Terms of Service

1. What Sworn is

Sworn is a self-commitment tool. You nominate a task, nominate an amount of your own money between 2 and 1,000 in your chosen currency (AUD, USD, GBP or CAD), and set a deadline. That amount is placed as a pre-authorisation hold on your payment card. If you provide acceptable proof of completion by the deadline, the hold is released and you are charged nothing. If you do not, the hold is captured.

1.1 Sworn is not gambling

No prize, winnings, payout or return above your own money is ever available. There is no element of chance: the outcome depends entirely on whether you complete and evidence your own task. The best possible financial outcome for you is a return of exactly your own money.

1.2 Sworn is not a financial service

Sworn does not hold, invest, lend or safeguard customer funds. Holds and captures are performed by our payment processor against your card issuer.

2. Eligibility

• You must be at least 18 years old and legally able to contract.
• You must use a payment card you own and are authorised to use, added to Apple Pay on your own device.
• One account per person. Accounts may not be shared or transferred.
• You must not use Sworn for any task that is illegal, dangerous, harmful to yourself or others, sexual in nature, or that involves another person who has not consented to appear in your proof.

3. Creating a pledge

When you confirm a pledge you authorise Sworn, through Apple Pay and our payment processor, to place a hold on your card for the amount shown. You are shown the amount, the task and the deadline before you confirm.

• Minimum pledge: 2. Maximum pledge: 1,000. Amounts are stated in the currency you select (AUD, USD, GBP or CAD) and are never converted between currencies: the limits are the same number in each.
• Pledges above 100 require an additional, non-skippable acknowledgement screen in the app. You must scroll it in full and tick both confirmations before Apple Pay is presented. That acknowledgement is stored verbatim with your pledge as the record of what you agreed to.
• The deadline is the end of the calendar day you select, in your device’s local time zone.
• A pledge cannot be edited once created. It can be cancelled only as set out in section 8.
• Your card issuer may show the hold as a pending transaction. It is not a charge.

4. Authorisation holds and their lifespan

Card networks limit how long an authorisation can remain open (typically up to seven days). If your deadline exceeds that window, or if your issuer releases the hold early, Sworn may re-authorise the amount or, where re-authorisation fails, cancel the pledge. Sworn is not liable for the timing of your bank in releasing a hold; released funds may take up to ten business days to disappear from your statement.

5. Submitting proof

• Proof must be a photo or video captured within the Sworn app. Uploads from your camera roll are not accepted and are technically blocked.
• Proof must be submitted before your deadline. Submissions received after the deadline are not considered.
• Each submission is issued a unique reference code. Keep it. It is required to raise a dispute.
• You may resubmit if a submission is rejected, provided the deadline has not passed.

6. Proof standards

Proof is accepted where a reasonable reviewer can conclude that:

1. the media plainly relates to the task you described;
2. the media shows the task done, or done to a substantive degree;
3. the media was captured within the pledge period; and
4. the media is not manipulated, screen-recorded, re-photographed from another display, or duplicated from a previous submission.

Proof is rejected where, without limitation:

• it is too dark, blurred, brief or ambiguous to assess;
• it plainly shows a different activity, place or time than described;
• it repeats media already submitted for another pledge; or
• it shows content that is unlawful, or that shows another identifiable person in a private setting.

Reviews are human judgements made in good faith. Sworn does not guarantee any particular outcome and reserves discretion, exercised reasonably, over whether a submission meets these standards.

7. Review and timing

Every submission is reviewed and decided by the end of your due date. Where proof is accepted, we instruct the release of your hold immediately; the time your bank takes to reflect that is outside our control.

8. Cancelling a pledge

You may cancel a pledge within 30 minutes of creating it, or at any time before the hold has been successfully placed, and nothing will be collected. After that window the pledge stands, because the commitment is the product. We may cancel a pledge and release the hold at our discretion if the task is impossible, unsafe, or contrary to these Terms.

9. Collection after a missed deadline

If no acceptable proof is submitted before the deadline, or if all submissions are rejected and the deadline passes, the hold is captured in full. That amount is Sworn’s revenue. It is not a fine, penalty, wager, deposit or trust arrangement, and it is not refundable except as set out in section 11.

10. Charity allocation

Sworn commits 75% of its net revenue from collected pledges (that is, after payment processing costs) to the registered charity you select in the app, or its local affiliate, on a quarterly basis. The remaining 25% funds operating the service. Donations are made by Sworn as a business donation; your pledge is not itself a donation and is not tax deductible to you.

11. Disputes and refunds

If you believe a review was wrong, submit your reference code through the dispute form within 30 days of the decision. We will re-examine the original submission by hand and reply to the email you provide, normally within five business days. Where we conclude our reviewer erred, or where a technical fault prevented you from submitting proof, we refund you in full.

We may also refund at our discretion in cases of bereavement, medical emergency, or a documented fault of ours. Chargebacks initiated without first raising a dispute may result in account suspension.

12. Prohibited conduct

• Submitting fabricated, edited, borrowed or recycled proof.
• Creating pledges for tasks you have already completed before pledging.
• Using another person’s payment card or identity.
• Attempting to access the reviewer dashboard, other users’ proof, or any non-public part of our systems.
• Automating, scraping or reverse engineering the service.

Breach may result in immediate suspension, rejection of open submissions, collection of open holds, and referral to authorities where fraud is suspected.

13. Availability and changes

We aim to keep Sworn available but do not guarantee uninterrupted service. If an outage attributable to us prevents you submitting proof before your deadline, tell us via the dispute form and we will release or refund the amount. We may change features, pricing limits or these Terms; material changes are notified in the app and apply only to pledges created after they take effect.

14. Liability

To the extent permitted by law, Sworn’s total liability arising out of or in connection with a pledge is limited to the amount of that pledge. We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for bank fees, overdraft charges or interest arising from a hold, or for any outcome of the task itself. Nothing in these Terms limits rights that cannot lawfully be limited, including consumer guarantees.

15. Your own safety

You alone decide what task to pledge and how to complete it. Sworn provides no health, fitness or medical advice. Do not attempt anything unsafe to avoid a collection — cancel or accept the outcome instead.

16. Termination

You may stop using Sworn at any time; pledges already created continue to their conclusion. We may suspend or close an account for breach of these Terms, suspected fraud, or where required by law.

17. General

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us. If any provision is unenforceable the rest continues to apply. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them to a successor of our business. Questions: legal@sworn.app.