Legal

Terms and Conditions

Effective 23 September 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 license for it, you agree to them.

You must be at least 13 to use Storydrills, and at least 18 to buy a license or to agree to these terms on your own behalf. If you are between 13 and 18, a parent or guardian has to agree to them for you. We do not knowingly grant access to anyone under 13; see the Privacy Policy for what happens if we find out we have.

1. Who sells you the license

Nothing is on sale yet. Storydrills is in private beta and access is granted directly, free of charge, by the person who publishes it.

When licenses do go on sale, orders will be handled by a third-party merchant of record — a payment processor that becomes the seller of record on your transaction and handles payment, invoicing and any applicable sales tax or VAT under its own terms and privacy notice. That processor will be named on this page before anything is sold, and we never see or store your card details either way.

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

2. What a license gives you

A paid license 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 license, not a subscription that stops working. A license buys twelve months of new material, and everything you receive in that year is yours to keep permanently, whether you renew or not. In detail:

• Twelve months of new material — new story tranches, new lessons, new modes and app improvements.
• If a license lapses you keep everything you already received — every beat, every lesson, every game, all four frameworks, exactly as they stood on the day it lapsed. New material stops arriving for the three paid frameworks. Story Circle continues to receive new material, because that is what the free tier gets.
• Importing beats from a file requires an active license. It is the one feature that stops at lapse rather than freezing.
• What you wrote is yours either way. Your own beats, your notes, your progress and your accuracy history live in your browser’s storage on your own device. You can export a backup and restore it at any time, lapsed or not.
• You may install Storydrills on the devices you personally use. While a license is active, the app keeps a copy of your own beats and progress on our server so those devices stay in step; that copy is part of the service, lives only as long as the license, and is described in the Privacy Policy along with the button that removes it.

Renew and the new material arrives on your next update. Nothing is lost in between.

A free tier exists and requires no license. 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 license, or use one license 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 license 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 — its novel and television applications are Jessica Brody’s and Jamie Nash’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 license is verified when you sign in, and the pass that issues is trusted for thirty days.

Past the halfway mark of those thirty days, opening the app asks for a fresh pass. That is how a license that has ended, or been withdrawn, reaches a device that is already installed, rather than a month later. If the request cannot be made or fails — no signal, or our end is down — the pass you already hold stands for its full thirty days, and nothing about your access changes. We will not lock you out of material you already have for being offline, and there is no age at which a pass stops being exchangeable.

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 license 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 license 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 license 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 Illinois, 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, write to that same address. Once a payment processor is live, it can also be contacted directly as the merchant of record.

Storydrills™ is a trademark of Hoodworks Media Group.