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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, and it describes Inklingly as it actually works.

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 is also a promise that the page is yours to publish. You are telling us that the page is your own, and that it is not made from somebody else’s drawing, photograph, character or logo that you have no right to hand round. Photographing a page out of a colouring book somebody else drew and asking for one like it does not make it yours, and neither does asking for a character somebody owns. You cannot give us permission to host something you never had the right to share.

A page like that kept to yourself is a small thing, between you and your printer. Publishing it moves it onto us: from that moment we are the ones storing it, showing it in Discover and handing it over to somebody who spends a Page on it. That is why this promise is attached to publishing rather than to drawing.

If a claim reaches us because of a page you published, it is yours to carry. In ordinary words: if somebody comes after Inklingly over a page you published, a complaint, a demand for money, a lawyer’s letter, you cover what it costs us to deal with and anything we have to pay out. We will tell you it is happening rather than handling it over your head, and we will not agree to a settlement in your name without asking you first. This covers pages you published and nothing else; a page you kept private is not part of it.

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.

If somebody tells us a published page is taken from their work, we may take it down. Usually we will, while we work out what happened, and that is not us deciding you were in the wrong, because we are rarely in a position to know who owns what. You are told it happened, you can tell us why it should go back up, and it can go back up.

Doing it repeatedly costs you publishing. An account that keeps publishing other people’s work loses the ability to publish, and may be closed. One page can be a genuine mistake; several is a pattern, and taking pages down one at a time while the same account carries on protects nobody.

If a page here is taken from your work, write to support@tinylantern.app and tell us. What helps: enough to find the page, a link, or its title and who published it, what it is taken from and where the original can be seen, who you are and what your connection to the work is, and a line saying you believe the page is not authorised. There is no form and no ticket number. A person reads it and answers, and what we promise is that it is read and answered rather than how quickly.

Pages, and money

A Page is the unit a drawing costs. A new account starts with no Pages and one free, watermarked preview. Printing that preview takes a Page, and so does anything made after it. Pages come from buying them, from an Inklingly+ subscription, or from publishing a page that somebody else unlocks.

Buying is done in the app, and the arrangement is this:

  • Google Play is the seller. You buy through Google Play, it takes the payment, and its own terms apply to the purchase. The price is the one Google Play shows you when you buy, in your own currency.
  • You can buy a single Page whenever you like, with no subscription. Pages bought this way never expire.
  • Inklingly+ is a monthly subscription of 7, 14 or 28 Pages a month, whichever you choose. It renews each month until you cancel it, and each renewal adds that month’s Pages.
  • 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 rolls over, to a limit. Unused Inklingly+ Pages roll over, up to twice your monthly allowance. Purchased Pages never expire.
  • You cancel in Google Play. Cancelling leaves you subscribed until the period you have already paid for runs out. If your subscription ends, the Inklingly+ Pages you have left stay yours to use for 90 days, and then they expire.
  • One subscription at a time. You can have one Inklingly+ subscription at a time. To change plan, cancel your current one in Google Play first.
  • Refunds are Google Play’s. You ask Google Play for one, under its rules, and it decides. If it refunds a Page you bought, that Page is taken back. If you have already spent it, nothing is taken from anywhere else: your bought Pages go to zero and stop there, your balance never goes below zero, and you never owe us Pages. If it refunds a subscription, Inklingly+ ends with it.

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 a Page covers a few of them.

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 3 October 2026. Written by the people who build Inklingly, and kept in step with the app rather than written once.