Last updated: 12 September 2026
These terms are a contract between you and Bernicia Studio Ltd. They apply when you download or use Lorewise. If you do not agree to them, please do not use Lorewise.
Nothing in these terms takes away your legal rights as a consumer. Where these terms and the law disagree, the law applies.
Lorewise is made and operated by Bernicia Studio Ltd ("we", "us", "our").
The contracting party is the company named above. Our contact domain is berniciastudios.com, in the plural; the company name is singular. Both are correct.
Lorewise is operated by one person. There is no telephone line, live chat or support portal. The email address above is the only way to contact us. We read every message, but we cannot promise a response time.
These terms form a contract between you and Bernicia Studio Ltd. You accept them at sign-in, by confirming that you accept them. We record the date and time of that acceptance and which version of these terms it applied to.
Your use of Lorewise is also governed by our Privacy Policy, at https://legal.berniciastudios.com/privacy-policy/, and by the terms of the app store you purchased through (Apple's App Store or Google Play).
We may change these terms from time to time, for example to reflect a change in the law or in Lorewise itself. If we make a significant change, we will update the "Last updated" date, and where the change materially affects you we will give you reasonable notice within the app before it takes effect. We will not use a change to these terms to move anything you have already unlocked or already collected behind a further payment. If you do not accept a change, you may stop using Lorewise and close your account.
Minimum age. You must be 16 or over to use Lorewise. It is not designed for children, we do not direct it at children, and we do not knowingly permit anyone under 16 to hold an account. Our Privacy Policy says the same.
Age and difficult subject matter. Lorewise covers murder, genocide, slavery and sexual subject matter as historical topics. Those three areas are closed to readers under 18 and cannot be opened before then. When you create an account we ask for your year of birth, and where it shows that you are under 18 the three sensitive-content categories described at section 10 cannot be switched on, in Settings or by any other route.
We ask for the year alone and never a full date of birth, because the only thing we need to establish is whether you are 18. We rely on what you tell us. We do not verify it, and we do not hold it out as anything stronger than an honest answer honestly acted upon. You set your year of birth once. If it is wrong, email us and we will correct it.
Signing in. You may sign in with Google, or with an email address and password. You are responsible for keeping your login details secure and for activity on your account.
One account. We assume one account per person.
Your data. You may export all of your data from within the app at any time, as a JSON file, using your device's share sheet.
Closing your account. You may delete your account from within the app. If you no longer have the app, you can ask us to delete it instead, as explained at https://legal.berniciastudios.com/delete-account/. Deletion is immediate and permanent from our active systems. Residual copies may remain in encrypted backups for a short period on a normal backup rotation before being overwritten.
Usage statistics and crash diagnostics held by the analytics and error-reporting providers described in our Privacy Policy are not linked to your Lorewise account, and deleting your account does not delete them. They are kept on those providers' own retention schedules. We do not describe them as anonymous: crash reports in particular can carry device and installation identifiers, which makes them pseudonymous rather than anonymous, and our Privacy Policy describes how they are handled.
Deleting your account destroys your entire collection and all of your progress. This cannot be reversed. Deleting your account does not refund your Founder purchase. If you later create a new account, "Restore Purchases" will restore your Founder entitlement through the app store, but your collection and progress will be permanently lost and cannot be recovered. The app will remind you of this before you confirm.
Your purchase record is deleted too. If you bought Founder, the record we hold of that purchase is deleted along with the rest of your account, including the store transaction identifier, the date, and the confirmation described at section 6.2. Apple or Google, whichever took your payment, keeps its own record of the transaction under its own terms. If you want a copy of your confirmation, use "Export my data" in Settings before you delete your account.
Lorewise teaches history, etymology and folklore through a trading-card mechanic. Its subject matter includes British and Irish history, world history, American history, folklore and cryptids.
The app has two separate layers:
Lorewise also includes a second study mode, Scholar's Assignments, consisting of structured courses and investigations that teach a subject and how to weigh historical sources. Completing one awards a card that cannot be obtained in any other way.
Lorewise has no leaderboards, no competitive leagues, no lives or hearts, no advertising and no social feed.
