Terms of Use

These terms are the agreement between you and Varun Rao, sole proprietor, doing business as Parampara ("we", "us", "our"), for the Parampara mobile app and the website at myparampara.in (together, the "service"). By creating an account or using the service, you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the service.

We have kept this in plain language on purpose. Where a sentence carries real legal weight, we have said so clearly rather than hiding it.

1. Who can use Parampara

You must be at least 18 years old and legally able to enter into a contract under the Indian Contract Act, 1872. The service is intended for personal and family use, and is currently offered in India. You are responsible for everything done through your account. Please give us accurate account information and keep it current.

2. What Parampara is, and what it is not

Parampara is a private place to record what your family would need to find: where papers are kept, which policies and accounts exist, who the nominees are. That is all it is, and being clear about the limits protects you as much as us.

Parampara is not:

• Legal, tax, financial or investment advice, and not a substitute for a lawyer, an accountant or a financial adviser.
• A Will, and not a substitute for one. Storing a document in Parampara does not make it legally valid, does not execute it, and does not register it. Storing your wishes here does not transfer anything to anyone.
• A bank, a locker, a custodian, a trustee, an executor, a nominee or an agent. We never hold, manage or transfer your money, assets or property.
• A verification service. We do not check that anything you record is accurate, current, valid or lawful.
• An insurer, a broker, or a seller of any financial product.

Decisions about your estate, your nominations and your family's future should be made with a qualified professional. Parampara helps you remember and share; it does not advise.

3. Your secret phrase and recovery code

This is the most important section in this document, so please read it twice.

Parampara is built so that only you can open your vault. Your secret phrase creates a key on your own device. That phrase and that key never reach us. We store only scrambled data that we cannot open.

This means that if you lose both your secret phrase and your recovery code, your vault is gone permanently. Not delayed. Not recoverable with proof of identity. Gone. We cannot reset it, we cannot decrypt it, and no court order, no support request and no amount of effort by us can open it, because the ability to do so does not exist on our side. This is the honest cost of real privacy, and it is the deliberate design of the product.

You are therefore responsible for: keeping your secret phrase memorable to you and unknown to others; saving your recovery code somewhere safe and separate from your phone; and keeping your own copies of anything you could not bear to lose. Parampara is not a backup service. Please do not make it the only place a critical document exists.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any loss that follows from a lost, forgotten, shared or stolen secret phrase or recovery code, or from your inability to open your own vault.

4. What you put in your vault

Your content remains yours. You give us only the narrow permission needed to run the service: to store, transmit and back up the encrypted form of your content so we can deliver it back to your devices, and to the family members you choose. We claim no other rights over it, and because it is encrypted, we could not use it for anything else even if we wanted to.

You confirm that you have the right to store what you store, and that doing so does not break any law or anyone else's rights. You are responsible for the accuracy of what you record. If you record a policy number incorrectly, or record where a document is kept and later move it, the record will simply be wrong, and we have no way to know.

5. Family sharing and emergency access

You decide who to invite, what areas they may see, and whether they can see it now or only after an emergency request and a waiting period you choose. You can remove someone at any time. When you grant access, the key for that person is created on your phone and sealed to them; we never hold a key that opens your vault.

Two honest limits. First, emergency access is a convenience, not a guarantee. It depends on your family members installing the app, keeping their own accounts and keys, having a working device, and having a network connection at the moment they need it. Please do not rely on it as the sole mechanism by which your family will learn anything essential. Tell them where things are as well. Second, once you have shared something with someone, we cannot control what they do with what they have seen, and we are not responsible for their actions. Choose the people you trust carefully.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable if emergency access does not work, is delayed, is declined, is triggered when you did not want it, or if a person you invited misuses what you shared with them.

6. If something happens to you

Because we cannot read your vault, we cannot hand it to your family, your legal heirs, your executor or anyone else, whatever proof they present to us. The trusted-family feature you set up while you are alive and able is the only route by which anyone else can open your vault. We may close an account on receiving satisfactory proof of death, but we cannot open, transfer or export the contents. Please set up your trusted family members, and tell them Parampara exists.

