Terms of Service

The Site is a searchable corpus of Orthodox Christian texts (scripture, ecumenical councils, the fathers, and the saints) with an AI-assisted chat (“Ask the Fathers”) for retrieval-augmented research. It is a study aid, not a substitute for the Liturgy, the parish, the priest, or a spiritual father. See the About page for the project's editorial posture.

You may use the Site anonymously to read, search, and (with your own Anthropic API key) chat. Some features, saving chat conversations, membership, donating with attribution, require an account.

When you create an account, you agree to:

• Provide a real email address that you control.
• Keep your password reasonably secure.
• Take responsibility for activity that happens under your account.
• Not impersonate another person or create accounts under false identities.

We may suspend or delete accounts that violate these terms, are inactive for an extended period, or are flagged by our security systems for abusive behavior.

You agree not to:

• Scrape, mass-download, or bulk-export the corpus in a way that bypasses the search and reader interfaces. The corpus is freely viewable; commercial republication is not granted by these terms.
• Use the chat to generate content for hateful, harassing, or violent purposes.
• Use the chat to impersonate Orthodox clergy, hierarchs, or specific saints.
• Attempt to circumvent rate-limiting, authentication, or quota controls.
• Probe the Site for security vulnerabilities without prior written authorization. (Responsible disclosure is welcome, see Security below.)
• Use the Site for any unlawful purpose, or in a way that infringes others' rights.

The corpus is assembled from public-domain English translations of Orthodox Christian texts. We do not own copyright in those underlying texts; they are in the public domain and may be used by anyone for any purpose. Our compilation, indexing, and presentation, the database, the curation, the editorial metadata, and the chat system, are the work product of this project and are not licensed for commercial republication without permission.

Acknowledgments to the public-domain transcribers and translators whose work the corpus relies on are listed on the About page.

The chat is a research assistant grounded in the corpus. Its answers are not authoritative, they are the output of a large language model citing retrieved passages. The model can be wrong, can flatten disagreements between fathers, and can on occasion attribute material in ways that don't perfectly match the source. You should treat chat answers the way you'd treat a well-read seminarian summarizing a passage: useful as a starting point, worth checking against the cited source, and never a substitute for prayer or conversation with a priest on doctrine or spiritual life.

Chat costs are paid in one of two ways:

• Bring-your-own-key (BYOK), you paste your own Anthropic API key, which is stored only in your browser's localStorage. Anthropic bills your account directly. The project incurs no API cost on your chats.
• Supporter membership ($5/month), uses the project's Anthropic key, subject to a monthly compute budget (currently ~$4 of Claude Sonnet 4.6 usage, approximately 235 typical questions). When you exhaust the budget, you can still use the chat by switching to your own API key until the next billing period.

The Supporter membership is a monthly recurring subscription billed by Stripe. By starting a membership, you authorize Stripe to charge your payment method on the recurring schedule shown at checkout until you cancel.

You can cancel at any time from your account page via the Stripe billing portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; you retain Supporter benefits through the period you've already paid for.

We do not generally offer refunds for the current billing period. If you believe you've been charged in error, please reach out through our contact formand we’ll review the case in good faith.

Memberships are not tax-deductible.

One-time donations toward gap-item translations are processed by Stripe. Donations are non-refundable except in the case of processing error, and are not tax-deductible. Donations allocated to a specific gap item are best-effort earmarked: if the line item is completed under budget, surplus rolls forward to the next gap item in the queue.

You may delete your account at any time by using our contact form. We may suspend or terminate access for accounts that violate these terms, that we reasonably believe to be compromised, or for legal-compliance reasons. Termination does not entitle you to a refund of an active membership period paid in advance.

The Site is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement. The Site may have bugs, periods of downtime, or partial outages of dependent services (Anthropic, OpenAI, Stripe, Resend, the hosting provider).

We make no warranty that the corpus is free of transcription errors, that AI-generated chat answers are accurate or complete, or that the editorial framing of any specific passage matches your personal theological tradition.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Custom Skills LLC and the Site shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits or revenues, arising out of or related to your use of the Site , even if advised of the possibility of such damages. In any case, the aggregate liability of Custom Skills LLC to you for any claim arising out of these terms shall not exceed the total amount you have paid to the Site in the twelve months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or US$50, whichever is greater.

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Custom Skills LLC from any claim arising out of your breach of these terms or your misuse of the Site.

If you discover a security vulnerability, please report it responsibly through our contact form. Do not exploit it, exfiltrate data, or disrupt service. Good-faith reports will be acknowledged and addressed as quickly as a small project can.

We may update these terms from time to time. The “Last updated” date at the top reflects the most recent change. Material changes will be highlighted to signed-in users by email or by an in-app notice. Continued use of the Site after a change constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Oklahoma, United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute will be resolved exclusively in the courts of that jurisdiction, unless otherwise required by mandatory consumer-protection law in your place of residence.

Questions about these terms? Use our contact form. Operated by Custom Skills LLC.