Founder is a single, one-time purchase. It is not a subscription. There is no recurring billing, no renewal and no expiry. On Apple it is a non-consumable in-app purchase. On Google Play it is a one-time product.
The price is shown at the point of purchase in your local currency. You pay the app store rather than us: Apple or Google process the transaction in full, and we never receive or handle your payment card details.
The app provides a "Restore Purchases" option, so that you can restore your Founder entitlement if you reinstall Lorewise or move to a new device.
Founder attaches to your Lorewise account, not to the device or the store you bought from. Once a purchase has been verified, signing in to the same Lorewise account on another device gives you Founder there straight away, including on the other platform, with nothing further to do. "Restore Purchases" exists for the case where you sign in and the entitlement is somehow missing. Refunds, however, are handled by each store separately, so if you ever need one you must ask the store you actually bought from.
Two words are used precisely in these terms and mean different things. Access is what your tier permits: 6 of the 13 Groups on the free tier, all 13 as a Founder. Follow is your own choice of subjects within what you can access, and it shapes what the app shows you. You choose your 6 Groups when you first sign in, and you can change that choice in Settings.
On the free tier you may give up at most 3 Groups in any 12 month period. Adding a Group to fill a place you had left empty does not count against that, because you were entitled to 6 either way; only giving one up does, since that is what makes room for a different one. The allowance is a rolling one, so it frees up again 12 months after each change rather than running out permanently. Founders have all 13 Groups and are not limited in this way.
Changing your Groups never affects anything already in your collection.
| Feature | Free | Founder |
|---|---|---|
| Topic Groups you can access | 6 of 13 (your choice) | all 13 |
| Packs per day | 1 | 3 |
| Unopened pack limit | 5 | 15 |
| Foil upgrades | locked | full system |
| Suggestions per week | 1 | 3 |
| Offline copies of full source articles | no | yes |
| Discovery cards in packs | no | yes |
The free tier remains a complete app in its own right. Within the Groups you can access, the reading Feed, spaced repetition, the daily quiz, streaks, card sharing, badges and the Trophy Cabinet are all included at no cost.
Content is organised as Groups, which are top-level subject pillars, then Sets within Groups, then Cards within Sets. As at the date of these terms there are 13 Groups:
These are the Groups as they exist on the date of these terms. Renaming or reorganising a Group does not reduce what your Founder purchase includes.
This accounts for the great majority of the content we intend to produce. A Founder will not be asked to pay again for additional content within these 13 subject areas.
We will not create a new Group out of subject matter that already sits inside these 13. If we later separate a subject out of an existing Group, whether by splitting, renaming, merging or moving it, the result remains included in your Founder purchase. This is a term, not a statement of intent, and it is the limit that gives the promise above its meaning: a new Group is only genuinely new if a Founder could not already reach that subject matter before it existed.
Nothing you have already unlocked or already collected will be moved behind a further payment. This promise is unqualified, and we reserve no right to change it.
Anything you have already collected remains yours, and continues to count toward badges and achievements, even if the tier structure or the allocation of Groups changes at a later date.
Two things, and only these two, may ever be offered for a further payment:
The second and fourth conditions are what give this section its limits. An optional collection may not be carved out of what you already have, and declining one may never take anything away from you or make what you already own worse.
We will not ask you to pay again for content already included merely because it has been renamed, split across more Groups, merged or moved between Groups. Dividing an existing Group does not create anything we may charge you for.
"Permanent" means for as long as Lorewise remains available. Lorewise depends on online services and is operated by one person. We will keep it running for as long as we reasonably can, but we cannot promise that it will exist indefinitely. Section 12 sets out what happens if we discontinue it.
We describe Founder as a one-time purchase with permanent access rather than as a "lifetime" purchase, because "lifetime" would overstate what we are able to guarantee.
Three distinct sets of rules apply, and they operate independently of one another.
Apple and Google take payment and operate their own refund processes. We cannot directly refund an App Store or Google Play purchase. To request a refund from the store, you must apply to the store:
Under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 you normally have 14 days to cancel an online purchase of digital content and receive a refund. If you live in the EU, equivalent rights arise under your own country's implementation of the Consumer Rights Directive, and this section applies to you in the same way.
