The deal, in plain words.

1Who you are agreeing with

You are agreeing with Firsthand (“we”, “us”), an independent service run by one person from the State of California and reachable at support@hearfirsthand.com. Write to us there for the operator’s legal name and service address, or for anything a court or a card issuer needs — it is given on request and answered by a person. Using Firsthand means accepting these terms. If you are recording a session on behalf of an employer or a school, you are confirming you are allowed to.

One thing you are NOT agreeing with us about: the purchase. Payments run through Creem, which is our merchant of record — the legal seller of the transaction, not a processor we hired. So when you buy credits or start a plan, the sale itself is between you and Creem: they charge the card, they own the tax, and Creem is the name that appears on your statement. Their terms cover that sale; these terms cover everything Firsthand does, which is all the rest of it.

You do not have to work out which is which. Write to us about anything and a person answers — if something genuinely has to go to Creem, we will say so and tell you how, rather than sending you away to find out.

You need to be at least 16 to record a session, and at least 18 — and old enough where you live to enter a contract — to buy anything. The two are different numbers because they are different acts: a sixth-former recording an answer about a project is exactly who this is for, and putting a card into it is not. Firsthand is early, and the service may change or be limited at any time — including how many sessions an account may record.

2What the service is

You record a live, spoken interview about one project on your résumé. The interviewer is a language model, not a person — it can misremember what you said, ask a clumsy question, or get something about your résumé wrong. Afterwards you choose, answer by answer, which parts go on a public page, and you get a link to that page to put on a résumé.

What we publish is what you recorded, in the order you recorded it: the whole exchange, the questions asked aloud and your answers, in one recording. Nothing spoken is cut, shortened, sped up or reordered. The one edit we make is to silence: where nobody spoke for more than about a second, the recording keeps a beat and drops the rest. That is stated on the published page itself, and it is why the page does not claim your answers are unedited takes.

Firsthand does not find you a job, does not send your link anywhere, does not represent you to anyone, and makes no promise about what any employer will think of it.

3Credits, and what one buys

Recording a session costs one credit, taken when the session starts.

• Your first session is free, with no card, once per account.
• One session — $4.99, for one credit.
• Five sessions — $19.99, for five credits.
• Credits you buy never expire, and there is no time limit on using them. Conversations included with a profile plan are different and are covered in section 4.

Prices are in US dollars. If a session ends without a single question having been asked, the credit comes back automatically. If a session ends inside its first minute, we ask you whether that was meant to happen and offer the credit back — taking it back gives up the recording, so you cannot keep both the credit and a publishable link from the same sitting.

4The profile plan, and what keeps a link live

Published links stay online while your profile plan is active. Every tier covers every link you have published, rather than being priced per link. There are three, all monthly:

• Hosting — $2.99 a month. Links stay live. No conversations included.
• Job search — $9.90 a month, including two conversations each month.
• Active search — $19.90 a month, including five conversations each month.
• Conversations included with a tier expire at the end of the month that granted them. They are an allowance for that period, not a balance that accumulates, and they are not refundable. Credits you buy separately are unaffected — those never expire and remain refundable. When you start a sitting we spend the expiring allowance first, so buying a pack never causes it to be wasted.
• Moving to a more expensive tier starts a fresh month at the new price. You are charged a full month that day, your billing date moves to that day, and the tier’s conversations are added to your balance straight away. The remainder of the month you had already paid for is not refunded — you keep the conversations it granted, which is what it bought, and they run until they expire. We tell you the price before you confirm.
• Moving to a cheaper tier takes effect immediately, and nothing is refunded. The rest of the month you have paid for at the higher price does not come back. What you keep is most of what you paid it for: the conversations already granted this month stay in your balance until they expire at the end of the month, and every published link stays live, because every tier includes hosting. Your next charge is at the lower price. We ask you to confirm this before the change is made, rather than explaining it afterwards.

We previously sold an annual plan at $19.90 a year. We no longer offer it. Subscriptions bought at that price continue on exactly the terms they were bought under until their year ends.

The rules for links, exactly:

• Your first link is free for seven days from the day you publish it, with no plan at all.
• Every link after the first needs an active plan at the moment you publish it. We tell you this before you spend the credit, not after.
• When a plan stops being active, links are archived — whether that is a cancellation taking effect, a renewal that failed, or a plan expiring. There is no grace period, and a failed card payment archives links until the retry succeeds.
• Archiving is not deletion. The page stays at the same address and tells the visitor it is not currently available. Your recordings are kept. Restarting a plan brings every page back, at the same links, in one click.