7. Early access

The service is in early access. It may change, features may be added or removed, and it may contain faults. We do not promise that it will be uninterrupted, error free, or available at any particular time, and we offer no service level guarantee. We may modify, suspend or discontinue any part of the service, and we will give reasonable notice before discontinuing it entirely so that you can retrieve your information.

8. Free now, and what happens if that changes

The service is currently free. We may introduce paid plans in future. If we do, we will tell you in advance, and the core of what you have already saved will remain accessible to you. We will never hold your existing information hostage behind a new payment.

9. What you may not do

Please do not: use the service for anything unlawful, or to store content you have no right to keep; attempt to break, probe, overload or bypass the security of the service; try to reverse engineer, decompile or extract the source code, except to the extent the law expressly permits; use the service to harm, harass, impersonate or defraud anyone; resell, sublicense or commercially exploit the service; use automated means to access it at scale; or upload anything containing malware.

10. Suspension and ending the agreement

You can stop at any time and delete your account from inside the app, or at myparampara.in/delete-account. Deletion is permanent and removes your account and your encrypted vault. We may suspend or end your access if you materially breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we reasonably believe it is necessary to protect the service or other people. Except where the law or a serious risk prevents it, we will tell you first and give you a fair chance to retrieve your information. Sections that by their nature should survive the end of this agreement (including sections 3, 4, 11, 12, 13, 16 and 17) will survive.

11. Our intellectual property

The Parampara name, logo, design, software and content are ours and remain ours. These terms give you a personal, limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the app for your own family's purposes, and nothing more.

12. Other people's services

We rely on infrastructure providers to run the service, and they are named in our Privacy Policy. The app may also link to third-party websites or services (for example when you open a guide, or share through another app on your phone). We do not control those services and are not responsible for them.

13. The service is provided as is

We work genuinely hard to make Parampara reliable and secure, and we have designed it so that we ourselves cannot read your data. But to the fullest extent permitted by law, the service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties or conditions of any kind, whether express, implied or statutory, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will meet your requirements, that it will be secure against every possible attack, or that any defect will be corrected.

14. Limitation of our liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

• We are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, opportunity, or anticipated savings, however caused.
• We are not liable for any loss of, or inability to access, your data, including where it follows from a lost secret phrase or recovery code, a device you lose or damage, or your own deletion of your account.
• We are not liable for any decision made, or not made, by you or your family in reliance on information stored in or absent from the service.
• Our total aggregate liability for all claims relating to the service, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), or otherwise, is limited to the greater of: the total amount you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim, or ₹1,000 (one thousand Indian rupees).

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for gross negligence or wilful misconduct, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including your non-excludable rights as a consumer under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. If you are a consumer, these terms do not affect those rights.

15. If a claim is made against us because of you

You agree to indemnify us against any claim, demand, loss or reasonable cost (including reasonable legal fees) brought by a third party and arising from your unlawful use of the service, your breach of these terms, your infringement of someone else's rights, or content you stored or shared through the service. We will tell you promptly of any such claim and will not settle it without talking to you first.

16. Things outside anyone's control

We are not liable for failure or delay caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including internet or network failure, failures of infrastructure providers, power cuts, natural events, epidemics, government action, or legal orders.

17. Governing law and where disputes are heard

These terms are governed by the laws of India. The courts at Bengaluru, Karnataka have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them, except that nothing prevents a consumer from bringing proceedings where the law entitles them to. Before starting proceedings, please write to us at [email protected]. Most problems can be sorted out quickly by a person reading your message, and we would rather do that.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms as the service grows. If a change materially affects your rights, we will give you reasonable notice by email or in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the updated terms. If you do not accept them, you may delete your account, which remains free and immediate.

19. The rest

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, that part is limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary and the rest remains in force. If we do not enforce a right straight away, we have not given it up. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours to a successor of the business (for example if Parampara is incorporated or acquired), and your rights will not be reduced by that transfer. These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, are the entire agreement between us about the service. Nothing here creates a partnership, employment or agency relationship.

20. Contact

Questions about these terms, or anything else:

Varun Rao, doing business as Parampara
Email: [email protected]
Bengaluru, Karnataka 560103, India

For privacy concerns specifically, our Grievance Officer is named in the Privacy Policy, and we aim to acknowledge grievances within 72 hours.