You lose that right if you asked for the content to be supplied immediately and acknowledged that by doing so you would lose your right to cancel. Before Lorewise opens the app store's purchase screen, we ask you to confirm the following, and you must confirm it yourself before the purchase can proceed:
> "I want Lorewise to give me access to Founder straight away, and I understand that once access begins I will lose my 14-day right to cancel."
We record the date and time of that confirmation, together with the exact wording shown to you, against your purchase. You can obtain a copy of that record at any time using "Export my data" in Settings, which returns it as a file you can keep. If you delete your account, that record is deleted with it, as described in section 3, so export a copy first if you want to keep one.
You will separately receive a receipt for the purchase itself from Apple or Google, who take the payment.
If you are entitled to cancel under these Regulations and have not lost that right, contact us at hello@berniciastudios.com and we will assist you in obtaining a refund through the relevant store.
Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, digital content we supply must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described. These rights cannot be excluded or limited.
If Lorewise is faulty you are entitled to a repair or replacement, and in some circumstances to a price reduction, which may amount to a full refund. Nothing in these terms removes those rights. Because the app store processes payment, we may need to work with Apple or Google in order to provide a refund, but that does not reduce your rights against us.
Cards, packs, foil upgrades, Lore Fragments, badges and titles are a limited, personal, non-transferable licence to use features within Lorewise. They are not your property, they are not money, and they are not an investment. The app describes them in everyday language, such as "your collection" and "owned", and that language does not alter their legal status.
Each pack contains 5 cards. Four are drawn from the subjects you follow: 2 Common, 1 Uncommon, and 1 card from the rarest slot, which resolves as set out below.
Where the subjects you follow cannot supply a card of the rarity a slot calls for, we draw one of that rarity from the wider library instead, so that the odds below hold whatever you happen to follow. Only if the library cannot supply one either do we fall back to a Common. A card you receive by either route is yours on exactly the same terms as any other: you may read it, it enters your collection, and it counts toward badges and achievements, even if it comes from a Group you have not unlocked.
The fifth card depends on your tier:
The rarest slot is the rarest card in the pack, and it carries the following odds. Most of the time it is a Rare:
A pity threshold also applies: after 150 consecutive packs in which you have received no Legendary, the next card in the rarest slot is guaranteed to be Legendary.
Duplicates. Cards are drawn independently each time, and we do not exclude cards you already own. You will therefore receive duplicates, and the more of a Group you have collected the more often that will happen. Duplicates are not waste: they are the only source of foil upgrades and Lore Fragments. We do not publish a duplicate rate because it depends on how much of your accessible pool you already hold, and any single figure we quoted would be wrong for most players.
These odds are shown in the app, on the Founder purchase screen, before you buy, so that you can see them before deciding.
You may send us a suggestion for a topic or set using the in-app suggestion box, once a week on the free tier and three times a week as a Founder. Suggestions are sent to a private list visible only to us, and are never shown to other users.
By sending a suggestion you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and sub-licensable licence to use, adapt, publish and act upon it, in Lorewise and in any successor or related product. That licence survives the closure of your account and cannot be withdrawn, because we may build content around a suggestion long after it was sent. We are under no obligation to use it. We do not treat suggestions as confidential, and we do not pay for them or credit them. Any content we create in response to a suggestion belongs to us, and sending a suggestion gives you no ownership of that content.
You may render a card as an image and share it, using your device's share sheet, to any application you choose. The image carries a "LOREWISE" watermark and, where you have set one, your earned title. Nothing is uploaded to our servers, and the process takes place entirely on your device.
You may share cards for personal, non-commercial purposes. Card text remains ours. Card artwork is public domain or openly licensed third-party material and remains subject to its own licence, which travels with the image: where a licence requires attribution, that attribution is shown on the card and must not be removed or cropped out of anything you share. If you want to use a card image commercially, check the artwork's licence first, because our permission does not extend to material we do not own.
Lorewise and its original content are owned by Bernicia Studio Ltd or licensed to us.
Third-party materials remain subject to their own licences.
We grant you a personal, non-commercial licence to use Lorewise. You may not scrape, bulk-extract, copy, redistribute or commercially exploit our content.
