Terms of Service

Last updated 29 September 2026

This is the agreement between you and Bright Side Streams. It covers what you get, what you pay, what you may not do, and what happens when something goes wrong. Plain English throughout — where a term has a legal meaning we say so rather than hiding it.

1. Accepting these terms

By creating an account or using the studio you agree to these terms, to the Acceptable Use Policy, and to the Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

You must be at least 13 to hold an account, and 18 or the age of majority where you live to buy a paid plan. If you are using Bright Side for an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

2. Your account

Keep your password to yourself and tell us promptly if you think someone else has it. You are responsible for what happens under your account, including what your guests do in your rooms.

One person, one account. Team seats are available on plans that include them — sharing a single login between people is not a substitute.

3. Plans and studio hours

Paid plans include a monthly allowance of studio hours and relay hours. The current allowances and prices are on the pricing page and form part of this agreement.

• A studio hour is live time in the studio — recording, streaming, guests on stage. The clock starts when you press Start the show, not when you open the tab.
• The green room has its own monthly allowance, from 30 minutes on Lite up to 240 on Business, listed on the pricing page. Setting up, waiting for guests and testing your camera come out of that allowance rather than your studio hours. Once it is used up for the month, further green-room time counts as studio time at the normal rate. The allowance is monthly, not per session — closing the room and opening it again does not reset it, because the green room costs us the same bandwidth as a show and we would rather charge for it honestly than pretend it is free and price it into everything else.
• A relay hour is when you produce elsewhere, such as in OBS, and we forward your stream onward.
• Allowances reset each billing period and do not roll over.
• Going over your allowance does not stop your show. Extra studio hours bill at the overage rate for your plan, currently $1.49 to $2.99 per hour depending on plan. We will not cut off a show in progress.
• Extra hours are rounded up to the whole hour. Going one minute past your allowance is billed as one extra hour, and one hour and one minute as two. We round up because a bill you can check yourself is worth more than a fractional one you cannot — "three extra hours" is a number you can verify against your own shows, "2.4 extra hours" is not.
• Extra hours are added to your next invoice as a separate line, on your normal renewal date. We never take a separate payment mid-month.
• The Chill Spot plan is metered the same way, in room hours: one hour of one room is one hour, however many people are in it.

4. Billing, renewal and cancellation

Payments are handled by Stripe. Prices exclude sales tax, VAT and equivalents, which Stripe calculates and shows in full before you enter a card.

If a payment fails we will retry and email you. If it keeps failing we may suspend the paid features until it clears. Your recordings are not deleted for a failed payment within their normal retention window.

We may change prices. Existing subscribers get at least 30 days' notice by email before a change affects them, and you can cancel before it takes effect.

Upgrades take effect immediately and are charged pro rata. Downgrades take effect at your next renewal, so you do not lose hours you have already paid for.

5. Refunds

If the service fails in a way that is our fault and we cannot put it right, write to us and we will refund the affected period. We would rather refund a frustrated customer than argue with one.

Beyond that, payments are generally non-refundable, and we do not refund unused hours in a period you have already started — cancelling stops the next charge rather than reversing the last one.

If you are a consumer in the UK or EU you have a statutory 14-day right to cancel a new subscription. By starting to use the studio within that period you agree we may begin supplying immediately, which may reduce or end that right once the service has been delivered. Nothing here removes rights the law gives you.

6. Your content, and who owns it

Your recordings are yours. We claim no ownership of your shows, your audio, your video, your artwork or your brand.

You grant us only the licence we need to actually run the service: to store, process, encode, transcribe and transmit your content so we can deliver it to you and to the destinations you choose. That licence ends when you delete the content, apart from backups that roll off within 30 days.

We do not use your recordings to train AI models and we do not licence them to anyone else.

What we own stays ours: the studio software, the backdrops, the sound effects, the Bright Side name and marks. Your plan lets you use the backdrops and sound effects inside your own productions. It does not let you extract, redistribute or resell them as assets.

7. Recording other people

You are the host, so this is your responsibility. Before you record, make sure everyone in the room knows and agrees — including remote guests, who may be somewhere with stricter rules than yours.

We help where we can: everyone in a room sees a REC indicator while recording runs, and guests are asked to acknowledge recording before they join. That is a courtesy, not legal cover, and it does not transfer the responsibility to us.