If a plan you have cancelled is going to end, we email you before it does. If it ends without warning — a card that stopped working — we email you when the links are archived.

Cancel any time in the customer portal, from your billing page, without emailing anyone. Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for, and we do not pro-rate the remainder. If what you want is to stop paying for conversations rather than to take your links down, moving to the $2.99 tier does that and keeps every page live.

5Refunds

Unused credits you bought are refundable, at the price you actually paid for them. If you bought a five-pack for $19.99 and have two credits left, that is $8.00 back. A refund can never exceed what you paid on the original charge less anything already refunded — a full five-pack refund is $19.99, not five times the four-dollar unit price.

Conversations included with a profile tier are not refundable. They came with a month of service that was delivered, they cost nothing on their own, and they expire with that month either way.

Credits you have spent are not refundable: a session you sat through is a service you received, whether or not you published it. The exceptions are in section 3 — a sitting with no questions, or one ended inside its first minute.

Plan payments are not refunded for time already elapsed. If something went wrong on our side, say so and we will make it right.

Refunds are issued by a person, not a button: write to us and say what happened. We answer within two business days.

One limit on all of the above, and it works in your favour. Because Creem is the seller of record, Creem may issue a refund on a purchase within sixty days of it at its own discretion — including in cases this section says are not refundable, and without asking us. We cannot prevent that and would not want to. What it means in practice: the rules above are what Firsthand promises to do, not a ceiling on what you can be given back.

6What you must not record or publish

You are the one talking, so most of this is obvious. The rules that matter are below, and they are also published on their own as the Acceptable Use Policy — same rules, said at more length, and reachable without reading a contract to find them.

• It has to be you. Do not record as someone else, do not publish a page under another person’s name, and do not present someone else’s work as yours.
• It has to be yours to say. Do not publish confidential information belonging to an employer, a client or a school, and do not publish other people’s personal information — including naming colleagues in ways they have not agreed to.
• No unlawful, harassing, or deliberately deceptive content, and nothing that infringes someone else’s rights.
• Do not attack the service — no scraping the site, no probing it for holes, no automating sessions, no attempting to reach accounts or links that are not yours.

If content breaks these rules we may take the page down, and in serious or repeated cases close the account. Where the situation allows it, we will tell you first and explain why.

7What you own, and what we may do with it

Your recordings, your transcripts and your résumé remain yours. We claim no ownership of anything you say.

Publishing a link gives us permission to store your shared recordings and transcripts and to serve them to anyone opening that link — which is simply what publishing means, and no more than that. We will not use your recordings to advertise Firsthand, will not show them to anyone as an example, and will not use them to train any model, without asking you first and getting a yes.

Taking a page down or deleting your account ends that permission. See the Privacy Policy for what is deleted and what is kept.

The site, its design and its code are ours, and these terms do not give you any rights over them.

8Taking things with you, and leaving

Your account page exports everything we hold as a single file, and deletes your account and every recording behind it. Both are free, work on any plan, work after you have stopped paying, and need nobody’s permission. We would rather lose a customer cleanly than keep one by making the door hard to find.

We may close an account that breaks section 6, or stop offering Firsthand altogether. If we shut the service down, we will give reasonable notice, refund unused credits you bought and the unused part of any plan period already paid for, and leave the export working until the end.

9What we do not promise

Firsthand is provided as it is. We do not guarantee it will be available without interruption, that a session will never drop, that a model will never say something odd, or that a transcript will be perfect. To the extent the law allows, we disclaim the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

The service depends on other companies — a payment processor, a model provider, a host. When one of them has an outage, so do we.

Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. The export exists for exactly this reason.

10Limits on liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost opportunities, or a job you did not get.

Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or $50.

Some places do not allow these limits. If yours does not, they apply to you only as far as it does allow, and nothing here removes rights you have as a consumer that cannot be waived.

11Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. If a change matters — prices, what a credit buys, what keeps a link live — we will update the date at the top and email you before it takes effect for you. Continuing to use Firsthand after a change means accepting it. If you do not accept it, cancel and export your work; unused credits are refundable as described in section 5.

A price change never applies to credits you have already bought — they are already paid for and they never expire.

12Law, disputes, and the rest

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and the courts there are where disputes are heard — unless the law where you live gives you the right to bring a claim closer to home, in which case it does.

Before any of that: write to us. Nearly everything that has ever gone wrong here was fixed by an email and a refund.

If a part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. Not enforcing something once does not waive it. You may not transfer your account to someone else; we may transfer these terms to a successor if Firsthand changes hands. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us.

Reach a person at support@hearfirsthand.com.