Sensitive content. Lorewise covers difficult historical subject matter, including murder cases, genocide and slavery. It provides an opt-in sensitive-content system with three independent categories, shown in the app as Violence, Sexual content and Historical atrocities, all of which are off by default. Readers under 18 cannot switch them on at all, as described at section 3. If you are 18 or over, you choose during onboarding what you are willing to see, and you may change that choice in Settings at any time. The filter is applied everywhere content is shown, and we take reasonable care to categorise content correctly, so that material in a category you have not opted into does not reach you. It depends on each card being tagged correctly by us, and we cannot promise that a judgement about a historical subject will never be wrong. If you find something miscategorised, tell us at hello@berniciastudios.com and we will correct it.
Accuracy. Lorewise is provided for general education and interest. It does not constitute professional, academic, legal or medical advice. History is contested, and scholarship changes over time. Cards display a consensus level (Established, Debated, Minority, Folklore or Myth), and debated topics deliberately present more than one position. This section does not reduce our obligation under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 to supply content as described.
External links. Lorewise links to external sources, including Wikipedia. We are not responsible for the content of websites we do not control.
You must not:
If you break these rules. We may suspend or, for serious or repeated breaches, close your account. We will act proportionately: wherever it is reasonable to do so we will contact you first and give you a chance to stop, and we will choose the least disruptive step that addresses the problem. We will only close an account without warning where the breach is serious, deliberate, or causes harm to the service or to other users.
If we close your account because you broke these rules, you lose access to your collection and progress.
We will only withhold a refund of the Founder purchase where the breach was serious or deliberate, such as circumventing the purchase gate, extracting content at scale, or exploiting Lorewise commercially. Where we close your account for a breach that was neither serious nor deliberate, we will refund you on the same basis as section 12. If we suspend or close your account for any other reason at all, section 12 applies instead.
You may challenge any suspension or closure by emailing hello@berniciastudios.com, and nothing here affects your statutory rights or your right to go to court.
Lorewise depends on online services, being a hosted database and a sign-in service. If those services stop, most of the app will stop working. Lorewise is not designed to operate fully offline.
We do not promise that Lorewise will be available at all times or free from error. Maintenance, downtime and defects occur, and we do not offer an uptime guarantee.
We may change or remove features. As set out in section 5, however, nothing you have already unlocked or already collected will be moved behind a further payment.
Lorewise is operated by one person, and discontinuation is a realistic possibility. We are honest about that rather than silent on it.
If we decide to discontinue Lorewise permanently, we will give you at least 30 days' notice in the app and, where we hold an email address for you, by email, so that you can export your data first. This is a commitment, not an intention.
Because the app stores took your payment, any refund has to be made through Apple or Google, and we will do everything reasonably within our power on our side to obtain it for you. We never take payment directly and hold no means of paying you directly, so we cannot promise a refund by any other route. Nothing in this section limits your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 if what we supplied was faulty or not as described.
We are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaching this contract or failing to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss or damage that is not foreseeable.
We do not exclude or limit our liability where it would be unlawful to do so. This includes liability for:
Subject to the paragraph above, and given that Lorewise is a low-cost product supplied for personal use, our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or in connection with these terms is limited to the greater of the amount you have paid for Lorewise and £100.
Lorewise is supplied for personal use. We are not liable for business losses.
We handle your personal data as described in our Privacy Policy, at https://legal.berniciastudios.com/privacy-policy/. Bernicia Studio Ltd is the data controller. Your use of Lorewise is also governed by that policy.
You obtained Lorewise through an app store, and that store's terms also apply to you.
Apple, where you downloaded from the App Store. You and we acknowledge that:
Google, where you downloaded from Google Play. Your use is also subject to the Google Play Terms of Service.
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.
If you live in another country, this does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory consumer laws of the country in which you live, and you may be entitled to bring a claim in your local courts. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may bring a claim in your local courts.
If you have a problem, please email hello@berniciastudios.com first, and we will attempt to resolve it with you. We do not participate in any alternative dispute resolution scheme, so if we cannot resolve the matter you may take it to court.