1. Acceptance of these terms
By creating an account or using Kinli, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the service. These terms are a binding agreement between you and Kinli Circles Limited (“Kinli”, “we”, “us”), a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17394471.
2. What Kinli is
Kinli is a referral-only community for trusted regional groups. Members are admitted to a circle when an existing member refers them. Each circle is private to its members. A feature called Ask Kinli can help answer questions by drawing on posts within your circles. The service is provided through our mobile apps and the website at kinli.co.uk.
3. Eligibility and membership
You may only use Kinli if:
- you are at least 18 years old;
- you have been referred by an existing member, or have created a circle through an invitation, in line with how the service works at the time; and
- you provide accurate information and keep your account details secure.
You are responsible for activity on your account. Let us know promptly if you think someone else has accessed it.
4. Member conduct and community rules
Kinli only works because members treat each other with care. You agree that you will not:
- post anything unlawful, harmful, harassing, hateful, or deceptive;
- impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your connection to a person or circle;
- share another member’s personal information, or content from a private circle, outside it;
- use the service to spam, scrape, or send unsolicited marketing;
- attempt to break, overload, or gain unauthorised access to the service or its systems; or
- use Kinli for any commercial purpose beyond the member-to-member marketplace described below.
Circles may set their own additional house rules. Hosts and co-hosts look after their circles and may manage membership and content within them.
5. Your content and the licence you give us
You keep ownership of everything you post. To run the service, you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, display, and distribute your content to the members of the circle you posted it into, and to operate features such as Ask Kinli. This licence exists only so we can show your content to the right people and run the service; it ends when your content is removed, except that:
- copies may remain in backups for a limited period before they are overwritten; and
- where you delete your account, your posts are not erased but are anonymised after a 14-day grace period — your name is replaced with “Former member” so the circle’s shared knowledge is preserved while your identity is removed.
You are responsible for your content and confirm you have the right to post it. We may remove content that breaches these terms.
6. Subscriptions and billing
Kinli has a free tier (Friend) and paid tiers (Insider and Founder). There is also a separate Business plan for a directory listing, which businesses can hold on its own or existing members can add to a Founder membership. Business listings are described in Business listings and verification below.
Paid subscriptions can be taken out in two ways, and how you pay decides who bills you and where you manage it:
- On our website, processed by Stripe. You authorise us, through Stripe, to charge the applicable fee on a recurring basis until you change or cancel it. Manage or cancel from your Kinli account.
- In the iOS app, processed by Apple as an in-app purchase. Apple is the merchant of record, bills your Apple ID, and applies its own terms to the transaction. These subscriptions can only be changed or cancelled in your Apple ID subscription settings — we cannot cancel them for you, and cancelling in our app would not stop Apple charging you.
- Cancellation: you can go back to Friend at any time. If you subscribed on our website, do it from your Kinli account; if you subscribed in the iOS app, cancel in your Apple ID subscription settings and your tier changes automatically when the period ends. Either way you keep your account, your circles, and your history — you simply stop being on a paid tier at the end of your current billing period.
- 14-day cancellation right: if you are a consumer in the UK or EU, you have a legal right to cancel a new subscription within 14 days. Because the service is digital content supplied immediately, by subscribing you agree that we may begin providing it straight away; if you cancel within the 14 days after using it, we may charge a proportionate amount for what you have used.
- Refunds: beyond your statutory rights, fees already paid are generally non-refundable, but we will always honour your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and other applicable consumer law. If something has gone wrong, contact us.
- Changes to pricing and what each plan includes: we may change subscription prices, marketplace fees, and what is included in any tier or plan — including the Business plan and the Founder business add-on, and any monthly allowances, such as how many marketplace listings or posts are included. We will give you at least 14 days’ notice before a change takes effect, by email or in the app. The change will apply from your next billing period after that notice. If you do not wish to continue, you can switch back to Friend, or cancel, at any time before it takes effect. (This 14-day notice period is separate from the 14-day cancellation right described above.)
7. Marketplace
Members may list items for sale to other members within their circles. The marketplace is member-to-member: a sale is an agreement between the buyer and the seller. Kinli is not a party to that sale, does not own or inspect the items, and is not responsible for the quality, safety, legality, or description of what is listed. At launch, payment for marketplace items is arranged directly between members off-platform; we provide a collection-code handshake to help confirm a sale has completed. Always use your own judgement when buying or selling, and meet safely.
How many listings you can create in a month depends on your tier, and marketplace fees vary by tier. We may change either — on at least 14 days’ notice, as set out in Subscriptions and billing above.
8. Business listings and verification
The Kinli directory lists local businesses and tradespeople. A listing usually starts because a member shared a contact card into a circle — so an entry may exist before the business knows about it. If a listing is about you, you can claim it free of charge, which gives you control of your own entry and nothing else, or ask us to remove your details using the link in the email we sent you.
The paid Business plan adds the features a listed business needs, including reading and replying to enquiries from members. A business account is a directory presence only: it is not a member of any circle, and cannot post, reply to posts, or sell in the marketplace, which stays member-to-member for physical items. Members can start a conversation with a listed business; a business cannot message a member first.
Verification. A verified badge records that we ran a specific check and it passed — a Companies House lookup for a limited company, or confirmation of the email address shown on the listing for a sole trader. The label says which was done. It is not an endorsement, a recommendation, or any assurance about the quality, safety, pricing, or conduct of that business, and we do not vet the work anyone does. A listing without a badge has simply not completed a check. As with the marketplace, any arrangement you make with a business is between you and them.
9. Ask Kinli
Ask Kinli generates answers from posts within your circles using AI. It can be wrong, incomplete, or out of date, and it is not professional, legal, financial, medical, or other expert advice. Always verify anything important and use your own judgement. We are not liable for decisions you make based on Ask Kinli.
10. Suspension and termination
You can stop using Kinli and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or end your access if you breach these terms, if your conduct puts other members or the service at risk, or where we are required to by law. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why. If your account is ended, the parts of these terms that should survive (such as content licences for content that remains, and the liability sections) will continue to apply.
11. Disclaimers and liability
We work hard to provide a reliable service, but we provide Kinli “as is” and cannot promise it will always be available or error-free.
Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability where it would be unlawful to do so. In particular, we do not exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot be excluded under English law — including your statutory rights as a consumer.
Subject to that, we are not liable for loss that is not reasonably foreseeable, for the acts of other members (including marketplace transactions and anything posted by members), or for loss arising from your failure to follow these terms.
12. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms from time to time. When we make a material change, we will update the “Last updated” date and, where appropriate, let you know in the app or by email. If you continue to use Kinli after a change takes effect, you accept the updated terms.
13. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales will have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the UK or in the EU, you may also have the protection of mandatory provisions of the law of the country in which you live, and you can bring proceedings in your local courts.
