Legal

Terms and Conditions

Effective 18 August 2026

These terms govern your use of Storydrills, a study application for story structure, published by Joseph Hood, trading as Hoodworks Media Group (“we”, “us”). By installing or using Storydrills, or by buying a licence for it, you agree to them.

1. Who sells you the licence

Orders are handled by Paddle.com Market Ltd, which acts as the merchant of record for every purchase. Paddle is the seller of record on your transaction, handles payment, invoicing and applicable sales tax or VAT, and its own terms and privacy notice apply to the payment itself. We never see or store your card details.

These terms govern the licence to use the software and its content. Paddle’s terms govern the transaction. Where the two touch — most obviously refunds — see our Refund Policy.

2. What a licence gives you

A paid licence is a non-exclusive, non-transferable, personal right to use Storydrills, including all four structural frameworks and the beat bank that ships with them.

Storydrills is sold as an annual updates licence, not a subscription that stops working:

• Your licence entitles you to twelve months of new material — new story tranches, new lessons, new modes and app improvements.
• Everything you receive during that period is yours to keep permanently, whether or not you renew.
• If a licence lapses, you retain free-tier entitlement plus everything already received. New material stops arriving for the three paid frameworks. Story Circle continues to receive new material, because that is what the free tier gets.
• You may install Storydrills on the devices you personally use.

A free tier exists and requires no licence. It covers one framework, Story Circle, and receives new Story Circle material on the same schedule as paid tiers.

3. What you may not do

• Redistribute, resell, sublicense, publish or otherwise make available the beat bank, the lessons or any other content supplied with Storydrills, in whole or in substantial part.
• Share, resell or transfer your licence, or use one licence to provide access to people it was not issued to. Cohort and institutional use is available and is priced separately — ask.
• Circumvent, disable or attempt to defeat the licence check.
• Reverse-engineer the software except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits it regardless of this restriction.

Your own work is not covered by any of this. Beats you write, notes you take, and any material you import are yours. We claim no rights in them, and you may export them at any time, licensed or lapsed.

4. Third-party frameworks

Storydrills teaches published story-structure frameworks that belong to their authors. Story Circle is Dan Harmon’s. Save the Cat! is Blake Snyder’s. Story Maps and Story Maps: TV are Daniel Calvisi’s.

Storydrills is an independent study tool built on those published frameworks. It is not affiliated with, authorised by, endorsed by, or a substitute for any of them or their authors or publishers. Buy the books.

Structural readings of copyrighted works in the beat bank are original analysis written for this application. Storydrills ships no third-party text — no dialogue, script lines, lyrics, transcripts or quoted prose. Public-domain sources are marked as such in the bank.

5. The Analyze feature and your own API key

Storydrills can send text you choose to Anthropic’s API for analysis. This runs on an API key you supply. Text sent this way goes from your browser directly to Anthropic under your own account and never passes through our servers. We supply no inference and bundle no API credit; what you use, you pay Anthropic for.

Your use of Anthropic’s API is governed by your agreement with Anthropic, not by these terms.

6. Availability, offline use and changes

Storydrills is an offline-first application. Your content is stored in your browser on your device and the app continues to work without a network connection. A licence is verified when you sign in and then trusted for thirty days without further contact. We will not lock you out of material you already have for being offline.

We may change, add to or withdraw features and content. A beat may be withdrawn for a rights or accuracy reason, in which case it is removed from installations regardless of licence status — corrections are not a paid feature.

We may update these terms. Material changes will be reflected in the effective date above, and continued use after that date constitutes acceptance. A change to these terms will not retroactively remove content a licence has already delivered to you.

7. Warranty and liability

Storydrills is provided “as is”. To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the software will be uninterrupted or error-free, nor that any structural reading in the beat bank is the only defensible one — structural analysis is interpretive by nature and disagreement with it is expected.

Back up your work. Content is stored in your browser and can be lost if you clear site data, uninstall, or lose the device. Storydrills provides an export at any time and we recommend using it. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for lost content.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total liability arising out of or relating to Storydrills is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits or lost data.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including your statutory rights as a consumer.

8. Termination

You may stop using Storydrills at any time. We may suspend or terminate a licence for a material breach of section 3, and will normally give notice and an opportunity to put it right first. Sections 4, 7 and 9 survive termination.

9. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of [[STATE]], United States, without regard to its conflict of law rules. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protections of your own country of residence.

10. Contact

Joseph Hood, trading as Hoodworks Media Group — [email protected]. For questions about a payment, an invoice or a refund, Paddle can also be contacted directly as the merchant of record.