Terms of Service

Who we are

Dam Chess is run by [PLACEHOLDER: COMPANY_LEGAL_NAME], a company registered in the Netherlands.

• Chamber of Commerce (KVK) number: [PLACEHOLDER: KVK_NUMBER]
• VAT number: [PLACEHOLDER: VAT_NUMBER]
• Address: [PLACEHOLDER: REGISTERED_ADDRESS]
• Email: [PLACEHOLDER: CONTACT_EMAIL]

What the service does: you give us your Chess.com or Lichess username, we fetch your public games, the Stockfish chess engine analyses them, and a Google Gemini model turns that analysis into plain-language coaching. On top of that you get a coach chat about a single game, practice drills, a playing-style review and an insights dashboard.

These terms cover all of it. Our Privacy Policy explains what we do with your data, and our Cookie Policy covers cookies and browser storage.

Your account

You can try Dam Chess without an account. To keep your history and get a weekly allowance instead of a one-off one, you sign in with your email address.

There is no password. You type your email, we send you a sign-in link, and clicking it signs you in. The link works for 15 minutes and then stops working.

Treat that link like a password. Anyone who opens it is signed in as you. Do not forward it, do not paste it into a chat, and tell us at [PLACEHOLDER: CONTACT_EMAIL] if you think someone else has used your email to sign in.

You must give us an email address you actually control, and you must be old enough to agree to a contract where you live.

More than one person can link the same chess username. Chess profiles are public, so we do not ask you to prove a username is yours — we only read what anyone can already see. Up to three Dam Chess accounts can point at the same chess username. That means linking a username does not make it yours, and it does not give you any control over someone else's Dam Chess account.

What you may not do

Never use the coach chat, or any part of Dam Chess, to help you during a live rated game. Every chess platform we work with calls that cheating, and it is the fastest way to get your Chess.com or Lichess account closed. Dam Chess is for studying games that are already finished. If we see this, we close your account.

Also, please do not:

• scrape the site, or pull data out of it with bots, scripts or automated tools;
• resell, republish or redistribute our analyses, reviews or coaching text;
• farm the free trial — creating extra accounts, clearing browser data or otherwise working around your allowance;
• try to break, overload or get around the security of the service, or reach data that is not yours;
• upload anything unlawful, or use the coach chat to abuse, harass or impersonate anyone;
• copy the service, or use our output to train a competing product.

Subscription and payment

Paid subscriptions are not live yet. Everything in this section applies from the day we launch them. Until then, Dam Chess costs nothing and we take no payment details.

When subscriptions launch, a plan costs [PLACEHOLDER: SUBSCRIPTION_PRICE] per month, including VAT. It is a monthly subscription and it renews automatically each month until you cancel. We charge the same card on each renewal date.

You can cancel at any time, from your account or by emailing [PLACEHOLDER: CONTACT_EMAIL]. Cancelling stops the next renewal. You keep the paid features until the end of the month you have already paid for, and we do not refund part of a month that has already started. There is no notice period and no cancellation fee.

Payments will be handled by Stripe. Your card details go straight to Stripe and never reach our servers. If a payment fails, we may pause the paid features until it goes through.

If we change the price, we will tell you by email before it applies, and you can cancel before the new price takes effect.

Your 14-day right to change your mind

This section applies from the day paid subscriptions launch. There is nothing to buy today, so there is nothing to withdraw from yet.

When they launch: if you are a consumer in the EU, you normally get 14 days to withdraw from an online purchase, without giving a reason. That right comes from article 6:230o of the Dutch Civil Code, and the 14 days will start on the day you subscribe.

To use it, just tell us within those 14 days — an email to [PLACEHOLDER: CONTACT_EMAIL] will be enough. We will refund you within 14 days of hearing from you, using the same payment method.

How you can lose the 14 days. A subscription starts working the moment you buy it, and article 6:230p of the Dutch Civil Code says that for digital services you give up the withdrawal right only if two things are true: you expressly ask us to start straight away, and you confirm that you understand this means losing the right. Checkout will carry one tick box that asks you both of those things together. In plain words:

• Leave the box unticked: you wait, and you keep the full 14 days.
• Tick the box: the subscription starts immediately and the 14-day right is gone.

If we never actually ask you both of those things, you keep the full 14 days.

Nothing here affects your other consumer rights — for example if the service is not what we said it would be.

The free trial

Right now you can try Dam Chess for free:

• Without an account: one sample game review per browser. We keep the sample against a cookie in your browser (sq_trial) so it stays yours; when you create an account, that review comes with you. Clearing cookies or switching browsers to get a second sample breaks the rules in What you may not do, and we can cut off your access for it.
• With a verified email address: 10 game analyses per week.

Paid plans will come with their own allowances: [PLACEHOLDER: TRIAL_TERMS].

