Terms of service

1. Who we are and how to reach us

Sugarhold is operated by STARBAK LIMITED. Our company details are on the legal information page. You can reach us at support@starbak.shop or on +44 7824871118, Monday to Friday, 09:00–17:00 UK time.

2. What the service is

Sugarhold takes a recipe you supply and a reduction you choose, and explains which of four functions the sugar in that recipe is performing — sweetness, holding water, colour and browning, and holding the structure up — how much of each is likely to be lost at the reduction you asked for, which of them something else can carry, and where the loss is smallest if some of it has to go. It produces a segmented bar and a change-preview card.

The weighting is produced from a fixed table of recipe types held in the service and is calculated in your browser. A language model is used for one thing only: deciding which kind of bake your recipe is. It does not produce any figure that you see.

3. What the service is not

These limits are part of the agreement, not a disclaimer bolted on at the end.

• It has nothing to do with health, nutrition or diet. It gives no calorie or intake figure, covers nothing about blood sugar, metabolism, weight, teeth or any medical topic, and takes no view on whether reducing sugar is a good idea. It does not care why you want to. Where it detects content of that kind it stops and says so. Questions about health belong with a qualified professional.
• It makes no food safety or shelf-life judgement. It describes changes in texture, such as something being drier and firmer the next day. It never addresses whether something is still safe to eat, how long it keeps or whether it will spoil, and it must not be relied on for any of that.
• It outputs no recipe and no quantity or ratio. Your oven, your flour, your technique and the texture you want are unknown to it, and putting a figure on the page would be pretending otherwise. It explains which category of ingredient can carry which job and leaves the doing to you.
• It makes no allergy or intolerance assessment. Anything swapped in brings its own ingredients with it. Check what the people eating it can and cannot have before changing anything.
• It names no brand and no specific product, and it accepts no image uploads of any kind.

The service tells you what a bake of that general kind tends to do. It is not a measurement of your bake, and it can be wrong about your recipe. Treat it as a well-informed expectation and use your own judgement.

4. Who may use it

You must be 18 or over to create an account or subscribe. You are responsible for keeping your password to yourself and for anything done through your account. Tell us straight away if you think someone else has got into it.

How you may and may not use the service is set out in our acceptable use policy, which forms part of these terms.

5. Your content

The recipes you paste in stay yours. You give us only the permission we need to run the service for you: to process what you paste in order to produce your reading, and, on the Kitchen plan, to store it so you can come back to it.

We do not use what you paste to train or improve any model, ours or anyone else’s, and we do not sell it or share it for advertising. The privacy notice sets out the detail.

The bars and cards the service produces for you are yours. Print them, keep them, put them on the wall.

6. Plans, payment and renewal

• There are three plans: Free, Reduce and Kitchen. Prices, what each includes and the monthly allowance are on the pricing page.
• All prices are in US dollars (USD) and include VAT at 20% where it applies. The price shown at checkout is the price charged.
• Paid plans renew automatically — monthly plans every month, annual plans every year — until you cancel. We will remind you before each annual renewal, and before any free or reduced-price introductory period turns into a paid one.
• Each plan carries a monthly allowance for using the service. It resets at the start of each period and does not roll over. There are no credit packs and no top-ups.
• An allowance is a right to use the service. It is not money, it is not stored value, it is not redeemable for cash and it is not transferable.
• We may change our prices. If we do, we will tell you in good time before the change takes effect and you can cancel instead of accepting it. A price change never applies to a period you have already paid for.
• If a payment fails we will tell you and try again. If it keeps failing we may suspend the paid features until it is settled. We do not add fees for a failed payment.

We voluntarily follow the subscription rules in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 ahead of the date they take effect. That means, in practice: we tell you clearly what you are signing up to before you pay; we remind you before renewals; we make cancelling as easy as subscribing and available in the same place; we do not roll a trial into a paid subscription without telling you first; and we refund promptly where a cancellation right applies. These are commitments we are making now rather than waiting for.

7. Promotions

We do not run discount codes, limited-time prices, countdown offers or referral rewards. If we ever do, the full terms will be published alongside the offer before you can accept it. The price on the pricing page is simply the price.

8. Payments and card security

Payments are taken by a third-party payment processor certified to PCI DSS Level 1. Card details are entered on the processor’s own hosted page over an encrypted connection and never reach Sugarhold’s servers. We receive and store only the last four digits, the card type and the expiry date, so that you can tell your cards apart. We never see or store the full card number or the security code.

9. Cancelling, and changing your mind

You can cancel at any time from your account page — a couple of clicks, no reason required and no telephone call. Cancelling stops the next charge and you keep the plan until the end of the period you have already paid for.

Separately from that, as a consumer you have a 14-day right to cancel a subscription and get your money back. Because this is a digital service that begins straight away, that right ends once the service has been fully provided, but only if you have asked us to begin within the 14 days and acknowledged that doing so means losing it. That is why there are two separate boxes to tick at checkout and why neither of them is ticked for you. The full wording, the refund process and the statutory cancellation form are on the cancellation and refunds page.

10. Availability and changes

We try to keep the service up and working, but we do not promise it will never be unavailable. We may change how it works, and we may add or remove features. If a change makes a paid plan materially worse for you, we will tell you before it happens and you can cancel and be refunded for the part of the period you have not used.

We may update these terms. If a change affects your rights we will tell you beforehand and say when it takes effect. Carrying on using the service after that is taken as accepting the new version; if you would rather not, you can cancel.

11. Ending your account

You can close your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or the acceptable use policy, or where we are required to by law. Unless the breach is serious we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right. If we close a paid account for a reason that is not your fault, we refund the unused part of the period.

12. Our responsibility to you

Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights. In particular, nothing here limits or excludes:

• your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 that digital content and services be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described;
• our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• our liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded.

Beyond that: Sugarhold is a tool for thinking about a change to a recipe before you make it. Deciding what to bake, and what to do with what it tells you, is yours. We are not responsible for the outcome of a bake, for ingredients you buy, or for any decision you take on the strength of a reading. Where we are liable for something that goes wrong with the service itself, our liability to you in any twelve-month period is limited to what you paid us in that period, except where the law does not allow such a limit.

If you use Sugarhold for business rather than as a consumer, we are not liable to you for loss of profit, loss of business or any indirect loss.

13. Complaints

Tell us and we will try to sort it out. Write to support@starbak.shop with what happened and what you would like us to do. We acknowledge complaints within one working day and aim to resolve them within ten. We are not signed up to any alternative dispute resolution scheme.

14. Law and courts

These terms are governed by English law, and disputes may be brought in the English courts. If you are a consumer living elsewhere, this does not take away the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, and you may also bring proceedings in your local courts where that law allows.

15. General

If a court finds part of these terms unenforceable, the rest stays in force. If we do not enforce something straight away, that does not mean we have given it up. You may not transfer your account to someone else. These terms, together with the acceptable use policy, the privacy notice, the cookie notice and the AI notice, are the whole agreement between us.