Terms of service

Effective May 17, 2026

These terms are the agreement between you and phew when you use the phew app or website (the “service”). Using the service means you accept them. They’re short on purpose.

What phew is

phew is a community-curated map of food & beverage places tagged by whether the screen at checkout asks for a tip. The data is contributed and voted on by users like you — it’s a community resource, not a professional review service.

Your account

You sign in with Google. You agree that the email you sign in with is yours, you’ll keep your access to it secure, and you won’t share your account or run multiple accounts to manipulate vote counts.

You pick a username (4–15 characters, letters/numbers/ underscore). It appears on the votes you cast. We may reclaim usernames that impersonate businesses, public figures, or phew itself, or that are abusive.

How to use it

You agree not to:

Cast fake or coordinated votes — manual or automated — to skew a place’s status.
Harass, threaten, or defame people or businesses, including in usernames or place names.
Scrape the service or use it to build a competing dataset.
Interfere with the service’s security, rate limits, or anti-abuse measures.
Use the service for anything illegal where you live.

We may remove content, suspend accounts, or block access to the service when we believe these rules have been broken. For clear or repeated cases we won’t consult you first.

What you contribute

When you add a place, cast a vote, or write a note, you keep ownership of what you wrote. You grant phew a worldwide, royalty-free license to host, display, and surface it inside the service as part of the community map. You can delete your contributions; the license ends for new copies when you do.

Don’t contribute anything you don’t have the right to share, anything defamatory, or anything that violates a place’s privacy (e.g. interior photos of staff without consent).

Information accuracy

A place’s status on phew is what the community has voted, not a verified statement by phew or by the place itself. Tipping screens change, menus change, businesses change hands. Before you act on a status, treat it as a recent community signal, not a guarantee.

Third-party services

phew uses Google for sign-in, Supabase for the backend, Vercel for hosting, and Mapbox for maps. Their terms apply to their parts of the experience. We’re not responsible for outages or behavior of these services beyond our control.

Service availability

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. We try to keep it up and accurate, but we don’t guarantee uptime, freshness, or that any particular feature will keep working. We may change, pause, or end the service at any time.

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent allowed by law, phew is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising out of your use of the service, including loss of data, business, or profit. Our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you’ve paid us in the last twelve months (which, since the service is free, is zero).

Ending the agreement

You can stop using phew at any time and delete your account from your profile or by emailing us. We can end your access if you break these terms. Sections about contributions, accuracy, liability, and governing law survive after either side ends the agreement.

Changes

If we materially change these terms, we’ll update the effective date and (when it matters) notify you in the app or by email. Continued use after a change means you accept the updated terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Washington, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Disputes will be handled by courts located in that jurisdiction, unless mandatory local law where you live requires otherwise.

Contact

Questions or notices: mamingming@gmail.com.