8. What you may not do

The full list lives in the Acceptable Use Policy. In short: do not break the law with it, do not use it to harm people, do not stream content you have no right to stream, and do not attack or abuse the service itself.

9. Availability

We work to keep the studio running and we do not offer a contractual uptime guarantee. Maintenance, outages at our providers, and faults will occasionally interrupt service.

Live shows depend on your internet connection, your hardware, and the platform you are streaming to. Those are outside our control and we cannot be responsible for them.

Recordings are retained for the period stated on your plan. Download anything you cannot afford to lose. Your browser also keeps a local backup while you record, but treat your own copy as the real one.

10. Your show page

On plans from $23.99 a month your show gets a public page at a Bright Side address, with every episode you publish and share on it. It is included in the plan price — there is no separate charge and no cap on how many times an episode is played.

We do not run a podcast feed. We do not publish an RSS feed and we do not submit your show to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other directory. Your show lives on Bright Side and wherever you stream or post it yourself.

Your show address stays put. We will not change or recycle it while your show is with us. If we ever have to move it, we will tell you before it happens and keep the old address redirecting for at least 90 days.

What you publish is yours, and so is the responsibility for it. That includes anything you did not make yourself — music in particular. A claim against your episode is yours to answer. Section 6 covers ownership and section 8 covers what you may not publish; both apply to anything we host.

If you leave or drop below the hosting plans. Your show page does not disappear on the day your plan changes:

• For 12 months it goes read only. Everything already published stays up and keeps playing normally. You cannot publish new episodes to it during that time.
• After 12 months we take the page and the hosted files down. We will email you at least 30 days before that happens, so you can download anything you have not already kept.

11. Text messages (SMS)

Program. Bright Side Streams show reminders and video-ready notifications, for podcast hosts and the guests a host books into a session. If you opt in, we text a guest a show reminder with the join link for the session they were booked into, and a host a notice with the download link when their recorded video is ready.

Opting in. Hosts tick the box under Settings › General › Text notifications in the studio; guests tick the box on the invite link their host sends for one session. There is no public sign-up page (our text notifications page explains how it works). Enter only your own number. It is optional, and consent to receive texts is not a condition of any purchase.

Frequency and cost. Message frequency may vary. Standard Message and Data Rates may apply.

Opting out. Reply STOP to any message to stop receiving them (STOPALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, CANCEL, END, QUIT, REVOKE and OPT OUT also work). We will confirm once and then send nothing further. A host can also turn texts off in the studio's Settings, and a guest on their invite; texts turned off there come back only by ticking the box again. Reply START to resume texts; this works only for a number that opted in on one of those two screens and later replied STOP, and it never signs up a new number.

Help. Reply HELP, or email support@brightsidestreams.com.

Carriers. Mobile carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages.

Privacy. How we handle your number is set out in our Privacy Policy. We will not share mobile information with third parties for promotional or marketing purposes.

12. Ending the agreement

You can cancel or delete your account at any time.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy. Except where the breach is serious — illegal content, harm to others, or an attack on the service, where we may act at once — we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right. If we close your account without cause, we refund the unused part of the period you paid for.

After closure you have 30 days to request a copy of your recordings before they are deleted.

13. Warranties

The service is provided "as is". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error-free.

If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are not affected by anything in this section.

14. Limits of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential losses, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost audience or lost recordings.

Our total liability to you, for any and all claims, is capped at the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

You agree to indemnify us against claims arising from your content, your shows, your use of the service, or your breach of these terms — including a claim brought by someone you recorded.

15. Disputes and governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of South Carolina, USA, and the courts of South Carolina, USA have jurisdiction, without affecting any right you have as a consumer to bring proceedings where you live.

Before starting formal proceedings, email us. Most disputes are a misunderstanding and we would rather fix it than litigate it.

16. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top always shows the current version. For material changes we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email, and continuing to use the service afterwards means you accept them. If you do not accept them, cancel before they take effect and we will refund the unused part of your period.

17. Contact

These terms are an agreement between you and Charles Hines of 3367 Moss Bridge Lane, Myrtle Beach, SC 29579, trading as Bright Side Streams.

For anything at all: support@brightsidestreams.com — a real person reads it.