Terms of Use
Last updated: 3 August 2026
These Terms are the agreement between you and KeenShift, of Sydney, Australia, covering the FernsBook iPhone app and the fernsbook.keenshift.ai website. They sit alongside Apple's Standard Licensed Application End User License Agreement (EULA), which is the licence under which you use the app. Where the two disagree about the licence itself, Apple's EULA governs. Installing or using FernsBook means you accept both.
What FernsBook is — and what it is not
FernsBook is a horticultural reference: a fixed library of thirty-seven fern species with care information, a search tool, a private notebook, a dated care log for the ferns you keep, and an AI-assisted coach that answers questions about the species you are reading. It is an aid to growing plants and nothing more.
It is not a plant identification service, a botanical authority, or a source of medical, veterinary, toxicity, edibility or foraging advice, and it must not be used as one. Never eat, apply or administer a plant on the strength of anything in this app. Species names, ranges and care guidance are written to be accurate and useful, but plants vary, growing conditions vary, and nomenclature changes — check anything that matters against a local horticultural authority. Content generated by the fern coach is produced automatically and can be wrong; treat it as a knowledgeable suggestion, not as fact.
No account
FernsBook has no registration and no sign-in, so there is no account for you to keep secure and none for us to suspend. Your notes are stored on your own device; keeping and backing up your device is your responsibility, and deleting the app deletes them irreversibly.
Acceptable use
- Use the coach for genuine questions about growing ferns. Do not use it to attempt to extract advice this app refuses to give, to generate unrelated content, or to abuse the service with automated or bulk requests.
- Do not scrape, republish or redistribute the species library. The entries, curator notes and the arrangement of the collections are original work and remain ours.
- Do not attempt to defeat the daily question allowance, reverse engineer the app's service endpoints, or interfere with the service for other people.
Notes you write are yours. We do not receive them, so we claim no licence over them.
FernsBook Pro subscription
FernsBook Pro costs US$4.99 per month or US$19.99 per year. Prices vary by storefront; the exact amount and billing period you will be charged are shown in the app before you confirm. Pro grants exactly three things: (a) fern coach questions without a daily limit, where a free account stops after three asks a day; (b) the care log, being a dated record of watering, misting, feeding, repotting, pruning and moving kept against each fern; and (c) export of your notes and care log as a plain-text file through the iOS share sheet. Everything else in FernsBook — all thirty-seven species, all eleven care panels, the curator notes, search, filters, the offline fallback answer, and writing and reading your notes — is free, requires no account, and is not affected by whether you subscribe.
- Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation of purchase.
- Auto-renewal. The subscription renews automatically for the same period unless auto-renewal is turned off at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Your Apple Account is charged for the renewal within the 24 hours before the current period ends, at the then-current price for your storefront.
- Managing and cancelling. Manage the subscription or turn off auto-renewal in your App Store account settings — on your iPhone, open Settings → your name → Subscriptions. Cancelling stops the next charge; Pro remains active until the end of the period you have already paid for. Deleting the app does not cancel a subscription.
- Restoring. Restore Purchases, in the app's Settings tab, re-checks the entitlement held by the Apple Account you are signed in with. Use it on a new iPhone or after reinstalling.
- Refunds for App Store purchases are handled by Apple under its terms, at reportaproblem.apple.com. We cannot issue them ourselves.
- If Pro lapses, nothing you created is deleted. The app returns to three coach questions per day, and the reference, search and your notes carry on exactly as before. The care log and the export are Pro features, so they lock until you resubscribe; your existing care entries remain stored on your device throughout.
We may change the price of Pro or what it includes, but only going forward. A change never alters a period you have already paid for, and a price increase takes effect on renewal only with your consent, in the manner Apple requires.
Availability of the coach
The fern coach depends on a network service and on third-party AI infrastructure, so it can be slow, unavailable, or withdrawn. When it cannot be reached, the app falls back to an answer assembled from the species entry itself. The reference library, search and your notes work with no network connection at all. Daily allowances and coach behaviour may change as the app develops; if a change would reduce what a paid subscription delivers, it will not be applied to a period you have already paid for.
Warranties and liability
FernsBook is provided "as is" to the fullest extent the law allows. Nothing in these Terms excludes rights that cannot legally be excluded, including the consumer guarantees under the Australian Consumer Law and equivalent protections where you live. Subject to that, KeenShift is not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and specifically not for the death of, or damage to, a plant, garden or collection arising from care guidance in the app or from an answer produced by the coach.
Governing law
These Terms are governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia, without limiting any mandatory consumer protection available to you where you live.