Terms of Sale & License Agreement

The short version

• Belltongue is a one-time purchase. There’s no subscription.
• One license covers up to two Macs at a time. You can move it by deactivating a Mac.
• All 1.x updates are included.
• You can try the full app free for 14 days. No card is needed.
• Paddle sells Belltongue for us and handles payment, tax, invoices and refunds.
• If it isn’t right for you, you get your money back within 30 days, no questions asked.

This summary is for convenience. The full terms below are what count.

About these terms

These terms are an agreement between you and Guohui Lin, the individual developer who makes Belltongue (“we”, “us”). They cover buying a license and using the Belltongue app for macOS. In Paddle’s Buyer Terms, this agreement is the “Supplier Agreement”.

You accept these terms when you buy a license, or when you install or use Belltongue, including during the trial. If you accept them for a company or other organization, you confirm that you may bind it, and “you” means that organization.

Belltongue is sold only on this website, through Paddle. It isn’t sold on the Mac App Store, and Apple is not a party to these terms.

Buying through Paddle

Our order process is conducted by our online reseller Paddle.com. Paddle.com is the Merchant of Record for all our orders. Paddle provides all customer service for orders, such as payments, receipts, invoices and taxes, and handles returns.

• Depending on where you buy, you buy from Paddle.com Market Limited, Paddle.com Inc. or Paddle.com (Canada) Ltd.
• Your purchase is governed by the Paddle Buyer Terms. Your use of Belltongue is governed by these terms.
• The current price is on our pricing page. Depending on where you live, sales tax or VAT may be added at checkout or included in the price. Paddle works this out. Checkout shows the final price before you pay.
• For help with an order, visit paddle.net or email us. For help with the app itself, email us.

Free trial

You can use the full app free for 14 days. You don’t need to give a card. When the trial ends, you need a license to keep using Belltongue. A trial is for trying the app, so please don’t try to restart or extend it by getting around the checks.

Your license

When you pay, we give you a personal, non-exclusive license to install and use Belltongue on up to two Macs at the same time, for personal or business use. The license doesn’t expire.

• Moving to another Mac. Deactivate Belltongue on one Mac, then activate it on the new one.
• Buying for an organization. The organization holds the license and makes sure it’s used on no more than two Macs at a time. Buy more licenses for more Macs.
• Transfers. You may not sell, rent, lend or give your license to someone else without our written permission.

We license the software to you; we don’t sell it. We keep all rights in Belltongue that these terms don’t give you.

Updates

Your license includes every 1.x update of Belltongue at no extra cost. A future major version, such as 2.0, may be offered separately.

Updates may change, add or remove features. Belltongue needs macOS 14 or later on a Mac with Apple silicon. Future versions may need a newer macOS.

What you may not do

Don’t:

• get around license checks, activation limits or the trial;
• share, publish or resell license keys;
• copy or redistribute Belltongue, except for your own backups;
• reverse engineer, decompile or modify the app, except where the law lets you do so anyway;
• use Belltongue to break the law or anyone’s rights.

The microphone may pick up other people’s voices. You are responsible for getting any consent the law requires before recording others.

Cleanup services and other third parties

Belltongue can send text to an AI cleanup service you choose, such as OpenRouter, Anthropic, OpenAI or another provider. These services are run by other companies under their own terms and privacy policies.

• You are responsible for your account with them, for following their terms, and for any fees they charge. We don’t handle those payments.
• We don’t control their availability, prices or output. If a provider changes or stops its service, cleanup through it may stop working. Speech recognition on your Mac keeps working.

Speech recognition and AI cleanup can make mistakes, including with names, numbers and meaning. Check text before you rely on it, especially for medical, legal, financial or safety matters.

Speech models are downloaded from their publishers and remain under their own licenses. Our Privacy Policy explains what each connection sends.

Your content

What you dictate is yours. We don’t receive it, and these terms give us no rights to it.

If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them freely, without owing you anything.

Open-source components

Belltongue includes open-source software and uses models published by others, such as sherpa-onnx, ONNX Runtime, WhisperKit, MLX, Sparkle, Whisper and Silero VAD. Each is under its own license. Speech recognition uses SenseVoiceSmall by Tongyi Lab, Alibaba Group (FunAudioLLM / FunASR, github.com/FunAudioLLM/SenseVoice); the model weights are © Alibaba Group and used under the FunASR Model Open Source License Agreement v1.1, and the INT8 ONNX conversion comes from the sherpa-onnx project (k2-fsa). Copies of the licenses for components bundled with the app are in Belltongue.app/Contents/Resources/Licenses. Where an open-source license gives you rights that conflict with these terms, the open-source license wins for that component.

Refunds

You can get a full refund within 30 days of purchase, for any reason. Paddle processes refunds. After a refund, the license is deactivated. See our Refund Policy for how to ask.

Your legal rights

If you are a consumer, you have rights under the law of the country where you live. Nothing in these terms takes them away. For example, in the EU and UK, digital content must be as described and fit for purpose, and you have remedies if it isn’t.

Some of the sections below limit what we promise and what we are liable for. They apply only as far as the law where you live allows.

Warranty disclaimer

We work hard to make Belltongue reliable, and the trial lets you check that it suits you. But to the extent the law allows, Belltongue is provided “as is” and “as available”. We make no other promises, express or implied, including that it is fit for a particular purpose, error-free or uninterrupted, or that it will work with every app, microphone or accent.

Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows:

• we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for lost profits, revenue, data or business opportunities;
• our total liability to you for anything connected with Belltongue is limited to the amount you paid for your license.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, or for anything else that can’t be limited by law.

If you are a consumer in the EU or UK, we are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable.

Ending the license

• You can stop using Belltongue at any time.
• Your license ends if you get a refund.
• We may end your license if you seriously break these terms, for example by getting around license checks or sharing your key. Where we can, we’ll email you first and give you a chance to fix it.

When the license ends, stop using Belltongue and delete it. The sections on refunds, legal rights, warranty, liability and governing law still apply after that.

Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the People’s Republic of China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan), without regard to conflict-of-law rules. The UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

If you are a consumer, you also keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the country where you live, and you can bring a claim in the courts there.

If something goes wrong, please email us first. Most problems can be solved quickly that way.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms, for example when the app or the law changes. We’ll change the date at the top and mention important changes in the changelog. Changes apply from the date shown. They won’t take away rights you already paid for, such as free 1.x updates.

If a part of these terms turns out to be invalid, the rest still applies.

Contact

Guohui Lin, Xitian Plastic Factory, Lane 3, Huancheng 1st Road, Huangbu Town, Huidong County, Huizhou, Guangdong 516353, China. Email: [email protected]. See also our contact page.