Some features have their own smaller limits — for example how many coach-chat messages you can send in a week, or how often you can regenerate a style review. Your dashboard shows how much of your analysis allowance is left, and we tell you when you reach one of the other limits.

Analysis costs us real money on every game, so these numbers can change. We may raise, lower or restructure the free allowances, and we may stop offering a free tier. If we reduce something, we will say so on this page first. We do not owe you a refund for a free feature.

AI coaching can be wrong

The coaching text, the chat replies, the style review, the insights and the practice explanations are written by an AI model. The engine numbers underneath them come from Stockfish. Both are tools, and neither is a chess teacher who has checked their work.

Which means:

• the AI can misread a position, misname an opening, or explain a move in a way that is simply wrong;
• engine analysis runs to a fixed depth, so a deeper search can reach a different verdict;
• we do not promise your rating will improve. Nobody can promise that.

Use your own judgement, and check anything that matters against a stronger source. We provide the coaching as study material, not as professional advice, and we are not responsible for chess decisions you make because of it.

Chess.com and Lichess

Dam Chess is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Chess.com or Lichess. We are an independent product. Their names and logos are their trademarks, and we use them only to say which platform a game came from.

We read your games through those platforms' public interfaces — the same data anyone can see on your public profile. We never ask for, and never hold, your password or any login token for them. Linking an account here means typing a username, nothing more, and we cannot act on those platforms on your behalf.

Your use of Chess.com and Lichess is governed by their own terms and privacy policies, not by ours. If one of them changes or blocks its public interface, parts of Dam Chess may stop working through no fault of ours.

Your games and your chats

Your games, your coach-chat messages and anything else you write stay yours. We do not claim ownership of them.

You give us permission to store your content and pass it through the steps that make the product work: saving your games, running the chess engine over them, sending the position data and your chat messages to our AI provider, and showing the results back to you. That permission covers running the service and nothing else. It lasts while your account does, plus the [PLACEHOLDER: BACKUP_RETENTION_DAYS] days it takes for our backup copies to be overwritten.

We do not sell your data and we do not use your games or chats to advertise to you. Our Privacy Policy lists every company we send data to and exactly what each one receives.

The coaching text, reviews and insights we generate for you are ours. You can use them for your own study and share them with friends, but please do not resell or republish them (see What you may not do).

If you send us feedback or a feature idea, we may act on it without owing you anything for it.

Availability and changes to the service

We work hard to keep Dam Chess up, but we do not promise any level of uptime. The service is provided as it is. It depends on other systems — hosting, the chess platforms, our AI provider — and any of them can have a bad day.

We may add features, change how they work, or remove them. If we retire something you are paying for, we will tell you in advance, and you can cancel before your next renewal. We may also take the service down for maintenance, and we will try to do that at quiet times.

Suspending or closing an account

We may suspend or close your account if you break these terms — most of all the rules in What you may not do — or if we have to for legal reasons, or if your use puts the service or other users at risk.

Where we reasonably can, we warn you first and give you a chance to fix the problem. For serious cases, such as using the coach during a live rated game or attacking the service, we act immediately. If we close a paid account for a reason that is not your fault, we refund the unused part of that month.

You can close your account whenever you like. There is no delete button in the app yet, so email [PLACEHOLDER: PRIVACY_EMAIL] and we will delete your account within 30 days. If you have a paid plan, cancel it first so it does not renew.

Our responsibility if something goes wrong

If we break this agreement and that causes you loss, we are responsible for loss that was a foreseeable result of what we did. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable, or for lost profits, lost opportunities or lost data in a business setting — Dam Chess is a consumer study tool.

Where the law lets us limit what we owe, our total liability to you for all claims in any 12-month period is capped at what you paid us in that period, or €100 if you paid us nothing.

These limits do not apply to anything the law says cannot be limited. In particular, nothing here limits our liability for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• deliberate wrongdoing or recklessness on our part — what Dutch law calls opzet of bewuste roekeloosheid;
• fraud, or lying to you to get you to sign up;
• your rights as a consumer, including your right to a service that matches what we described.

Changes to these terms

We update these terms when the product changes or the law does. The current version always lives on this page, with the date it took effect at the top.

For small changes — fixing wording, clarifying something — the new version applies as soon as we post it. For changes that actually affect you, we will tell you by email before they take effect if you have an account with us, and give you reasonable notice.

If you do not agree with a change, you can stop using Dam Chess and close your account. If you are on a paid plan, cancel before the change takes effect and it will not apply to you.

Which law applies

Dutch law governs this agreement, and disputes go to the courts of the Netherlands.

If you are a consumer living somewhere else in the EU, this does not take away the protection that the mandatory rules of your own country give you. You can also bring a case in the courts of the country where you live.

Please email us first — most problems are quicker to fix that way than through a court.

Contact us

Questions about these terms, your account or a payment:

For anything about your personal data — access, correction, deletion — write to [PLACEHOLDER: PRIVACY_EMAIL] instead, and see the Privacy Policy.