Terms of service

These terms are the agreement between you and the company that operates Greyback, set out on the legal information page. They apply from the moment you use the service, with or without an account. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

They are governed by the law of England and Wales. If you live elsewhere in the United Kingdom, or in another country, you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protections that apply where you live, and you may bring proceedings in your local courts where the law gives you that right.

Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights.

You upload a photograph of a light-coloured sock and describe how it is washed. The service records which regions of the sock have shifted away from white and which way the tone moved, ranks four possible causes against a published table, states which of them can be ruled out, gives a view on whether the discoloration can be recovered, and — on the paid tiers — sets out an ordered treatment and a prevention list.

It is an inference drawn from how a fabric looks. It is not a chemical test, not a measurement of your water supply, and not a laboratory analysis. The notice on how the reading is produced sets out its limits in full, and you should read it before acting on anything the service says.

Four things, deliberately, and none of them is a limitation we intend to lift.

• It reaches no conclusion about the quality of any product and evaluates no brand. Any brand name visible in an uploaded photograph is masked before that photograph is shown back, annotated or shared.
• It recommends no detergent, bleach, water softener or whitener by brand or by product. Where a treatment step needs one, it names a generic category and stops there.
• It uses no household remedy of the unverified kind that circulates online, and will not suggest one.
• It offers no reassurance it cannot support. Where discoloration generally cannot be recovered, the reading says so.

You may not use the output of this service as evidence in a return, a complaint, a warranty claim, a chargeback, or any assertion about the quality of a product or the conduct of any brand or retailer. It is not capable of supporting such a claim: the causes it distinguishes lie overwhelmingly on the use and laundering side, and it has no way of establishing anything about how a garment was made. Using it that way is a breach of these terms.

Anyone aged 16 or over. Between 16 and 18 you need the consent of a parent or guardian. The service is not designed for children and we do not knowingly hold data from anyone under 16.

One account per person. Keep your sign-in details to yourself; you are responsible for what is done through your account until you tell us it has been compromised.

There are three tiers, set out on the pricing page. Prices include VAT at 20% and are charged in US dollars (USD). There is no trial, no introductory rate and no promotion, so there is no later price for you to be surprised by.

A paid tier renews automatically at the same amount and on the same cycle until you cancel it. Before the first charge you are shown a separate screen giving the amount, the cycle, the date of the next charge and how to cancel, and you are sent the same particulars again in a receipt after every charge, each time with the cancellation instructions.

What an allowance is, and is not

Each tier includes a monthly allowance of service usage. That allowance is not money, is not stored value, is not redeemable for cash and is not transferable. It is a measure of how much of the service you may use in a period, nothing more.

An unused allowance ends with the period and does not carry into the next one. There are no top-up packs and no stored balance to buy: if a tier’s allowance is not enough for the way you are using the service, the only route is the tier above.

One button in your billing settings, at any time. No telephone call, no email to support, no retention flow and no additional steps. Access continues to the end of the period you have already paid for.

You also have a statutory right to cancel within 14 days under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. Because access begins straight away, that right ends once all three of the following have happened: you have expressly agreed to the service beginning within the cancellation period, you have acknowledged that you will lose the right to cancel as a result, and we have confirmed both of those back to you on a durable medium. The first two are separate, unticked boxes at checkout; the third is the confirmation email.

If any of those three is missing, the 14-day right stands. The full detail, including the statutory model cancellation form, is on the cancellation and refunds page.

A cancellation window after every renewal

We also give you a fresh 14-day cancellation window after each renewal, and send a reminder before a renewal as a separate message that carries no marketing. Neither is required by law today. Both anticipate the subscription rules in Part 4 Chapter 2 of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which are expected to come into force in spring 2027. We have chosen to work to them now; this is voluntary early adoption and we describe it as such rather than as a current legal obligation.

The service ranks likely causes from the appearance of a fabric. Reasonable care goes into the table it ranks against, but a ranking is not a certainty, and three things that move the answer are outside its knowledge entirely: the hardness of your water, how much detergent actually went into the drum, and what has built up inside your machine. Every reading lists them.

So we do not promise that a reading will be correct for your sock, and you should treat it as informed guidance rather than as a finding. Where a treatment risks doing harm, the service says so before it says anything else.

That qualification is about the accuracy of the assessment and nothing else. It is not, and may not be read as, an exclusion of your rights in respect of the service itself. Under Chapter 3 of Part 1 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015, digital content supplied to a consumer must be of satisfactory quality, fit for any particular purpose you made known to us, and as described; where it is not, you have the right to a repair or a replacement and, after that, to a price reduction. Section 47 of that Act prevents a contract term from excluding or restricting those rights, and we do not attempt to. Nothing in these terms affects your statutory rights.

Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, we are not liable for losses that were not reasonably foreseeable when you started using the service, or for losses arising from a use of the service outside these terms.

You own the photographs you upload. You give us permission to store and process them for as long as it takes to produce your reading and to keep it available to you, and for no other purpose. That permission ends when you delete the photograph or your account.

Your photographs are not used to train any model, ours or anyone else’s. This is stated in the privacy policy as well and is not a setting we can quietly change: changing it would require telling you first.

The readings produced for you are yours to use for your own purposes, subject to the restriction above on using them as evidence in a claim. The service, its interface, the distribution table and the Greyback name remain ours.

Uploading material you have no right to upload, uploading images of people rather than of garments, attempting to work around the allowance or the rate limits, scraping the service, or using the output as evidence in a claim against a brand or retailer. The acceptable use policy is the full list.

Where we suspend or close an account we will tell you why, and where the breach is capable of being put right we will say what would put it right. If we close a paid account for a reason that is not your fault, we refund the unused part of the period.

They can, and the date at the top says when they last did. Where a change materially affects you we will tell registered users at least 30 days before it takes effect, and if you do not want to continue on the new terms you may cancel and we will refund the unused part of the period.

Changes are never applied retrospectively to a charge you have already made or a reading you have already been given.