Terms of Service

These terms are a contract between you and Ali Benhamamouch, who operate InstaZap. “We” and “us” mean them; “you” means whoever is using the service.

By creating an account or uploading a video, you accept these terms. If you don’t accept them, don’t use InstaZap. Our Privacy Policy forms part of this agreement.

You must be at least 16 years old. If you are using InstaZap for a business, you confirm you are authorised to accept these terms on its behalf.

You upload a talking-head video. We transcribe the speech, find the silent gaps, cut them out, and give you back a shorter video. If you ask for captions, we also burn word-by-word subtitles into it and hand you a subtitle file alongside. That is the entire service.

Transcription is performed by OpenAI’s Whisper API, which means the audio track of your video is sent to OpenAI as part of processing. This is described in detail in the Privacy Policy, and you should read it before uploading anything sensitive.

• Give us a real email address you can access. Password resets go there, and we have no other way to let you back in.
• Keep your password to yourself. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you.
• One person, one account. Creating extra accounts to collect extra free Zaps is a breach of these terms.
• Tell us at support@instazap.org if you think someone else has got into your account.

A Zap is one processed video. Every plan comes with a number of Zaps and a maximum video length:

• Monthly Zaps reset each billing period. Unused Zaps do not roll over into the next month.
• Video length is measured on our servers from the actual file, not from anything your browser reports. A file longer than your plan allows will be rejected before any Zap is used.
• Longer videos cost more than one Zap where the plan is priced that way; the cost is shown before you confirm.
• We may change what a plan includes. If a change reduces what you get, we will tell you before your next renewal so you can cancel.

The free Zap is one per person, for the lifetime of the account — not one per month and not one per browser.

It exists so you can find out whether InstaZap works on your kind of video before paying anything. Free Zaps produce a watermarked result and are limited to 60-second videos.

Creating multiple accounts, clearing cookies, or using private browsing to get more free Zaps is a breach of these terms. We may close accounts used this way and are not obliged to refund anything.

• Paid plans are monthly subscriptions that renew automatically until you cancel. Your card is charged on the same day each month.
• Payments are handled by Stripe. The exact amount, including any VAT that applies where you live, is shown before you confirm.
• If a payment fails we will retry it. If it keeps failing, your plan reverts to free and any remaining monthly Zaps stop being available.
• If we change our prices, existing subscribers get at least 30 days’ notice by email before it affects them, and can cancel first.

Cancel any time from Account → Manage billing. It takes a few clicks and you never have to email anyone to do it.

Cancelling stops the next payment. You keep your plan and its remaining Zaps until the end of the period you have already paid for, then move to the free plan. We do not pro-rate part-months.

If you are a consumer in the EU or UK, you normally have 14 days to withdraw from a distance contract without giving a reason.

Because InstaZap is a digital service you can use straight away, the law lets you ask us to start immediately — and when you use a Zap inside those 14 days, you are doing exactly that. Once the service has been fully performed with your express request, the withdrawal right no longer applies to what you have used.

In practice we are more generous than we have to be: if you subscribed within the last 14 days and have used no Zaps in the current period, email us and we will refund you in full, no questions asked.

To withdraw or request that refund, email support@instazap.org from your account address.

• If a Zap fails, you get it back. Zaps are reserved when a job starts and returned automatically if it fails, times out, or you cancel it. You are never charged for an edit you did not receive.
• A file we reject as invalid — wrong format, too long, no audio — never consumes a Zap in the first place.
• Beyond the cases above and the 14-day position in section 8, subscription fees are not generally refundable. If something has genuinely gone wrong, write to us and we will deal with it fairly.

None of this affects your statutory rights, which we cannot exclude.

You are responsible for what you put through InstaZap. By uploading a video you confirm you have the right to do so, including the rights of everyone who appears or speaks in it.

You must not upload

• Anything sexual involving minors. This is reported to the authorities without exception.
• Intimate or sexual material of anyone who has not consented to it being there.
• Content that harasses, threatens, or incites violence against people.
• Anyone else's copyrighted work that you have no right to use.
• Material whose possession or distribution is illegal where you are or where we are.
• Anything you are contractually or professionally barred from sharing with a third-party processor — remember that transcription sends the audio to OpenAI.

You must also not

• Try to break, overload, or probe the service, or work around its limits.
• Automate access, scrape it, or resell it as your own service without our written agreement.
• Use it in a way that breaks OpenAI's or Stripe's terms, since we rely on them to serve you.

You own your videos. Uploading one to InstaZap does not give us any ownership of it, and we do not acquire a right to publish, reuse, or train anything on your footage.

You grant us one narrow licence: permission to store, transcode, transcribe, and edit your file for the sole purpose of producing your result, and to pass the audio to OpenAI for transcription. That licence ends when the files are deleted — within 2 hours for the upload, 24 hours for the output.

The edited video is yours to use however you like, commercially or otherwise. On the free plan it carries an InstaZap watermark, which you may not remove; paid plans have none.

The InstaZap name, logo, website, and software are ours. These terms give you the right to use the service, not to copy it, and nothing here transfers any of our intellectual property to you.

If you send us feedback or suggestions, we may act on them freely and without owing you anything.

Automatic editing is not perfect. Always watch the result before you publish it.

Silence detection works from a transcript, and transcripts get things wrong — background noise, accents, crosstalk, music, and quiet speech all affect it. A cut may land somewhere you would not have chosen, or a pause you wanted to keep may be removed. The output is a starting point, not a finished edit signed off by a person.

The service is provided as is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for any particular purpose, and we do not guarantee any specific level of uptime. We may take it down for maintenance, and may change or discontinue features.

Because output files are deleted after 24 hours, download your result and keep your own copy. We are not a backup service and cannot recover a file once it is gone.

We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms — particularly section 10 — or where we are legally required to. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right.

You can close your account at any time from your account settings. What happens to your data then is set out in the Privacy Policy.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected by anything here.

Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits, lost revenue, or lost opportunity, or for loss of any video or file you did not keep your own copy of.

Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose, or €50 if you have paid us nothing.

We may update these terms. The date at the top of the page shows when they last changed. For changes that materially affect your rights, we will email you at least 30 days before they take effect, and you may cancel before then if you disagree. Continuing to use InstaZap after that means you accept the new terms.

These terms are governed by the law of Spain, and its courts have jurisdiction.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the EU, this does not deprive you of the protection of your own country’s mandatory consumer law, and you may bring proceedings in your local courts.

Before going to court, you are welcome to raise anything with us directly at support@instazap.org — we would rather sort it out that way. Consumers in another EU country can also get free help from their European Consumer Centre.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still applies.

support@instazap.org
Ali Benhamamouch