foolscap back to the front
A short page, because a long one would mostly be there to protect me from you, and there is nothing here worth that.
Foolscap is run by one person, David Draguta, reachable at atugard@proton.me. There is a free plan and two paid ones; what each allows is on the front page. It is young software and it may break or be switched off for an afternoon while something is fixed. If it is ever going away for good you will be told well beforehand, in time to take everything with you.
Every word you dictate or type stays yours. No licence to it is claimed, asked for, or implied — not to publish it, not to show it to anybody, not to train anything on it. You keep every right you had before you opened the page, including the copyright.
The scribe inside Foolscap will not write prose for you, by design. He may cut, move, punctuate and title, and anything he puts on the page has to be liftable from a sentence you actually said; that check is enforced in the code and not merely promised here. So the book that comes out is one you wrote, which is the entire point.
You can take all of it away at any moment — Download everything on your shelf — and you can delete your account and everything in it, at once and for good, with the button beside it. No asking, no waiting, no email exchange.
If an account is being used for any of the things above I may close it. For anything else I will write to you first.
It is one person and one rented machine. There is no uptime promise, no support contract, and no guarantee that a transcription is accurate — speech recognition misheards words, and the scribe can be wrong about your book. Keep your own copies of anything you would be upset to lose. The database is backed up daily, and that is a precaution rather than a promise.
Nothing here takes away rights you have as a consumer where you live. Since Foolscap is free, I can't be liable for lost profit, lost writing, or anything consequential — but I will not hide behind that if I lose your work through carelessness, and I would rather you had a copy anyway.
There is a free plan that costs nothing and asks for no card. The two paid plans are billed every month until you stop them, and what each allows is on the front page. Instructions to Tiro can also be bought outright, a hundred at a time; those are paid for once, do not renew, and do not expire at the end of the month.
Payment is handled by Stripe, who are the seller of record: they take the money, they issue the receipt, and any VAT is theirs to charge and account for. The price you are shown is the price you pay. No card detail ever reaches this machine.
You can stop paying whenever you like, from the Account panel, which opens Stripe’s own page. There is no notice period and nobody to talk to first. Stopping takes effect at the end of the month you have already paid for, and then the account goes back to the free plan — it is not closed, nothing is deleted, and every word you have written is still there and still yours.
If you pay for something and decide within fourteen days that it was not for you, write to atugard@proton.me and you will have your money back. No reason is needed and none will be asked for. This is more than the law requires for software you have already started using, and it is offered because arguing with a writer about a twelve euro refund is not a business worth running.
The one thing that cannot come back is instructions you have already spent, since they were carried out and cost real money to carry out. Anything unused is refunded in full.
Running out is never a locked door. Past the hours on your plan, dictation carries on using the transcriber on our own machine: slower, and the punctuation is plainer, but nothing stops mid-sentence and nothing is lost. Past the instructions, Tiro declines until the month turns, and everything that never needed him keeps working — making a PDF, reading the draft back, taking back the last change. If the chapter cannot wait, you can buy more. You will never be charged for anything you did not choose.
Transcribing your voice and answering your instructions use other companies, so the sound of your voice and your finished sentences pass through them. Who they are, what each one gets and for how long is set out in what Foolscap does with your writing. Read that page; it is the one that matters.
This page will say so. Anything that changes who sees your words gets emailed to you before it takes effect, not after.
Last changed 23 October 2026.