Draft — under review before release
Terms
What you can expect from Inklingly, what it expects from you, and — the part that matters most — exactly what you grant us when you publish a page for other people to find.
A note on this page, first
This is written in plain English by the people building Inklingly, and it describes the app accurately. The legal wording is being reviewed separately, before the app is released.
Three things are deliberately not answered here yet, because guessing at them would be worse than showing the gap: which company operates Inklingly, which country’s law governs these terms, and how they sit alongside the consumer rights you have where you live — which you keep whatever any of this says. All three are settled and written in before anybody can sign up.
Your account
You need an account because the drawing happens on our servers rather than on your phone. Give a real email address you can receive mail at, keep your password to yourself, and do not let somebody else use your account.
An account is meant to belong to an adult. Inklingly makes pictures for children to colour in; it is not made for children to operate.
What you make
The pages you make are yours to use. Print them, colour them, hand them round your family, use them in your classroom or your childminding group. We do not take ownership of them and we do not need to.
Two honest limits on that, and both are about how the drawings are made rather than about us:
- A drawing is not guaranteed to be unique. Two people asking for similar things can get similar pages, and nobody can promise otherwise.
- Whether a machine-made picture can be owned at all is unsettled and differs from country to country. If you plan to build a business on the pages, take your own advice on that first.
You are responsible for what you ask for. If you upload a photograph, it has to be one you are allowed to use — your own, or one you have permission for — and it has to be one the people in it would be content to see turned into a drawing.
What you may not ask it to draw
Do not use Inklingly to make, or to publish, anything that:
- sexualises anybody, and above all anything involving a child;
- depicts a real person in a way that would deceive, harass or humiliate them;
- promotes hatred of, or violence against, people;
- infringes somebody else’s copyright, trade mark or likeness;
- is illegal where you are, or would make us break the law by hosting it.
The model refuses some requests on its own, and a refusal costs you nothing. That is not a permission system: a request the model happens to accept is still your responsibility.
Do not attack the service — no probing other people’s accounts, no automated hammering of it, no attempt to get at the underlying model through it. Every part of it is rate limited per account, so unusually heavy use is refused rather than quietly billed or silently degraded; if you hit a limit doing something ordinary, that is a limit set wrong and worth an email.
Publishing a page, and what that grants us
Read this section before you publish anything. It is the only part of these terms where you give us something, and it was written down before the feature existed so that nobody would first read it at the moment they were asked to agree to it.
Nothing becomes public unless you publish it. Every page starts private, and publishing is a deliberate act with a screen that shows you what will be shared before anything happens.
When you publish a page, you give Inklingly permission to host it, display it and distribute it — to store a public copy of the drawing, show it in Discover and in search results, show it at different sizes on different screens, and deliver it to somebody who unlocks it. That permission is worldwide and free of charge, because a hosted feed cannot work otherwise. You keep everything you had in the page; this is permission to show it, not a transfer of it.
What that permission does not include. We do not sell your page to anybody else, licence it on to third parties, or use it to advertise Inklingly outside the app and this site without asking you first.
Publishing a page never publishes the photograph it came from. That photograph was deleted when the drawing was finished, and no part of the app can reach it — the privacy page describes the four separate locks that make that true rather than merely intended.
You can unpublish. The page stops appearing and the public copy comes down. What we cannot undo is a copy somebody has already printed or saved, or a Page somebody has already spent to unlock it — so an unlock that has already happened stays honoured, and the credit that changed hands is not clawed back.
A published page outlives the account that made it. If you close your account, pages you published stay up and stop being attributed to anybody — your name and handle come off them — because other people may have liked and saved them. If you want them gone as well, unpublish them before you close the account, or ask us at support@tinylantern.app.
Closing your account refunds everybody who unlocked one of your pages. That is the opposite of unpublishing, and deliberately so: unpublishing takes the page out of Discover and leaves what somebody already bought working, whereas closing your account deletes the printable itself. Nobody is left holding a Page they spent on something that no longer exists.
Published pages are moderated. A page can be held before it appears, removed afterwards, or reported by somebody who sees it, and the reason is recorded. Removal is about the page, not a judgement about you, and you can ask why.
Pages, and money
A Page is the unit a drawing costs. A new account is given a few, and nothing can be bought yet — packs of Pages and the Inklingly+ subscription are still being built, so today there is no price and no transaction of any kind.
When there is, the arrangement is this, and none of it is unusual:
- The app store is the seller. It takes the payment and its own terms and refund rules apply to the purchase.
- Pages are not money. They are not a currency, they have no cash value, they cannot be transferred between accounts and they cannot be paid out. Credit a creator earns from somebody unlocking their page is credit inside Inklingly and nothing else.
- A technical failure never costs you a Page. If a drawing fails, times out or is refused, the Page goes back. That is built into how spending works rather than being something we do on request.
- A subscription allowance is for its month. Unspent allowance does not roll over, and cancelling leaves you subscribed until the period you have already paid for runs out.
If something goes wrong with a charge, write to support@tinylantern.app. Every credit movement is recorded, so a mistake can be found and put right.
What we do not promise
That a drawing will be what you pictured. It is made by a model reading your words or looking at your photograph, and sometimes the result is not the one you wanted. That is why previews exist and why they are free.
That the service is always up. It is a small product built by a small team; things break and get fixed.
That your library is a backup. Keep the printables you care about. They come out of the app as ordinary files precisely so you can.
Ending it
You can stop at any time, and the account-deletion page says how, what goes and what stays.
We can suspend or close an account that breaks the rules above — most of all the ones about children, about real people and about other people’s work. Where it is a misunderstanding we will say what happened and give you the chance to answer; where it is not, we will not.
Changes, and getting in touch
These terms change as the app does. Anything that meaningfully changes what you are agreeing to is shown in the app rather than quietly edited here, and the date at the bottom of this page moves whenever the text does.
Inklingly is made by Tiny Lantern. Questions about any of this: support@tinylantern.app.
Last updated 5 September 2026. Draft wording, reviewed by somebody qualified before the app is released.