright, email copyright@mataron.org with: a description of the work, where it appears on the Service, your contact information, a statement that you have a good-faith belief the use isn’t authorized, and a statement under penalty of perjury that your notice is accurate and you’re authorized to act. We will review valid notices and may remove material or disable access, and we may remove content and terminate accounts of users who repeatedly infringe.

9. AI outputs & honest limits

Sembrae uses AI to synthesize answers grounded in retrieved sources and cited by authority tier, with Scripture as the highest authority. We design it to never invent doctrine. Even so, AI systems can be incomplete or wrong, and may produce output that looks confident but isn’t accurate.

• Treat AI output as a study aid, not a ruling — verify against Scripture, your sources, and trusted spiritual leadership.
• When your sources don’t address something, Sembrae aims to say so plainly rather than fill the gap with invention.
• You’re responsible for how you use and share output, including any claims you attribute to it.

Generated content isn’t guaranteed to be unique to you; others may receive similar answers to similar questions.

10. Contributions & payments

Core use of Sembrae is free, within fair-use limits. If you contribute to a paid tier or unlock additional capacity, payment is handled entirely by Stripe on Stripe-hosted pages — we never receive or store your card number. Contributions support a non-profit, cost-recovery ministry; they are not tax-deductible donations unless we expressly say otherwise.

Prices, tiers, and limits may change; we’ll give reasonable notice of material changes. Except where the law requires otherwise, payments for usage already provided are non-refundable. If you believe you were charged in error, contact support@mataron.org and we’ll work with you in good faith.

11. Third-party services & sign-in

The Service relies on third-party providers (such as hosting, AI, speech-to-text, and payments) described in our Privacy Policy. Your use of those features may also be subject to the providers’ own terms.

If you sign in with Google, your use of that feature is also subject to Google’s terms. Sembrae’s use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including its Limited Use requirements. If you connect any other third-party platform (for example, to import a public sermon), you agree to comply with that platform’s terms and not to misuse its data. We’re not responsible for third-party services we don’t control.

12. Our intellectual property

The Service — including the Sembrae name and logo, the Mataron design system, the authority-tier citation system, software, and content we create — is owned by Mataron or its licensors and protected by law. Subject to these Terms, we grant you a limited, personal, non-transferable, revocable license to use the Service for its intended purpose. We reserve all rights not expressly granted; please don’t use our name or marks without permission.

13. Feedback

If you send us ideas or suggestions, thank you — we may use them to improve the Service without obligation or compensation to you, and you grant us a perpetual, royalty-free license to do so. Please don’t include confidential information in feedback.

14. Suspension & termination

You can stop using Sembrae at any time and delete your account from Profile → Delete account (see the Privacy Policy for what deletion does). We may suspend or terminate access if you violate these Terms, if needed to protect the Service or others, or if required by law — and, where reasonable, we’ll give notice. On termination, your right to use the Service ends; sections that by their nature should survive (ownership, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnity, governing law) will survive.

15. Disclaimers

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or that AI output will be accurate or complete. Some jurisdictions don’t allow certain disclaimers, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

16. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Mataron and its team, volunteers, and providers will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, goodwill, or profits, arising from your use of (or inability to use) the Service — even if we’ve been advised such damages were possible.

Because Sembrae is a non-profit, largely free ministry, our total liability for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the three months before the claim, or US $50. Some jurisdictions don’t allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

17. Indemnification

To the extent permitted by law, you agree to defend and indemnify Mataron from claims, losses, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of content you submit, your use of the Service, or your violation of these Terms or the rights of others — for example, submitting a sermon or other content you didn’t have the rights to use.

18. Governing law & disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the Service is operated from the United States. You agree to first try to resolve any dispute with us informally by contacting support@mataron.org. Disputes that can’t be resolved informally will be subject to the courts located in Texas, unless your local law gives you the right to bring a claim elsewhere. Nothing here limits any non-waivable rights you have under the law where you live.

19. Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms as the Service evolves or the law changes. When we do, we’ll revise the “Last updated” date above and, for material changes, give notice in the app or by email. Continuing to use Sembrae after an update means you accept the revised Terms. If you don’t agree, please stop using the Service and delete your account.

20. General terms

• Entire agreement. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about the Service.
• Severability. If any part is unenforceable, the rest stays in effect.
• No waiver. If we don’t enforce a provision, that isn’t a waiver of it.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them to a successor non-profit steward of Sembrae, under this same agreement.
• No agency. These Terms don’t create any partnership, employment, or agency relationship between us.

21. Contact us

Questions about these Terms? Email support@mataron.org, or write to us about privacy at privacy@mataron.org. We’ll do our best to help.